“Thank you,” returned the postgraduate, with the true Blount smile.  “Now I know that it was my father.  No; you needn’t deny it; I suppose it was for some good reason that this man was sent to teach me how to play the game—­as reasons go in practical politics.  But we are side-stepping the real issue.  I’ve asked you for a promise:  will you give it?”

“I—­I can’t give it, Evan, and hold my job; that’s God’s own truth!”

“No; it isn’t God’s truth—­it’s the other kind.  But that was about what I expected you to say.  Now hear my side of it:  if you don’t clean house—­you and the other officials of the company—­I shall not only resign; I shall take the field on the other side and tell what I know and why I’ve thrown up my job.  I’ve been telling everybody that this is to be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good and great, I shall keep my word, Dick!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you wouldn’t do that!” ejaculated the traffic man, now thoroughly alarmed.  “Land of glory, Evan! you know too much—­a great deal too much!”

The young man who knew too much got up and relighted his cigar with a match taken from Gantry’s desk box.

“It’s up to you,” he said, with his hand on the door-knob.  “Get into communication with whatever ‘powers that be’ there are that can give the necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given, and that they are put in the way of being carried out.  As God hears me, Dick, I mean what I say:  it’s a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a lot of you wish you had never been born.  If I have to put the screws on—­as I hope and pray I sha’n’t—­you can bet they’ll be put on lawyer-fashion; with evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary.”

“Hold on—­one question before you go, Evan!” pleaded Gantry.  “I haven’t known half the time where I’m at in this latest muddle.  Is this another little blind lead of the Honorable Sen—­of your father’s?”

Blount’s smile was as grim as any that Gantry had ever seen on the face of the Honorable David.

“It’s against nature for you to play the game straight, isn’t it, Dick?” he said in mild reproach.  “If you don’t know that my father is still the head of the machine, and that the machine has always been for you in the past, I imagine you’re the only man in the Sage-Brush State who needs enlightening.  No, Gantry; you’ve got only one man to fight; but you mustn’t forget that his name, also, is Blount.  Go to it and send me word, and let the first word be that you have scotched the head of this lumber-company snake.  That’s all for to-day.  Good-by.”

Notwithstanding the fact that his day’s work was still ahead of him, the traffic manager did not attack it when he was left alone.  An able man in his calling, and one who had fought his way rapidly by sheer merit and hard work from a clerkship to an official desk, Richard Gantry was still lacking, in a character admirable and most lovable in many ways, the iron that refuses to bend, and—­though perhaps in lesser measure—­the courage of his ultimate convictions.  In addition to these basic weaknesses he owned another—­the weakness of the cog which is constrained to turn with the great wheel of which it is a part.