“Pull up a chair and sit down,” said Blount, not too ungraciously, considering his just cause to be more ungracious.  “I was thinking of you a little while ago, Dick.  I saw your name in the list of Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston, and—­well, at the present moment I’m not sure but you are the one man in the world I wanted most to meet.”

“Say! that sounds pretty good to me,” laughed Gantry, settling himself comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.  “I’ve been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social claw-hold.  Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old town keep going ever count ’em?”

“Boston is all right when you know it—­or, rather, when it comes to know you,” returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge—­which is Boston in the process of elucidation—­was the birth and dwelling place of Patricia.

Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.

“The ‘effete East’ has psychically and psychologically corralled you, hasn’t it, Evan?—­to put it in choice Bostonese.  I thought maybe it would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the Harvard Law School.  By the way, how much longer are you in for?”

“I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean—­out and admitted to the bar,” said Blount.  “If you get into trouble with the Boston police let me know, and I’ll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood hills and Judge Lynch’s court.”

“The good old greasewood hills!” chanted Gantry, who was of those who curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and pugnaciously elsewhere.  “Are you ever coming back to them, Blount?  I believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were Western-born.”

“I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much about going back,” was Blount’s rather enigmatic reply.

“But now you are thinking of it?” inquired the railroad man, waking up.  “That’s good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young lawyers mighty bad.  Is that why I’m the particular fellow you wanted to meet?”

Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across the interval between the two chairs.  “Read that,” he said.

Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe.  Its date-line carried the name of his own city in the “greasewood country”—­the capital of the State—­and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent arrival.  Below the date-line he read: 

To Evan Shelby Blount,
Standish Apartments, Boston.

You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me nothing but an occasional sight of your face.  If you are not tied to some woman’s apron-string, why can’t you come West and grow up with your native State?

David Blount.