“Oh, no; I wouldn’t put it quite that strong.  Not many of these little fellows ask for money, or expect it.  A free ride now and then in the varnished cars is about all they look for.”

“But you can’t give them passes under the interstate law,” protested the purist.

“Not outside of the State, of course.  But inside of the State boundaries it’s our own business.”

“You mean it was our own business, previous to the passage of the State rate law two years ago,” corrected Blount.

“It is our own business to this good day—­in effect.  That part of the law has been a complete dead-letter from the day the governor signed it.  Why, bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who argued the loudest and voted the most spitefully for it came to me for their return tickets home at the end of the session.  Of course, we kept the letter of the law.  It says that no ‘free passes’ shall be given.  We didn’t issue passes; we merely gave them tickets out of the case and charged them up to ‘expense.’”

“Faugh!” said Blount, “you make me sick!  Gantry, it’s that same childish whipping of the devil around the stump by the corporations—­an expedient that wouldn’t deceive the most ignorant voter that ever cast a ballot—­it’s that very thing that has stirred the whole nation up to this unreasonable fight against corporate capital.  Don’t you see it?”

Gantry shrugged his shoulders.

“I guess I take the line of the least resistance—­like the majority of them,” was the colorless reply.  “When it comes down to practical politics—­”

“Don’t say ‘practical politics’ to me, Dick!” rasped the reformer.  “We’ve got the strongest argument in the world in the fact that the present law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal.  We mustn’t spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers ourselves and descending to the methods of the grafters and the machine politicians the country over.  If you have been sending these pie-eaters to me, stop it—­don’t do it any more.  I have no earthly use for them; and they won’t have any use for me after I open up on them and tell them a few things they don’t seem to know, or to care to know.”

“I don’t believe I’d do anything brash,” Gantry suggested mildly, and he was still saying the same thing in diversified forms when Blount led the way back to the crowded drawing-rooms.

Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with the traffic manager, Blount began to carry out the new policy—­the starvation policy, as it soon came to be known among the would-be henchmen.  The result was not altogether reassuring.  The first few rebuffs he administered left him with the feeling that he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with the working details of which he was only theoretically familiar.  There were wheels within wheels, and the application of the brakes to the smallest of them led to discordant janglings throughout the whole.