“I know,” Gantry nodded.  “Just the same, you’re not going to do it.”

“If I don’t, it will be because I can’t; because the time is too short.”  Then, with a sudden and impulsive gesture of appeal:  “Dick, for Heaven’s sake help me to find that man Gryson, if you know where he is!  I shall blow up if I can’t do something!”

Gantry rose and tossed the second cigarette among the coals in the grate.

“I’ve been afraid all along that they’d corner you and beat you to death with feather-dusters,” he lamented.  “And the only thing I can say will make matters worse instead of better.  I have it pretty straight that Gryson has been fired—­shooed out of town, and probably out of the State.”

“Who did it, Gantry?”

“There is only one man in this bailiwick who can take the whip to a fellow like Tom Gryson.  I guess I don’t need to name him for you, Evan.”

Blount got out of his chair and stood with his back to the fire, and his face was white.

“Good God! the rottenness of it, Dick!” he groaned.  And then:  “I’ve got to get out of this and begin all over again in some corner of the world where at least one man in ten hasn’t forgotten the meaning of common honesty and decency and fair dealing.  Heaven knows I’m no saint, but if I stay here this cursed crookedness will get into my blood and I’ll be just as degraded as the worst of them.  No, I’m not raving; there have been times when I’ve felt myself slipping—­times when I’ve been tempted to get down and fight with the weapons that everybody fights with in this God-forsaken, law-breaking, graft-ridden commonwealth!”

Gantry had risen and he was slowly shaking his head.

“You’re hot now—­and with good enough cause, I guess.  But that sort of a temperature makes a man near-sighted and color-blind.  Human nature is pretty much the same the world over, Evan, and if you could see beyond the crookedness you’d find a lot of good people out here, averaging about the same as the decent majority anywhere.  It’s an inarticulate majority generally; it doesn’t stand up on its hind legs and rear around and call attention to itself—­couldn’t if it should try.  But it’s here and there and everywhere in America, just the same.  A railroad car with one drunken fool in it gives you the idea.  You focus on him and say, ‘What a beastly shame!’ and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd people in the car who are quietly minding their own business.”

Blount’s smile was for the man rather than for the theory.

“You are an implacable optimist, Dick, and you always have been,” he returned.  “Your theory is good humanitarianism, and I wish I could accept it as applying to this abandoned community out here in my native hills; but I can’t.  Let’s go back to the others.  We’ve established a sort of family modus vivendi, my father and I, and I don’t want him to think that I’m breaking it by plotting with you.”