“Maybe so; maybe I do,” was the even-toned answer.  “It happens so, once in a while, that I know a heap of things I can’t tell, son.”  Then:  “Has McVickar been calling you down?”

“No one has called me down.  But some one, or something, is keeping me out of the real fight.  I don’t mean that I’m not doing what I set out to do:  I’ve got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I’m about to choke the life out of it.  But that is, as you might say, a side issue.  The real struggle is going on all around me, but I’m not in it or of it.  Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same predetermined enthusiasm.  Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me.”

The senator’s chuckle was barely audible.

“Seems as if I wouldn’t find fault with that, if I were you, son,” he suggested.  “You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it won’t break and let him down into the cold water.  You’ll get enough of the real thing by and by.”

Evan Blount felt his anger rising.  He was in precisely the right mood to construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in some mysterious way to insulate him—­to make it impossible for him to get into the real tide of affairs.  But he kept his temper, in a measure, at least.

“I guess it’s no use for us to try to get together,” he said with a tang of abruptness in his tone.  “We are diametrically opposed to each other at every point, you and I, dad.  I stand for democracy, the will of the people and its fullest and freest expression.  You stand for—­”

“Well, son, what do I stand for?” queried the father, and the question was put with a quizzical smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to Blount’s cheeks.

“If I should say what all men say—­what some of them are frank enough to say even to me—­” he stopped short, and then went on with better self-control:  “Let’s keep the peace if we can, dad.”

“Oh, I reckon we can do that,” was the good-natured rejoinder.  “Being on the railroad side, yourself, you can’t help feeling sort of hostile at the rest of us, I reckon.”

Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his chair.

“There it is again, you see.  We can’t get together even on a question of admitted fact!  Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I’ve been going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?”

The senator was nodding soberly.  “So you’ve found that out, too, have you?” he commented.

“I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn’t, dad.  There’s a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else I’ve had to face.”