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       THE RECKONING

       XXXI

       À LA BONNE HEURE

BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"

       Table of Contents

      Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read the single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs. Beverley's indulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the veranda where the frivolities had not as yet intruded.

      It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns. At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear, brought the guests of honor—three daughters of a Western senator lately home from their summer abroad.

      Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover, the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.

      Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself. He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world, and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained, and when he sat back in his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of motor-cars he was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation of the disappointed lover the world over.

      It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him; a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was unfeignedly glad.

      "Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed, with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to be bored stiff—" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shiftily insincere with as old a friend as Evan Blount. But in the nature of things it was baldly impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not accidental.

      "Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not too ungraciously, considering his just cause to be more ungracious. "I was thinking of you a little while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston, and—well, at the present moment I'm not sure but you are the one man in the world I wanted most to meet."

      "Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed Gantry, settling himself comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar. "I've been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social claw-hold. Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old town keep going ever count 'em?"

      "Boston is all right when you know it—or, rather, when it comes to know you," returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge—which is Boston in the process of elucidation—was the birth and dwelling place of Patricia.

      Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.

      "The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you, hasn't it, Evan?—to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you in for?"

      "I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean—out and admitted to the bar," said Blount. "If you get into trouble with the Boston police let me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood hills and Judge Lynch's court."

      "The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were Western-born."

      "I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.

      "But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up. "That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to meet?"

      Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.

      Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"—the capital of the State—and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent arrival. Below the date-line he read:

      To Evan Shelby Blount,

      Standish Apartments, Boston.

      You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up with your native State?

      David Blount.

      It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original creases before he passed it back.

      "Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.

      "I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."

      "He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."

      "I didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it were printed."

      Blount's smile was altogether friendly.

      "What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"

      "Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me any more."

      "Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a boyhood like other boys—or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I was born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was—as it still is, I believe—a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the nearest shipping-corral on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,' 'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster, and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than Painted

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