“What I said to you then goes as it lies,” was the threatening reminder.  “If you pull the props out, there’ll be more than one death in the family.”

“You mean that you, or Mr. McVickar, will make it a point to include my father; I’ve wrestled that out, too, Dick.  I’m going to try to pull him out of it, but whether I succeed or fail, the consequences will be the same for you fellows.  Come and hear me speak to-night, Dick—­if you’re stopping over that long.  Then you’ll know how much in earnest—­how deadly in earnest—­I am.  You spoke of my father just now; I want to remind you again that I, too, bear the Blount name—­a name that I have heard bandied about as a synonym for all that is worst in our political life.  Don’t you see that I’ve got to make good?”

“Oh, great cats!—­you and your high-strung notions of what you’ve got to do!” snorted the traffic manager, and he went away to his classification meeting.

XV

SWORD-PLAY

It was during this hard-travelling period that Blount saw, with keen regret, the gradual widening of the breach between his father and himself.  In their infrequent meetings there was never anything remotely approaching an open rupture; but in a thousand ways the younger man fancied he could see and feel the steady growth of the rift.

That the long arm of the machine of which his father was the acknowledged head was reaching out into all corners of the State, was a fact no longer to be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion were sinister, he took for granted.  Therefore, when it came in his way, he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against the corporations.  “The worst in politics joined with the worst elements in capitalized industry,” was his platform characterization of the alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as every honest man was in duty bound to fight it.  But it is hard to fight in the dark.  After all was said, he could not help admiring the subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody’s mouth, its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.

In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowded cafe.  On such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the place and carefully steered the table-talk—­or thought he did—­into innocuous channels.  But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry in Ophir this desultory programme was broken.  Reaching the hotel in the evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed a cafe dinner the senator shook his head.