It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original creases before he passed it back.

“Well?” said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.

“I was just thinking,” was the reflective rejoinder.  “We used to be fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father.”

“He was and is,” was the quiet reply.  “I supposed everybody knew it.”

“I didn’t,” Gantry denied, adding:  “You may not realize it, but what you don’t tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it were printed.”

Blount’s smile was altogether friendly.

“What’s the use, Richard?” he asked.  “The world has plenty of banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man’s personal contribution.  Why should I bore you or anybody?”

“Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground,” said the railroad traffic manager.  “Just the same, there’s another side to it.  In an unguarded moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me that you were Western-born.  I always supposed afterward that you regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me any more.”

“Perhaps I didn’t tell more because there was so little to tell.  I had a boyhood like other boys—­or, no, possibly it wasn’t quite the usual.  I was born on the ‘Circle-Bar,’ when the ranch was—­as it still is, I believe—­a hard day’s drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the nearest shipping-corral on the railroad.  At twelve I could ‘ride line,’ ‘cut out,’ and ‘rope down’ like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster, and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than Painted Hat.”

“And what happened when you were twelve?” queried Gantry.  He was not abnormally curious, but Blount’s communicative mood was unusual enough to warrant a quickening of interest.

“The greatest possible misfortune that can ever come to a half-grown boy, Dick—­my mother died.”

Gantry’s own boyhood was not so deeply buried in the past as to make him forgetful of its joys and sorrows.  “That was hard—­mighty hard,” he assented.  Then:  “And pretty soon your father married again?”

“Not for some years,” Blount qualified.  “But for me the heavens were fallen.  I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came here to the Law School.  In all that time I’ve never seen the ‘Circle-Bar’ or my native State—­in fact, I have never been west of Chicago.”

Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase.  As a railroad man, continent-crossing travel was to him the merest matter of course.  Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset Country Club on the North Shore, it was well within the possibilities that the following week-end might find him sweltering in New Orleans or buttoning his overcoat against the raw evening fogs of San Francisco.