“Well, Senator, I’m here,” was the follow-up of the perfunctory hand-shake.  “Let’s find a place where we can flail it out,” and together the two entered an elevator.

Reaching the floor of the private dining-room suites, the ex-cattle-king led the way in silence to his own apartments; rather let us say he pointed the way, since in the march down the long corridor the two field commanders tramped evenly abreast as if neither would give the other the advantage of an inch of precedence.  In the sitting-room of the private suite the senator snapped the latch on the door, and pressed the wall-button for the electric lights.  McVickar dragged a chair over to one of the windows commanding a view of the busy street, and dropping solidly into it, like a man bracing himself for a fight, began abruptly: 

“I suppose we may as well cut out the preliminaries and come to the point at once, Blount.  Ackerton wired me that you had definitely announced your son as a candidate for the attorney-generalship.  Have you?”

The senator had found an unopened box of cigars in a cabinet and he was inserting the blade of his pocket-knife under the lid when he said, with good-natured irony:  “The primaries do the nominating in this State, Hardwick.  Didn’t you know that?”

“See here, Blount; I’ve come half-way across the continent to thresh this thing out with you, face to face, and I’m not in the humor to spar for an opening.  Do you mean to run your son or not?  That is a plain question, and I’d like to have an equally plain answer.”

“I told you two weeks ago what you might expect if you insisted on sticking your crow-bar in among the wheels this fall, McVickar, but you wouldn’t believe me.  I’ll say it again if you want to hear it.”

“And I told you two weeks ago that we couldn’t stand for any such programme as the one you had mapped out.  And I added that you might name your own price for an alternative which wouldn’t confiscate us and drive us off the face of the earth.”

“Yes; and I named the price, if you happen to remember.”

“I know; you said you wanted us to turn everything over to the Paramounters and take our chances on a clean administration.  Naturally, we’re not going to do any such Utopian thing as that.  What I want to know now is what it is going to cost us to do the practical and possible thing.”

“Want to buy me outright this time, do you, Hardwick?” said the boss, still smiling.

“We”—­McVickar was going to say—­“We have bought you before,” but he changed the retort to a less offensive phrasing—­“We have had no difficulty heretofore in arriving at some practical and sensible modus vivendi, and we shouldn’t have now.  But as a condition binding upon any sort of an arrangement, I am here to say that we can’t let you nominate and elect your son as attorney-general; that’s out of the question.  If it’s going to prove a personal disappointment to you, we’ll be reasonable and try to make it up to you in some other way.”