Therefore, when it came in his way,
he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief
which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against
the corporations. "The worst in politics joined with the worst elements
in capitalized industry," was his platform characterization of the
alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as
every honest man was in duty bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight
in the dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring the
subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a
complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and
cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's mouth,
its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest
chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.
In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his
father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now
and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowded _cafe_. On
such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the
place and carefully steered the table-talk--or thought he did--into
innocuous channels. But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry
in Ophir this desultory programme was broken. Reaching the hotel in the
evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his
father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed a _cafe_
dinner the senator shook his head.
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