“Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar dead to rights this time,” remarked the older of the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on his first day in the capital, but whose name he could not now recall.  “This scheme of the senator’s for shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship is just about the foxiest thing he has ever put across.  You can bet the air was blue in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the news got there.”

“What do you suppose McVickar will do?” asked the other.

“He will do anything the senator wants him to—­he’s got to.  Blount is land hungry, and I guess he’ll take a few more sections of the railroad mesa-land under the Clearwater ditch.  That was what he did two years ago when McVickar wanted the right of way for the branch through Carnadine County.”

“Don’t you believe he’s going to take any little Christmas gift this time!” was the rasping reply.  “He’ll sell the railroad something, and take good hard money for it.  It’s a cinch.  The railroad can’t afford to have the courts against it, and McVickar will be made to sweat blood this heat.  You watch the wheels go round when McVickar comes out here.”

Evan Blount found himself growing strangely sick and faint.  Could it be his father whom they were thus calmly accusing of graft and trickery and blackmailing methods too despicable to be imagined?  His first impulse was to confront the two; to demand proofs; to do and say what a loyal son should.  But the crushing conviction that they were discussing only well-known and well-assured facts unnerved him; and after that he was anxious for only one thing—­that they might finish their cigars and go away without discovering him.

Fate was kind to him thus far.  After a little further talk, in which the accepted point of view of the on looker at the great game was made still more painfully evident for the unwilling listener, the men went away.  For a long time after they had gone, Blount sat crumpled in the depths of the big chair, chewing his extinct cigar and staring absently at the row of books on a level with his eyes in the opposite case.

One clear thought, and one only, came out of the sorrowful confusion:  not for any inducement that could now be offered would he lend himself to the furtherance of his father’s plans.  Beyond this he did not reason in the miserable hour wrought out in the quiet of the club smoking-room.  But when he got up to go, another prompting was forcing its way to the surface—­a prompting to throw himself boldly into the scale against graft and chicanery; to redeem at any cost, and by whatsoever means might offer, the good old name which had been so shamefully dragged in the mire.

He did not know just how it was to be done, but he told himself that he would find a way.  That the path would be full of thorns he could not doubt, since every step in it would widen the breach which must be opened between his father and himself.  Possibly it might lead him to the bar of justice as that father’s accuser, but even in that hard case he must not falter.  He said to himself, in a fresh access of passionate determination, that though he might have to blush for his father, Patricia should not be made ashamed for her lover.