“One more question,” snapped Blount, striving to fix the roving gaze of the hawk-like eyes.  “With whom did you make this arrangement two years ago?”

“With your boss, if you want to know; with Mr. McVickar himself!”

“And you think you can do it again?”

“I know damned well I can; only I don’t care to go over your head unless I have to.  They tell me you’re handling this end of it for the railroad company, and I’m not going around hunting a chance to make enemies.  That’s all I’ve got to say”—­and he rose to go—­“all but this:  you’ve got a lot to learn about this something-for-something business, and the quicker you get at it, Mr. Blount, the sooner you’ll arrive somewhere.  About this little matter of ours, there’s no special hurry.  Take your own time to think it over; take it up with McVickar, if you want to.  Then, when you get things fixed, wire me one word to Twin Buttes.  Just say ‘Yes,’ and sign your name to it.  That’ll be enough.”

For a long half-hour after the president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company and its allied corporations had closed the door of the private office behind him, Blount sat rocking gently in his pivot-chair.  In the fulness of time the bitter thoughts wrought their way into words.

“So this is what I was hired for!” he mused, “a fence; a wretched mask put up to hide the trickery and chicanery and criminality—­the crookedness which has never been put aside; which nobody ever meant to put aside!  My God! they’ve let me stultify myself in a thousand ways; let me sit here day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things that nobody in this God-forsaken homeland of mine has believed for a single minute!  After it’s all over, every man who has listened to me will say that I knew—­that all this talk about openness and fair dealing was simply that much dust-throwing to hide the workings of a corrupt and criminal machine grinding away in the background!”

He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped in his hands, staring at the little photograph of Wartrace Hall which he had had mounted in a plate-glass paper-weight.  The sight gave an added twist to the torture screw and he broke out again.

“I’ve been nothing more than a bit of potter’s clay, and the master potter—­God help me!—­is my own father!  It’s all plain enough now.  He saw that I wasn’t going to fall in with the attorney-general scheme; or perhaps he saw that I might be a stumbling-block if I should; so he planned this thing with McVickar—­planned it deliberately!  There is no fight, after all; it’s merely one of the moves in the game that the ‘boss’ and the railroad should seem to be fighting each other.  Good God!  I can’t believe it, and yet I’ve got to believe it.  That man Hathaway is a self-confessed criminal, but he was telling the truth about the law-breaking trickery that is going on; he wouldn’t be idiotic enough to lie and then give me a chance to prove the lie.  And he didn’t come to me of his own volition; he was sent—­sent to break me down, and sent by....  Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!”