or him to be
sinding his gum-shoe wire-pullers to be laboring with our min. We're
safe as the clock up here in the Moscow."

This was not the first hint that Blount had been given pointing to the
underground work of the machine. That this work was being directed
toward the subversion of the popular will, he made no doubt; and there
were times when he was strongly tempted to carry the war boldly into the
wider field of graft and bossism. That he postponed the bigger battle
was due quite as much to the singleness of purpose which was his best
gift as to the desire to spare his father. Telling himself resolutely
that the reformation of the railroad company's political methods was his
chief object, and the only one which warranted him in retaining his
place on the Company's payrolls, he held aloof when his father's name
was mentioned and bent himself to the task of providing the means for
the subjugation of Gantry--and of Gantry's and his own superiors, if
need be.

The securing of evidence of the kind which would really give him the
whip-hand promised to be a delicate undertaking. Men like McDarragh
talked openly enough about the illegal special freight rates, but talk
was not evidence. Curiously enough, while he was trying to devise some
way of obtaining the tangible proof without using his semiofficial
position in the company's service as a lever, the thing itself was
thrown at him. From some mysterious source a rumor went out that the
special rates were in jeopardy; and the very men with whom he had talked
began to write him importunate letters begging him to deny the rumor.
With a sheaf of these letters in his pocket, each one inculpating both
parties to the illegal "deals," Blount grew gayly exultant. The natural
inference was that Gantry and "the powers" had been finally forced to
yield--that he had won his victory. But if he had not yet won it,
chance, or something better, had placed in his hands the weapon with
which he could compel a return to fair dealing and honesty.

It was on a second speech-making visit to Ophir that Blount had his
first face-to-face chance at Gantry. A meeting of the Mine-Owners'
Association, moving for a readjustment of the classification on copper
matte and bullion at a time when the railroad company might be supposed
to be on the giving hand, brought Gantry to the gold camp in the
Carnadine Hills, and the first man he met at the hotel was the stubborn
dictator of new policies for the T