"You're asking a good deal, Blount, and you don't seem to realize it. You are practically demanding that we lay down our arms and put a possible enemy in the saddle on the eve of a battle. If we should agree to meet the people of this State half-way, as you suggest, what guarantee have we that we won't be compelled to go all the way?"
The fine-lined wrinkles were appearing again at the corners of the hereditary Blount eyes.
"You can't quite rise to the occasion, can you, Hardwick?" smiled the boss. "You'd like to behave yourself and be good, of course; but you want to be cocksure beforehand that it isn't going to cost too much."
"Well, anyway, I'm going to ask for a little time in which to consider it," was the vice-president's final word.
"Sure! You have all the time there is between now and the election. Go on and do your considering. I've told you what I'm going to do."
"You know very well that we can't allow you to do what you propose. With an unfriendly attorney-general we might as well throw up our hands first as last."
"All right; it's right pointedly up to you," was the calm reply.
The vice-president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve with the table-napkin. When he looked up, the heavy frown was again furrowing itself between his eyes.
"Let me know when your son is coming and I'll try to make it possible to meet him here," he said rather gratingly.
And thus, at the precise moment when Richard Gantry, some three thousand miles away to the eastward, was declaring his weariness and his intention of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain private dining-room was closed.
As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago. On the second day of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis. Hence, on the morning of the following day, Blount continued his journey alone.
Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon; in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge spanning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar--which should have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.