The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush. Lynde Francis

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 considering. 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 intention of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain private dining-room was closed.

III

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A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES

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      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 following 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 spanning 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 fourteen 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 opportunities for the making of passing acquaintanceships 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 manner were singularly out of keeping with the fashionable 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 commonplaces. 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 suggestively 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 another 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 mountain-land reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining 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 gentleman of many troubles, gave an opinion.

      "Conservation, in timber as well as in other remaining 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 nervously 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 perturbation 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 misunderstanding 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 Government 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 remembered 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 response 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 intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. 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 momentary stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed loading-corral, and the towering water-tank—all backgrounded by a thin line of saloons and dance-halls—had disappeared completely, and the window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted, 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 underman to lay hold upon. Blount, the sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working itself out