IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES
For fifteen miles north of the capital the Quaretaro road is a well-kept, level speedway, and Miss Anners amply proved the worth of her summer's training by showing herself a fearless driver. Half an hour after the small roadster had left the curb in front of the Temple Court Building it was among the hills and climbing to the upper mesa level.
Nearing the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, they overtook and passed a horseman turning into the canyon road. The man's horse shied and threatened to bolt at sight of the storming car, but Patricia was looking straight ahead, and she made no movement to slacken speed. At the passing glimpse, Blount's mind went shuttling backward to the homecoming night in the Lost Hills, and he made sure he recognized the rider as Hathaway's morose henchman, the man Barto.
He wondered vaguely what Barto could be doing at the turn in the obstructed side-canyon road, and the wonder went with him while the little car was covering the remaining distance and flying up the cottonwood-shaded avenue at Wartrace Hall. But a glance at his watch made him forget the Barto incident in a heart-warming thrill of admiration—the joy of a skilled motorist recognizing kindred skill in another. The thirty miles from the city had been made in something under fifty minutes.
When she brought the roadster to a stand at the carriage entrance, Patricia spoke for the first time since she had taken the wheel for the record-breaking drive.
"Find your father quickly and say to him what you have come to say. When you are ready to go back, I'll keep my promise and drive you."
"That won't be at all necessary," he protested, getting out to stand with his hand on the dash. "I am perfectly well able to drive myself; and, besides, it would leave you at the wrong end of the road, and alone."
"Don't stand there talking about it," she commanded. "Go and do what you have to do. I'll wait here."
Blount turned away and found old Barnabas holding the door open for him. A word passed, and the old negro bobbed his head. "Yas, sah; Marsteh David's in de libra'y," was the answer to Blount's query, and, throwing his overcoat and soft hat aside, the bearer of burdens not his own walked quickly through the hall and let himself into the room of trial.
The bright autumn day was cool—cool enough to warrant the crackling wood-fire on the library hearth. With his easy chair planted at the cosey corner of the fire and an open book on the table at his elbow, the senator sat smoking his long-stemmed pipe in the Sunday afternoon quiet. Mingled with the fire-snapping there were faint tappings, as if one of the cottonwoods, growing too near the house, were sending twig signals to the inmates.
The senator moved the open book a little farther aside when his son made an abrupt entrance into the cheerful room.
"Well, son, you made out to get here after so long a time, didn't you?" he said gently. And then: "How's the broken head to-day?"
"Better," answered the son shortly, adding: "It's the least of my troubles just now."
"That's good," was the hearty comment. Then, with the long stem of the pipe pointing to a Morris-chair: "Draw up and sit down. I reckon the drive has tired you some, even if you won't admit it. Where's the little girl?"
Evan Blount saw instantly that he must be brief and pitiless.
"Patricia is waiting in the car to drive me back to town," he explained, forcing himself to speak calmly. "I have an appointment with Chief Justice Hemingway which must be kept, and he will wait in his chambers in the Capitol only until five o'clock. Father, do you know why I have made that appointment?"
The senator wagged his great head in a way which might mean anything or nothing, and said: "How should I know, son?"
"I hoped you would know. It's not a very pleasant task for me to tell you," the younger man went on, ignoring the chair to which the long-stemmed pipe was still pointing. "A short time ago—yesterday, to be exact—evidence, legal evidence, of corruption and false registration in four of the city wards, and in a number of outlying districts in the State, was put into my hands. This evidence incriminates a group of ringleaders and a still larger number of election officers. You know what I've got to do with it."
The older man nodded slowly.
"Yes, I reckon I know, son; and I'm not saying a word. If you weren't a Blount, I might ask if you haven't learned that one of the first rules in the book of politics is the one that says we mustn't hang the dirty clothes out where everybody can see 'em, but I know better than to say anything like that to you."
The young man's heart sank within him. It seemed evident that his father was still unsuspecting, still unconscious of the dreadful consequences to himself. Only utter frankness could avail now.
"I can't discuss the question of expediency with you," he said hastily, "any further than to say that I'd cheerfully give ten years of my life to be able to consider it. Let me be perfectly plain: This evidence I am speaking of involves you personally. If the papers are put into Judge Hemingway's hands there will be a searching investigation, prompt indictments, criminal proceedings, and all the disgrace that the widest publicity can bring upon the men who are responsible for the present desperate state of affairs."
The senator had laid his pipe aside and was staring soberly into the fire. "Go on, son," he said quietly; "let's have the rest of it."
"You know what has led up to the present wretched involvement—my involvement," Blount went on. "When I took the railroad job, I did it in good faith and went about preaching the gospel of the square deal for everybody, including the corporations. But in a very short time I discovered that my own people were not keeping faith with me; had no intention of keeping it. Later on, a number of corporation officials and managers, men who had formerly made corrupt deals with the railroad company, and are to this day profiting by them, became frightened. Assuming that I was the chief broker for the railroad company in the present campaign, these men wrote me letters which were in the highest degree incriminating."
The big man who was staring into the heart of the fire nodded thoughtfully.
"I remember; you told me something about that before, didn't you?"
"Yes, and we needn't go into the details again. I meant to use those letters as a club to hammer a little honesty into my own employers. Up to that time I had been trying to believe that the machine—your machine—and the railroad lawbreakers were not one and the same thing."
"But you changed your mind about that?"
"I had to, after I found out that you had corrupted one of my clerks and had sent one of your thugs to dynamite my safe. That is past and gone; but you can see where it left me. As you and everybody in the State know, I had been committing myself publicly everywhere, doing it with the assurance that when it came to the pinch I could bring Gantry and Kittredge and even Mr. McVickar himself to terms—the terms of honesty and fair dealing. With my weapon stolen, I was left helpless, facing the certainty that on the day after the election I should be pilloried in every hole and corner of my native State as the most shameless liar that ever breathed. Do you wonder that I was desperate?"
"No, son; I reckon you wouldn't have been much of a Blount if you hadn't been."
"I was desperate. I said to myself that I would find another weapon, even if I should have to take a leaf out of your own book, dad, to do it. I took the leaf, and I have the weapon. You drove Gryson away, but you made one small miscalculation. You didn't believe that his desire for revenge would be stronger than his fear of the gallows."
Again the older man nodded thoughtfully.
"Yes, son; I know. He came back twice: once when he found you in your office last Wednesday night; and again yesterday, or rather last evening, when you got out of your bed and went to help him make his getaway on the east-bound Overland."
Evan Blount started back, and his exclamation was of pure astoundment.
"You knew all this?" he gasped.
"Oh, yes; I reckon there isn't much happening that such a double-dyed old villain as I am doesn't find out, Evan," was the sober rejoinder.
"But, good heavens! if you know so much, you must know what Gryson came back for, and what he gave me!"
"Yes; I know that, too. I reckon I might as well make a clean breast of it while I'm at it."
"You knew it last night, and yet you didn't send somebody to hold me up and take the papers away from me?"
The senator's chuckle rumbled deep in his mighty chest.
"Maybe I was counting a little on the kinship, Evan, boy. Maybe I was saying to myself: 'No, I reckon the boy won't do it, after all—not when he reads what's set down in the papers; he just naturally couldn't do it.'"
"Oh, my Lord, dad!" was the choking response. "Can't you see that you are killing me by inches? Can't you see that I've got to choose between being a man clear through, or a scoundrel as weak and shifty as any of those I have been denouncing? My God, it's terrible!"
"I reckon you're going to choose straight," said the older man, still with eyes averted.
"I have chosen," said the son brokenly; "or perhaps it would be truer to say that there never has been any choice since the moment when I set my foot in the path which has led me thus far on the way to hell. I can despise myself utterly for the means I took to secure the evidence, but that very lapse makes it all the more needful that I should atone as I can."
David Blount rose and put his back to the fire.
"Son, you are a man among a thousand—among ten thousand," he said quietly. "When it comes to a pure question of good, old-fashioned right and wrong, you can buck up just like your old great-gran'pap, the judge, did when he had to sentence one of his own sons for killing an Indian. You haven't said it in so many words, so I'll say it for you: you've got me, and maybe some others, right where you can shove us into the penitentiary. That's about what you're trying to tell me, isn't it?"
"For God's sake, don't put it that way!" Blount protested. "I gave you fair warning almost at the first. I've got to fight for the right as I see it. If I don't, I shall be less than a man—less than your son. Can't you see that it is breaking my heart?"
A silence electrically surcharged with possibilities settled down upon the isolated room, with the stillness broken only by the crackling of the fire and that other distant tapping as of tree-twigs on the roof. At the end of the pause the senator took a forward step and put a hand on his son's shoulder.
"I haven't one word to say, Evan, boy," he began slowly. "As you told me that first day out here, son, it's your job to hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may. You go ahead and do just what seems right and law-abiding to you. I'd rather go to jail twice over than have you do any different. Is that what you're wanting me to say?"
Blount dropped into a chair, as if the touch on his shoulder had crushed him, and covered his face with his hands. It was hard—harder than even his own prefigurings had forecast it. Fighting against the patent facts, he had been cherishing a lingering hope that his father might be able to brush away the cruel necessity at the last moment. But now the hope was dead.
It was a long minute before he staggered to his feet and groped his way to the door, leaving his father standing before the fire and once more puffing absently at the long-stemmed pipe. When old Barnabas had helped him into his coat and had given him his hat, he found Patricia still sitting in the car, with the motor purring softly under the hood.
"Must you go back?" she queried, when he had descended the steps to climb stiffly into the seat beside her.
He nodded.
"Your duty is clear?"
"Perfectly clear—now."
"And the consequences?" she asked.
"I can only guess," he muttered. "Ruin and disgrace for all of us, I suppose. Of course, you understand that I have resigned from the railroad service and shall stand with my father when—when the thing is done."
She was backing the little roadster into the circling driveway to turn for the start. At the reversing moment she made her final plea.
"Don't do it, Evan—don't do it! I have no more than a woman's reason to offer, but I am sure you are opening the door to a lifelong sorrow for yourself and—and—for me!"
It was the last two words that steeled him suddenly. Not even at her beseeching would he turn aside from the plain path of the oath-bound obligation. It struck him like a blow that the turning aside would make him forever unworthy of her.
"Take me back to the city as quickly as you can!" he said. "Or, better still, stay here and let me have the car. That is my last word."
"You're not fit to drive a car!" she snapped; and for further answer she threw the speed lever into the intermediate gear and released the clutch. Like a projectile hurled from a catapult, the swift little roadster shot away down the cottonwood avenue, and with a jerk of the lever into the "high" the second race against time was begun.
For the first few miles Patricia's passenger had all he could do to keep his seat. On its upper mesa windings the Quaretaro road follows the course of the stream which has been robbed of its waters for the cultivated lands, and though the roadway was good the hazards were plentiful when taken at speed. More than once Blount caught himself in the act of reaching for the steering-wheel, but as often he desisted. As on the outward race, Patricia was staring straight ahead, and giving the little car every throb of speed there was in its machinery. None the less, he could see that she had it under perfect control.
What finally happened came with the suddenness of the thunder-clap following a bolt which strikes near at hand. They were on the down-grade approach to the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, and they could not see beyond the gentle curve to the left, where the smaller gulch found its intersection with the main ravine. When they were within a hundred yards of the curve the stretch below came into view. Blount had a momentary glimpse of some barrier—a pine-tree, as it proved to be—lying across the main road. Seeing it, he realized at the same instant that Patricia was neither throttling the motor nor applying the brakes. After that he had barely time to snap the switch and to throw the heavy wind-shield down before the devastating crash came.