“Never been west of Chicago?” he echoed.  “Never been—­” He stopped short, beginning to realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons; reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college friendship, and the confidences begotten thereby, in the rendering of them.

“No,” said Blount.

“Then the senator’s—­that is—­er—­your father’s political life has never touched you.”

The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount’s steady gray eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the Blount grimness.

“It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick.  I saw a large-hearted, open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn’t at all his own—­a woman’s ambition.  In order that the woman might mix and mingle in Washington society for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to fill out an unexpired term of two months in the United States Senate—­bought the election, some said.  That was three years ago, wasn’t it?—­a long time, as political incidents or accidents go.  But Washington hasn’t forgotten.  When I was down there last winter the five-o’clock-tea people were still recalling Mrs. Blount’s gowns and the wild-Western naivete of ’The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.’”

Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter admission had got itself fully made.

“Land of love, Evan!” he said, “you may be an educated post-graduate all right, with the proper Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down to a hard-glaze finish, but you’ve got a lot to learn yet—­about the senator and his politics, I mean.  Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn’t in it a little bit for the social frills and furbelows; he never was.  Let me intimate a few things:  Politically speaking, David Blount is by long odds the biggest man in his State to-day.  He can have anything he wants, from the head of the ticket down.  You spoke rather contemptuously just now of his two months in the Senate; you probably didn’t know that he might have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually did a much more difficult thing—­named his successor.”

David Blount’s son stood up and put his shoulders against one of the veranda pillars.  From the new view-point he could look through the reading-room windows and on into the assembly-room where the dancers were keeping time to the measures of a two-step.  But he was not thinking of the dancers when he said: 

“It’s a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down here to-night like the deus ex machina of the old Greek plays.  You’ve read this telegram”—­holding up the folded message—­“it is just possible that you can tell me what lies behind it.  Why has my father sent it at this particular time and in those words?  He knows perfectly well that my plans for settling here in Boston were definitely made more than a year ago.”

“I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood country, if that’s what you want to know,” said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.