The senator looked up quickly.  “That’s a mighty good stout thing to say,” he remarked, adding:  “I reckon you’re not saying it without having the right and proper club hid out somewhere where you can lay hands on it?”

Blount tapped his coat-pocket.  “I have the club right here—­documentary evidence that will rip this State wide open and send a lot of people to the penitentiary.  I’ve told Gantry to pass the word:  a clean sheet, or I go over to the other side and tell what I know.  And that brings me to the thing that I’ve got to say to you, dad—­the thing that made me hope I’d find you here to-night.  After I’d got my battle-word from Patricia, I had a jolt that was worse than the other.  When I pulled the gun on Gantry, he told me that I couldn’t shoot without killing you; that you were just as deeply involved as any one of the railroad officials.  Is that the truth?”

The senator had pushed his chair back and was burying his hands in his pockets.

“You’ve come to try to haul me out of the fire?” he inquired, ignoring the direct question.

“I’ve come to ask you, first, if it is possible for you to stand from under.  Can you?”

“Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to.”

“Then do it, and do it quickly, dad!  As there is a God above us, I’m going to push this thing through to the bitter end.  To-morrow morning I shall give Gantry his time limit.  If the time goes by, leaving the house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my promise to the letter.  You know, and I know, what will happen after that.”

“Yes; I reckon I know,” was the half-absent reply.

Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.

“I’ve got to go back to the office and work a while,” he said.  And then:  “I feel better for having had this talk with you, dad.  I’m sorry you are finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand times sorrier that I’ve got to fight you.  But I can’t give ground now, and still be a man and your son.  Think it over and dodge.  It’ll break my heart a second time if I have to pull the other fellow’s house down and bury you in the wreck.”

For some little time after his son had left the table and the private dining-room, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with his dessert-spoon.  When he rose to go out, the battle light in the gray eyes was the signal which not even his most faithful henchmen could always interpret; but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight, and one which many of them feared.

XVI

THE SAFE-BLOWER

About the time that Evan Blount was finishing the fourth week of the campaign of education, the senator’s wife began to detect signs of country weariness in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.

“When you are tired of the out-door bignesses, you have only to say the word,” she told the professor’s daughter one morning after they had driven to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car.  “As you have doubtless discovered, the senator and I live either here or at the capital indifferently during the season, and we shall be only too glad to entertain you in town whenever you feel like going.”