“What other bunch?”

“In this case it’s the corporations:  the timber people, the irrigation companies, and, most of all, the railroad.”

“Gantry seems to think that the railroads—­or his railroad, at least—­are persecuted.”

The senator pulled his horse down to a still slower walk.  “Where did you see Dick Gantry?” he demanded.

Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club, adding the further fact of the college friendship.

“Just happened so, did it?” queried the older man, “that getting together last Saturday night?”

“Why—­yes, I suppose so.  Dick knew I was in Boston, and he said he had meant to look me up.”

“I reckon he did,” was the quiet comment; “yes, I reckon he did.  And he filled you up plumb full of Hardwick McVickar’s notions, of course.  I reckon that’s about what he was told to do.  But we won’t fall apart on that, son.  To-morrow we’ll run down to the city, and you can look the ground over for yourself.  I want you to draw your own conclusions, and then come and tell me what you’d like to do.  Shall we leave it that way?”

Evan Blount acquiesced, quite without prejudice, to a firm conviction that his opinion, when formed, was going to be based on the larger merits of the case, upon a fair and judicial summing-up of the pros and cons—­all of them.  He felt that it would be a blow struck at the very root of the tree of good government if he should consent to be the candidate of the machine.  But, on the other hand, he saw instantly what a power a fearless public prosecutor could be in a misguided commonwealth where the lack was not of good laws, but of men strong enough and courageous enough to administer them.  He would see:  if the good to be accomplished were great enough to over-balance the evil ... it was a temptation to compromise—­a sharp temptation; and he found himself longing for Patricia, for her clear-sighted comment which, he felt sure, would go straight to the heart of the tangle.

It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the father, looking on, suspected that Evan’s taciturnity was an expression of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother’s place.  After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his room, the senator’s suspicion became a belief.

“You’ll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman,” he said to the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort; this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed pipe was alight.  “I shouldn’t wonder if Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his head.”

The little lady looked up from her embroidery frame and a quaint smile was twitching at the corners of the pretty mouth.  “He is a dear boy, and he is trying awfully hard to hate me,” she said.  “But I sha’n’t let him, David.”