irrigation
companies, and, most of all, the railroad."

"Gantry seems to think that the railroads--or his railroad, at
least--are persecuted."

The senator pulled his horse down to a still slower walk. "Where did you
see Dick Gantry?" he demanded.

Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club, adding
the further fact of the college friendship.

"Just happened so, did it?" queried the older man, "that getting
together last Saturday night?"

"Why--yes, I suppose so. Dick knew I was in Boston, and he said he had
meant to look me up."

"I reckon he did," was the quiet comment; "yes, I reckon he did. And he
filled you up plumb full of Hardwick McVickar's notions, _of_ course. I
reckon that's about what he was told to do. But we won't fall apart on
that, son. To-morrow we'll run down to the city, and you can look the
ground over for yourself. I want you to draw your own conclusions, and
then come and tell me what you'd like to do. Shall we leave it that
way?"

Evan Blount acquiesced, quite without prejudice, to a firm conviction
that his opinion, when formed, was going to be based on the larger
merits of the case, upon a fair and judicial summing-up of the pros and
cons--all of them. He felt that it would be a blow struck at the very
root of the tree of good government if he should consent to be the
candidate of the machine. But, on the other hand, he saw instantly what
a power a fearless public prosecutor could be in a misguided
commonwealth where the lack was not of good laws, but of men strong
enough and courageous enough to administer them. He would see: if the
good to be accomplished were great enough to over-balance the evil ...
it was a temptation to compromise--a sharp temptation; and he found
himself longing for Patricia, for her clear-sighted comment which, he
felt sure, would go straight to the heart of the tangle.

It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him
absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the
father, looking on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression
of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother's place.
After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his
room, the senator's suspicion became a belief.

"You'll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman," he said to
the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort;
this when Evan had disappeared and