Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their bushy penthouses.  “Reckon you could give it a name, son?”

“Yes; when you found that I wasn’t going to let you run me for the attorney-generalship, you arranged with Mr. McVickar to have me put on the railroad pay-roll.  Isn’t that the fact?”

“Not exactly,” said the senator, and a grim smile went with the qualified denial.  “It was sort of the other way round.  I reckon McVickar thought he was putting one across on me when he offered you the railroad job and got you to take it.”

“I know; that was at first.  You and he couldn’t come to terms because you—­because the machine wanted more than he was willing to give.  But afterward there was another meeting and you got together.  That part of it was all right, if you see it that way.  What broke my heart was the fact that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence behind which all the crookedness and rascality of a corrupt campaign could be screened.”

In the pause which followed, a deft waiter slipped in to change the courses.  When the man was gone, Blount went on.

“It came mighty near smashing me when I found it out, dad.  It wasn’t so much the thing itself as it was the thought that you’d do it—­the thought that you had forgotten that I was a Blount, and your son.”

Again the older man nodded gravely.  “How come you to find out, Evan, boy?” he asked.

“It was when Hathaway had been given his chance at me.  He opened the cesspool for me, as you meant he should when you sent him to me.  From your point of view, I suppose it was necessary that I should be shown.  You knew what I was saying and doing; how I was taking it for granted that the railroad was going in clean-handed, and the one ray of comfort in the whole miserable business is the fact that you cared enough to want to give me a glimpse of the real thing that was hiding behind all my brave talk.  But I don’t think you counted fully upon the effect it would have upon me.”

“What was the effect, son?”

“At first, it made me want to throw up the fight and run away to the ends of the earth.  It seemed as if I didn’t have anybody to turn to.  You were in it, and Gantry was in it—­and Gantry’s superiors and mine.  That evening I borrowed one of your cars and drove out to Wartrace.  I meant to have it out with you, and then to throw up my hands and quit.”

“But you didn’t do either one,” said the father tentatively.

“No.  Nothing went right that day, until just at the last.  When I was about to give up and go to bed, Patricia came into the smoking-room.  I had to talk to somebody, so I talked to her; told her where I had landed.”

“And she advised you to throw up your hands?”

“You don’t know Patricia.  She put a heart into my body and blood into my veins.  What she said to me that night is what has kept me going, dad—­what has made me drive this fight for a clean election on the part of the railroad company home to the hilt.  I have driven it home.  There will be no crooked deals on the part of the railroad company this time.”