od work, mighty good work. You've helped
out in the only way that help could come in this campaign; you've
stirred up a good, healthy public sentiment in favor of a square deal
for everybody. McVickar was fixing to tangle it all up--get the people
down on him until they'd simply legislate the life out of his railroad.
But he couldn't see that."

"He sees it now--the 'machine' has made him see it."

"Yes. You didn't know that a machine could be put to any really
righteous use, did you, boy? But in this campaign it has gone in to
knock out the crookedness, big _and_ little. Listen, son; you heard what
I told McVickar. After you'd sent me that wire from Boston last summer,
saying you'd come, I lay awake nights projecting how I'd put you in
training for a spell, and then help you into the saddle and make you the
boss of the round-up, the same as I'd been. Then it came over me, all of
a sudden, that I'd been as crooked as a dog's hind leg--that we'd all
been crooked. Not that I've ever taken a dollar for my personal pocket,
for I haven't; but I've bought and sold and dickered and schemed with
the best of 'em, and the worst of 'em. On top of that, I began to ask
myself how I'd like it to see you wallowing in the same old mud-hole,
and--well, Evan, boy, you may have a son of your own some day, and then
you'll know. I let things rock along until you came; until that first
day at Wartrace when you ripped out at me about hewing to the line.
Right then and there I made up my mind that I'd put the whole power of
the 'machine,' as you call it, into one campaign for a clean election
and a square deal."

"Oh, good Lord!" ejaculated the son, "and I've been fighting you and
your organization at every turn!"

"Oh, no, you haven't," was the quick rejoinder.

"You've been fighting graft and crookedness, and that's what you thought
you were hired to do. As you know now, McVickar wasn't playing quite
fair with you. Just the same, you've been in the hands of your friends,
right from the start. It's the organization that's been giving you all
these chances to preach the gospel of the square deal; it was a shrewd
little captain-general of the organization who pushed Hathaway up
against you to let you know that the railroad people were running around
in the same old circles--hollering for justice, and doing everything
under the sun to defeat the ends of justice--muddying the spring
because, they say, they don't know what else to do. And, by