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.
III
A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES
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.
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