"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were Western-born."
"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.
"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up. "That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to meet?"
Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.
Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"--the capital of the State--and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent arrival. Below the date-line he read:
TO EVAN SHELBY BLOUNT, Standish Apartments, Boston.
You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up with your native State?
It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original creases before he passed it back.
"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.
"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."
"He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."
"_I_ didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it were printed."
"What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"