The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush

Front matter

“HeTs taken our retainer!” snapped the vice-president

BY

FRANCIS LYNDE

II

It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of an exclu¬ sive North Shore club to a private dining-room in the Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows com¬ mand a magnificent view of the Lost River Range, and from whose roof, on a clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the distant western horizon.

Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminis¬ cences by the two young men whose apparently for¬ tuitous meeting on the veranda of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.

On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was illegible to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature of a notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well known in all the vast region served by the Trans¬ continental Railway System. The owner of the name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age, large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master of circumstances. Like the younger gen¬ eration, he was clean shaven; hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the massive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the Inter-Mountain’s guest-book. Though he figured only as the first vice-president of the Transconti¬ nental Company, Hardwick McVickar was really the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its policies.

Across the small round table sat the railway magnate’s dinner-guest, a man who was more than McVickar’s match in big-boned, square-shouldered physique, and whose half-century was written only in the thick, grizzled hair and heavy, graying mustaches. Like McVickar, he had the lion-like face of mastership, but the fine wrinkles at the corners of the wide-set eyes postulated a sense of humor which was lacking in his table companion. His mouth, half hidden by the drooping mustaches, needed the relieving wrinkles at the corners of the eyes; it was a grim, straight-lined inheritance from his pioneer ancestors — the mouth of a man who may yield to persuasion but not easily to opposition.

“I wish I could convince you that it isn’t worth while to hold me at arm’s-length, Senator,” Mc- Vickar was saying, as he clipped the end from his cigar. “You know as well as I do that under the present law in this State we are practically bankrupt. We are not making enough to pay the fixed charges. We do a losing business from the moment we cross your State line.”

“ Yes; it seems to me I have heard something that sounded a good deal like that before,” was the non¬ committal rejoinder.

“You have heard the simple truth, then. And it is a bald injustice, not only to the railroad company, but to the people it serves. We can’t give adequate service when the cost exceeds the earnings. That is the simplest possible proposition in any business undertaking.”

“And you can’t make out to convince the mem¬ bers of the State Railroad Commission of the sim¬ pleness?” asked the man whom the vice-president addressed as “Senator.”

“You know well enough that we can’t hope to convince a rabidly anti-railroad commission,” was the half-angry retort.

“Yet you are still running your railroad,” sug¬ gested the other. “We don’t hear anything about your shutting down and tearing up the track.”

“No; luckily, the Transcontinental System does not lie wholly within your State boundaries. If it did, we might as well surrender our charter and go out of business — shut down and tear up the track, as you put it.7’

“All of which has come to be a pretty old and well-worn story with us, McVickar,” said the lis¬ tener quietly. “I’m sure you didn’t make me motor thirty miles to hear you tell it all over again. What do you want?”

“We want a square deal,” was the curt reply.

“So do the people of this State,” asserted the man across the table. “You bled us, Hardwick — bled us to the queen’s taste — while you had the chance; and the chance lasted a blamed long time. You are equitably, if not legally, in debt to every man in this State who had ever shipped a car-load of freight or paid a passenger fare over your line before the present rate law went into effect. You can shuffle and side-step all you want to, but that is the plain fact of the matter.”

The vice-president sat up and braced his arms on the edge of the table.

“You are too much for me, Blount — you hold out too many cards; and I’m no apprentice at the game, either. In all these years we’ve been dicker¬ ing together you’ve always been a hard-bitted and consistent fighter for your own hand. What’s hap¬ pened to you lately? Have you acquired a new set of convictions? Or have you been figuring out a different way of whipping the devil around the stump?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the guest, with large good-nature. “We are all growing older — and wiser, perhaps. You don’t deny the debt you owe us, do you?”

“Do we owe you anything, Blount?” asked the magnate pointedly, and with a definite emphasis upon the personal pronoun. “If we do, we are will¬ ing to pay it in spot cash, on demand.”

The big man on the other side of the table was leaning back in his chair with his hands in his pockets, and the smile wrinkling at the corners of his eyes was half-genial, half-satirical.

“It’s lucky we’re alone, McVickar,” he remarked. “A third fellow standing around and hearing you talk might imagine that you are trying to bribe me.”

“That’s all right, Blount; this is between us two, and we understand each other. Nothing for noth¬ ing is the accepted rule the world over, and we both recognize it. You are figuring on something; I know you are. Name it. If it is anything less than a mortgage on the earth and one or two of the planets I’ll get it for you.”

“I’m afraid we are a good deal more than a mile or two apart yet, McVickar,” said the man who was not smoking, after a long minute. “Let’s ride back to the beginning and get us a fresh start. I said that Gordon is going to be the next governor of the State.”

“I know you did; and I said — and I say it again — he isn’t going to be — not if we can help it,” de¬ clared the railway magnate, with emphatic deter¬ mination.

“The methods you will take to defeat him will insure his election, McVickar. You fellows are mighty slow to learn your lesson; mighty slow and obstinate, Hardwick. You don’t know anything but wire-pulling and crookedness and bribery. The times have changed, and you haven’t had the com¬ mon-sense or the courage or the business shrewd¬ ness to change with them. I say Gordon will be the next governor.”

Again there was a strained silence like that which follows the hand-shake in the prize-ring when the two antagonists have drawn apart and are warily watching each for his opening. After the pause the vice-president said:

“If we had the safest kind of a majority in both houses of the legislature, we couldn’t be sure of ac¬ complishing anything worth while with Gordon in the governor’s office; you know that, Blount. If Gordon runs and is elected, his platform will be flatly anti-railroad.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” was the calm rejoinder. “Gordon is a mighty square fellow; an honest man and a fair one. If you could stay out of the fight and go to him with clean hands — but you couldn’t do that, McVickar; you’re too badly out of prac¬ tice.”

“We needn’t go into that phase of it. We are so savagely handicapped in this State that we can’t afford to take a divided chance; can’t afford to pass our case up to a man who has been elected by an unfriendly opposition. If we should wash our hands of the fight, as you suggest, we might just as well throw up our franchises and quit, so far as any prospect of earning a reasonable return upon our investment here is concerned.”

“I know; that is what you always say, and you have said it so often — you and your fellow railroad string-pullers — that you have lost the straightforward combination completely. If you ever knew how to make a clean fight you’ve forgotten the moves, and it’s your own fault.”

Once more the man with the fierce eyes and the dominating jaw took time to consider. Like others of his class, he was partisan only in the sense of one fighting hardily for the side upon which he had hap¬ pened to be drawn in the great world battle. If he had not long ago parted with his convictions, the heat and smoke of the battle had obscured them, and he chose his weapons now with little regard for anything beyond their possible efficacy.

“You are sparring with me, Blount,” he said finally. “You are talking to me as you might talk to a committee of the Good Government League — and possibly for the same reason. Let’s get together. You control the political situation in your State, and we frankly recognize that fact. It’s a matter of business, and we can settle it on a business basis. I have been outspoken and above-board with you and have told you what we want. Meet me half¬ way and tell me what you want.”

“I want a square deal all around, Hardwick; that’s all. You’ve got to take the same ground and make a clean fight if you want me with you. I can’t make it any plainer than that, can I?”

“I don’t know yet what you are driving at,” frowned the vice-president, “nor just why you have taken this particular occasion to read me a kinder¬ garten lecture on political methods. In times past I suppose we have both done some things that we would like to have decently buried and forgotten, but - ”

“But right there we break apart, McVickar,” cut in the other, setting his jaw with a peculiar hard¬ ening of the facial muscles that gave him the appear¬ ance of a fierce old viking attacking at the head of his squadrons. “I’m telling you over again that a new day has dawned in American politics; I and my kind recognize it, and you and your kind don’t seem to be big enough to recognize it. That is the difference between us. In the present instance it comes down to this: you are going to fight for a railroad majority in the legislature, and you want Reynolds for the head of the ticket because you know that you can depend upon his veto if you don’t get your majority in the House and Senate. You are not going to get Reynolds, or the majority either, without the help of the party organization.”

“We can put it much more elementally than that,” supplemented the railroad man. “We get nothing without your say-so as the head of the party organization. That is precisely why I have come a couple of thousand miles to ask you to eat dinner with me here to-night.”

“I reckon I ought to feel right much set up and biggitty over that, Hardwick,” smiled the veteran spoilsman, relapsing, as he did now and then, into the speech of his Southern boyhood. And then half-quizzically : “Are you tolerably well satisfied that you’ve got around to the place where you are willing to tote fair with me? You recollect, I gave you a straight pointer two years ago; you wouldn’t take it, and we did you up. Are you right certain you are ready now to holler Enough’?”

Once again the vice-president refused to be hur¬ ried into making a capitulative admission. When he spoke, the militant second thought of the fight¬ ing corporation commander chose the words.

“There is a limit to all things, Senator, and you are pushing us pretty well up to it. I suppose you can crack the whip and swing the vote on the legis¬ lature, and you can take it and be damned. But, by God, we’ll have our governor and our attorney-general!”

“You are betting confidently on that, are you?” said the veteran mildly. “Is that your declaration of war?”

“Call it anything you like. We are not going to be legislated off the map if we can help it. Strong as your machine is, you can’t swing Gordon in against Reynolds if we concede your bare majority in the legislature and put up the right kind of a fight. And when it comes to Rankin, our candidate for attorney-general, you simply haven’t another man in the party to put up against him. You’d have to run in a dummy, and even you are not big enough to do that, Blount, and put it over.”

“You’ve settled this definitely in your own mind, have you, Hardwick?” was the placable rejoinder. “I’m sorry — right sorry. I’ve been hoping that you had learned your lesson — you and your tribe. I came to town this evening prepared to show you a decent way out of your troubles, so far as this State is concerned; but since you have posted your cde-fi,’ as we cow-punchers say, I reckon it isn’t worth while to wade any deeper into the creek.”

Again the railroad magnate rested his arms on the table-edge. “What was your decent way,’ Sena¬ tor?” he asked, fixing his gaze upon the shrewd old eyes of the other, which, for the first time in the conference, seemed to be losing a little of their grimly good-natured aggressiveness.

“I don’t mind telling you, though you will likely call it an old man’s foolishness. I have a grown son, McVickar. Did you know that?”

The vice-president nodded, and the big man op¬ posite went on half-reminiscently :

“He is a lawyer, and a mighty bright one, so they tell me. As I happen to know, he is pretty well up on the corporation side of the argument, and the one thing I’ve been afraid of is that he would marry and settle down somewhere in the East, where the big corporations have their home ranches. I’m get¬ ting old, Hardwick, and I’d like mighty well to have the boy with me. Out of that notion grew another. I said to myself this: Now, here’s McVickar; if he could have a good, clean-cut young man in this State representing his railroad — a man who not only knew his way around in a court-room, but who might also know how to plead his client’s case before the public — if McVickar could have such a young fellow as that for his corporation counsel, and would agree to make his railroad company live somewhere within shouting distance of such a young fellow’s ideals, we might all be persuaded to bury the hatchet and live together in peace and amity.”

A slow smile was spreading itself over the strong face of the railway magnate as he listened.

“Say, David,” he retorted mildly, “it isn’t much like you to go forty miles around when there is a short way across. Why didn’t you tell me plainly in the beginning that you wanted a place for your boy? ”

“Hold on; don’t let’s get too far along before we get started; I’m not saying it now,” was the sober protest. “You forget that you’ve just been telling me that you don’t intend to comply with the one hard-and-fast condition to such an arrangement as the one I’ve been pipe-dreaming about.”

“What condition?”

“That you turn over a brand-new leaf and meet the people of this State half-way on a proposition of fair play for everybody.”

“There isn’t any half-way point in a fight for life, David. You know that as well, or better, than I do. But let that go. We’ll give your son the place you want him to have, and do it gladly.”

The man who had once been his own foreman of round-ups straightened himself in his chair and smote the table with his fist.

“No, by God, you won’t — not in a thousand years, McVickar! Maybe you could buy me — maybe you have bought me in times past — but you can’t buy that boy! Listen, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I telegraphed the boy this after¬ noon, telling him to throw up his job in Boston and come out here. If he comes within a reasonable time he will be legally a citizen of the State before election. You said we didn’t have anybody but Rankin to run for attorney-general. By Heavens, Hardwick, I’ll show you if we haven’t!”

Mr. Hardwick McVickar was not of those who fight as one beating the air. While the deft waiter was clearing the table and serving the small coffees he kept silence. But when the time was fully ripe he said what there was to be said.

“You’ve got us by the nape of the neck, as usual, Blount. Name your terms.”

“I have named them. Get in line with the new public opinion and we’ll do what we can for you.”

During the long pause following this curt ulti¬ matum the masterful dictator of railroad policies deliberated thoughtfully upon many things. With the ex-senator as the all-powerful head of the ma¬ chine in this State of many costly battle-fields, it would have been a weakness inexcusable on the part of so astute a commander as McVickar if David Blount’s history, political and personal, had not been known to him in all its details. As a contingency to be met sooner or later, the vice-president had anticipated the thing which had now come to pass. That Blount should wish to push the fortunes of his son was perfectly natural; and it was no less natural that he should push them by making the railroad company’s pay-roll furnish the motivepower. The magnate smiled inwardly when he re¬ membered that he had given Gantry, the division traffic manager of the Transcontinental, a quiet hint to look up one Evan Blount, a young lawyer, on his next visit to Boston. By all odds it would be better to wait for Gantry’s report before taking any irrevocable steps in the bargaining with Evan Blount’s father; but unhappily the crisis had ar¬ rived, and in all probability it could not be post¬ poned. None the less, the vice-president tried craft¬ ily for the postponement.

“You’re asking a good deal, Blount, and you don’t seem to realize it. You are practically demanding that we lay down our arms and put a possible enemy in the saddle on the eve of a battle. If we should agree to meet the people of this State half-way, as you suggest, what guarantee have we that we won’t be compelled to go all the way?”

The fine-lined wrinkles were appearing again at the corners of the hereditary Blount eyes.

“You can’t quite rise to the occasion, can you, Hardwick?” smiled the boss. “You’d like to be¬ have yourself and be good, of course; but you want to be cocksure beforehand that it isn’t going to cost too much.”

“Well, anyway, I’m going to ask for a little time in which to consider it,” was the vice-president’s final word.

“Sure! You have all the time there is between now and the election. Go on and do your consid¬ ering. I’ve told you what I’m going to do.”

“You know very well that we can’t allow you to do what you propose. With an unfriendly attorney-general we might as well throw up our hands first as last.”

“All right; it’s right pointedly up to you,” was the calm reply.

The vice-president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve with the table-napkin. When he looked up, the heavy frown was again furrowing itself between his eyes.

“Let me know when your son is coming and I’ll try to make it possible to meet him here,” he said rather gratingly.

And thus, at the precise moment when Richard Gantry, some three thousand miles away to the eastward, was declaring his weariness and his inten¬ tion of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain private dining-room was closed.

Ill

As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago. On the second day of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis. Hence, on the morning of the follow¬ ing day, Blount continued his journey alone.

Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon; in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge span¬ ning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar — which should have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had been wrought during his four¬ teen years of absence.

Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled, and there were the usual op¬ portunities for the making of passing acquaintance¬ ships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment — a man whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy man¬ ner were singularly out of keeping with the fashion¬ able cut of his clothes, with his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.

At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be, with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was directly opposite Blount’s, defined himself as a mine-owner whose property, vaguely located as somewhere “in the mountains,” was involved in litigation.

It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond the boundaries of the common¬ places. Oddly enough, considering the fact that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law. Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself thawing out sufficiently to be sugges¬ tively helpful to the man who had apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.

Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching an¬ other matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies operating “in the mountains” — bad investments, he feared, since the Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of timber in the mountainland reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he asked, that the talk would materialize in restrain¬ ing action? If so, he was in the hole again — worse off than he should be if his mining lawsuits should go against him.

Again Blount, good-naturedly charitable and not a little amused by the nervous anxiety of the gentle¬ man of many troubles, gave an opinion.

“Conservation, in timber as well as in other re¬ maining resources of the country, has come to be a word which is in everybody’s mouth,” was the form the opinion took. “The plain citizen who isn’t familiar with the methods of the timber sharks would do well to keep his money out of their hands if he doesn’t wish to be held as particeps criminis with them in the day of reckoning.”

“Say!” ejaculated the thin man, wriggling ner¬ vously in his chair. “If you were a Government agent yourself you could hardly put the case stronger for the conservation crowd!”

Now, in ordinary circumstances, nothing was ever farther from Blount’s normal attitude toward his fellow-men than a disposition to yield to the sudden joking impulse. But the hawk-faced man’s pertur¬ bation was so real, or so faultlessly simulated, that he could not resist the temptation.

“How do you know that I am not a Government agent? ” he demanded, with a decent show of gravity.

“Because you are not travelling on Government transportation,” was the shrewd retort.

At another time Blount might have wondered why a casual fellow-traveller should have taken the trouble to make the discovery. But at the moment he was intent only upon keeping the small misun¬ derstanding alive.

“I suppose you have seen my ticket, but you can’t tell anything by that,” he countered, laughing. “A good many civilian employees of the Govern¬ ment travel nowadays on regular tickets, like other people.”

“I know damned well they do,” admitted the anxious one; and then, with a swift eye-shot which Blount missed: “Especially if they happen to be travelling on the quiet to catch some poor devil napping on the job.”

“You needn’t be alarmed; you haven’t told me anything that the department could make use of,” returned Blount, carrying the jest the one necessary move farther along.

It was precisely at this point, as Blount remem¬ bered afterward, that the timber-thieving subject was dropped. Later on, after the talk had drifted back to mining, and from mining to politics, the nervous gentleman pleaded weariness and declared his intention of going to his section to take a nap, and presently disappeared to carry it out.

Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In re¬ sponse to a vague stirring of something within him — a thing which might have been the primitive underman yawning and stretching to its awakening • — he had been trying in the window-facing inter¬ vals to reconstruct the passing panorama of moun¬ tain and plain upon the recollections of his boy¬ hood. As yet there was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were no longer open. The towns, too, at which the train made its momen¬ tary stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping period, with the shedroofed railroad station, the whitewashed loadingcorral, and the towering water-tank — all back¬ grounded by a thin line of saloons and dance-halls — had disappeared completely, and the windowwatcher found himself looking in vain for the flaphatted, cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been chiefly peopled.

Farther along toward evening the great range, which had been visible for hours in the westward vista, began to define itself in peaks and high, bald shoulderings of wind-swept mesas. Here was something definite and tangible for the stirring under¬ man to lay hold upon. Blount, the sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working itself out in quickened pulses and exhila¬ rating nerve-tinglings. Boston, the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already seemed age-old and half forgot¬ ten. He threw open the window at his elbow and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast. It was sweet in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in his blood. After all, he had been but a sojourner in the other world, and this was his homeland.

At the dining-car dinner, which was served while the higher peaks of the main range were as vast islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold, Blount missed the man of many troubles. The dining-car was well filled, and, though the faces of the diners were all unfamiliar, the hum of talk, the hurrying of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels answered well enough for companionship. There are times when even the voice of a friend is an in¬ trusion, and the returning exile had happed upon one of them. Largeness, the inspiring breadth of the immensities, was what he craved most; and when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he hurried back to his Pullman window, hoping that he might have the smoking-compartment to himself again.

The unspoken wish was granted. When he en¬ tered the smoking-room he found it empty; and, filling his cutty pipe, he drew the cushioned wicker chair out to face the open window. Fresh glimpses of the northward landscape shortly brought a re¬ newal of the heart-stirrings; and when he finally had the longed-for sight of a bunch of grazing cattle, with the solitary night-herd hanging by one leg in the saddle to watch the passing of the train, the call of the homeland was trumpeting in his ears, and he would have given anything in reason to be able to changes places, temporarily at least, with the care-free horseman whose wiry, muscular figure was struck out so artistically against the dun-colored hillside.