Upon leaving the club, he paused long enough to remember that he was in no fit frame of mind to risk an immediate meeting with his father.  To make even a chance meeting impossible, he crossed the street, and, passing through the Capitol grounds, strolled aimlessly out one of the residence avenues until he came to the open country beyond the suburbs.

It was quite late in the afternoon when he re-entered the city by another street and boarded a trolley car for the down-town centre.  The long afternoon tramp, and the conclusions it had bred, made it imperative for him to see Gantry before the traffic manager should leave his office for the day.  His business with the railroad man was purely personal.  He meant to ask Gantry a few pointed questions requiring such answers as friendship may demand.  If Gantry’s replies were such as he feared they would be, he would seek his father and come at once to a plain understanding with him.

The trolley car dropped him within a square of the railway station, on the second floor of which Gantry had his business office.  The shortest way to the Sierra Avenue end of the station building was through the great train-shed.  Half-way up the platform Blount met the west-bound Overland steaming in from the eastern yards.  At the Sierra Avenue crossing the yard crew was cutting off a private car.  Blount saw the number on the medallion, “008,” and noted half absently the rich window-hangings and the polished brass platform railings.  A car inspector in greasy overalls and jumper was tapping the wheels with his long-handled hammer.

“Whose car is this?” asked Blount.

“’Tis Misther McVickar’s, sorr—­the vice-prisidint av the coompany,” said the man.

Blount turned away, saying something which the hammer-man mistook for a word of thanks.  So the vice-president had come, hastening upon the wing of occasions, it seemed.  And in the light of the overheard conversation in the club smoking-room, it was only too easy to guess his errand in the Sage-brush capital.  He had come to make such terms as he could with the man who was going to hold him up.

VII

A BATTLE ROYAL

Having already convinced himself that the time was ripe for a straightforward declaration of principles, Evan Blount saw in the arrival of the Overland, with the vice-president’s private car attached, only an added argument for haste.

During the better part of the long tramp in the outskirts of the city he had been halting between two opinions.  The fighting blood of the Tennessee pioneer strain had clamored for its hearing, prompting him to enter the lists, to set up the standard of honesty and fair-dealing in the Blount name, to plunge into the approaching political campaign with a single purpose—­the purpose of overthrowing the power of the machine in his native State.  On the other hand, filial affection