“If that is the case, Gantry, it is high time that some one should have nerve enough to break the charm.  I haven’t said that I would accept the nomination if it were tendered me, and I am not at all sure that I am going to say it.  And if I don’t say it, by all that’s good and great, that settles it!”

Gantry was plainly shocked.  “You’re not trying to make me believe that you’ve got nerve enough to buck the old m—­your father, I mean?  Why, great cats, Evan! you don’t know what that stands for in the greasewood hills!”

“And I don’t care, Dick.  Up to this present moment I am a free moral agent; I haven’t surrendered any right of decision to my father, or to any one else, so far as I am aware.”

Gantry’s eyes dropped to his plate, and his rejoinder was not wholly free from guile.

“Will you authorize me to contradict the talk as I can?” he asked, without looking up.

Blount was still warm enough to be peremptory.

“Yes, you may contradict it.  You may say that it is entirely unauthorized—­that I have told you so myself.”  Then he remembered the claims of friendship.  “I’ll be frank with you, Dick; this thing has been mentioned to me once, but nothing was decided—­absolutely nothing.  I didn’t even promise to take it under advisement.”

Among those who knew him only externally, Mr. Richard Gantry had the reputation of owning a loose tongue.  But none recognized more justly than the real Richard Gantry the precise instant at which to bridle the loose tongue or when to make it wag away from the subject which has reached its nicely calculated climax.  While the flush of irritation was still making him ashamed that he had shown so much warmth, Blount found himself gossiping with his table companion over a social function two days old; and subsequently, when the waiter brought the cigars, Gantry was congratulating himself that the danger-point, if any there were, was safely past.

It was after the club luncheon, and while the two young men were on their way to the smoking-room, that some one on business bent stopped Gantry in the corridor.  Blount strolled on by himself, and, finding the smoking-room unoccupied, went to lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a little alcove lined with bookcases and half screened by the racks of the newspaper files.  Notwithstanding the successful topic changing at table, he was still brooding over the false position in which his father’s plans had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a chance to think things over fairly and without heat.

Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently missing the half-concealed easy-chair and its occupant in the bookcase alcove, went his way.  He had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one would say, before two men entered the smoking-room, coming down the corridor from the grill.  Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw him.  But when they had taken chairs on the other side of the sheltering newspaper files he was suddenly assured that they had not seen him.  They were talking quite freely of him and of his father.