The senator rose and shook hands with the departing debater.  “Shall I say that to both of ’em?” he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan was learning to expect.

“Yes; to both of them, if you like—­only I suppose Mrs. Blount will hold it against me.  Good-night and good-by.  I’ll be back day after to-morrow, if the Ophir miners don’t mob me.”

It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount’s train had steamed Ophir-ward out of the Sierra Avenue station that a dust-covered touring-car drew up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and the same porter who had put Blount’s hand-bag into the taxicab opened the tonneau door for two ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.

The senator met the two late travellers in the vestibule, and while the three were waiting for an elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question and answer passed between husband and wife.

“You got Evan out of the way?” whispered the wife.

The husband nodded.  “That was easy.  I passed the word to Steuchfield, and he helped out on that—­invited Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a joint debate.  He left on the night train.”

“And Hathaway?  Will he be here?”

“He is here.  Gantry has turned him down, according to instructions, and he is clawing about in the air, trying to get a fresh hold.  I bluffed him; told him he’d have to make his peace with you for something, I didn’t know what, before I could talk to him.”

Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended, and the wife’s voice sank to a still lower whisper.

“He will be at the Weatherfords’?” she inquired eagerly.

“He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there.”

The small plotter nodded approval.

“Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready,” she directed; and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to finish his cigar.

X

IN THE HERBARIUM

The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them, kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic, no-thoroughfare of the capital city.  Weatherford, the father, egged on by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province of the next legislature.  The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view carefully tucked away inside of it—­an outlook upon life which was a survival from his hard-working past—­would willingly have dodged, but Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable.  There were two grown daughters and a growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.