The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush - Lynde Francis

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enlightening if not particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school, he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his father was reputed to be the dictator.

      Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a possible time when some great corporation should need his services in permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business. Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests, promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at the head of the civilized nations.

      Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been uncompromisingly partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a skilful pleader for the special interests—the interests of the few against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State. Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least, would be political rather than legal, and in his mind's eye he saw himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.

      The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment.

      It was after the ashes had been knocked from the bedtime pipe that Blount left his chair and the secluded corner of the veranda to go down among the parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation—and it was the only one in which he found the precious fillip of enthusiasm—was motoring. There was a choice collection of fine cars in the grouping on the lawn, and Blount had just awakened a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to uncover and exhibit the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine, when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at least a few of the dancing guests were leaving early.

      Being more curious at the moment about the mechanism of the Italian motor than he was about people, he did not realize that he was an intruder until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet and began to get his car ready for the road. Blount stepped back when the little group on the veranda came down the steps preceded by a club footman who was calling the number of the car. And it was not until he was turning away that he found himself face to face with a very beautiful and very clear-eyed young woman who was buttoning an automobile dust-coat up under her chin.

      "Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For Heaven's sake! you don't mean to tell me that you have been here all evening?"

      Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of frigidity perhaps, but of that quality of serene self-possession which strangers sometimes mistook for coldness.

      "Why shouldn't I be here?" she asked. "Didn't you know that the Cranfords—the people who are entertaining—are old friends of ours?"

      Blount shook his head. "No, I didn't know it; and because I didn't, I have lost an entire evening."

      "Oh, no; you shouldn't say that," she protested. "The evening was yours to use as you chose. Mrs. Beverley told me you were here, and she added that you had particularly requested not to be introduced to the Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you know you don't care anything about dancing."

      The chauffeur had placed his other passengers in the tonneau, and was trying to crank the motor. Blount was thankful that the new Italian engine was refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving him an added moment or two.

      "No, I don't care much for dancing; and you know very well why I couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's good company to-night," he said. Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting me know that you were here."

      "'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why 'last'?"

      "Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow—or rather, Monday. It is the only thing to do."

      "I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense of proportion."

      "Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of proportion, Patricia," he retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully distorted."

      The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door.

      "It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered. "But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman's place in this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside—her own fireside. I don't agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with you. Where are you going?"

      "I am going West, Monday."

      "How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too—father and I—though not quite so soon as Monday."

      "You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?"

      She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now, the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient.

      "If we are both going in the same direction we needn't say good-by," she said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be auf wiedersehen." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down.

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      It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of an exclusive North Shore club to a private dining-room in the Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command a magnificent view of the Lost River Range, and from whose roof, on a clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the distant western horizon.

      Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.

      On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was illegible to the cursory eye, but since

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