Moyese had flung himself down in his chair with a blow of his clenched fist on the desk, when the opening of the office door stopped the oath of disgust on his lips; and Eleanor MacDonald stood framed in the yellow light shining in from the hot street.  For a moment, the transition from sun to shade blinded her.  Then, she saw who was with the Senator.  Brydges sprang up waiting to return her recognition.  She made no sign.  She walked over where he was standing.  The Senator had half risen from his desk.  Was it the spirit of the ancestral Indian in her eyes; or of the Man with the Iron Hand?  Brydges’ oily gloss went to tallow under her look.  Moyese knew looks that drilled; and Brydges himself could bore behind for motives; but this look was not a drill:  it was a Search Light; and the handy man—­well, perhaps, it was the heat—­the handy man suddenly wilted.

“You can go, Brydges,” ordered Moyese.

“All right!  See you again about that, Senator!” Brydges grabbed up the loose notes from the desk and bolted, banging the door behind him.

The Senator’s face seemed at once to age and trench with lines.  He motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his desk till she had seated herself.  Then, he sat down, suddenly remembered his hat, and laid it off.  If she had sunk forward on the desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone round and caressed her and petted her and told her she must stop Wayland.  His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between her and what? . . .  Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a cog?  But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the Search Light had turned on him.

“You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in, Miss Eleanor; but it was a G—­ doggon lie!  I had been angered:  I had been angered very much; and that’s a bad thing on a hot day.”  He was slipping back to the usual suavity.

CHAPTER XIX

BALLOTS FOR BULLETS

It was Calamity, who had carried the trouble-making coat across from the Mission Library to the MacDonald Ranch House.  Eleanor had found it in the big living room that day after she had read the note saying he was setting out “on the Long Trail, the trail this Nation will have to follow before Democracy arrives; the trail of the Man behind the Thing.”  Somehow, she lost interest in her reading and her driving, and spent the most of that first week after the funeral in the steamer chair on the Ranch House piazza.  Were the topaz gates of the sunset still ajar to a new infinite life; or did satyr faces haunt the shadows of the trail, satyr faces of the Greed that had plotted the bloody villainy of the Rim Rocks?  She had thought she knew joy before, joy that rapt her from life in a race reverie.  Now, she knew joy, tense as pain; and the consciousness never left