in motion
were sinister, he took for granted. 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.

"No, son; not this evening," he said. "I've been feeling sort of set up
and aristocratic to-day, and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I
reckon you'll join me?"

The young man was willing enough; more than willing, since he was now
ready to say a thing which must be said before he could be prepared to
set a time limit upon Gantry--a limit beyond which lay the firing of the
fuse and the blowing up of all things mundane.

"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes to change my clothes--"

"You look good enough to me just as you are, boy," said the
dinner-giver, and he took his son by the arm and walked him to the
elevator.

In the private dining-room Blount found the table laid for two, much as
if his coming had been pre-figured. He let that go, and for the time the
talk was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's enthusiastic
digging for fossils, of P