Francis Lynde - The Honorable Senator Sage Brush

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THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH

[Illustration: "He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president]

THE HONORABLE
SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH

BY

FRANCIS LYNDE

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : : 1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

* * * * *

Published September, 1913

[Illustration]

TO MR. GEORGE ADY

My Regius Professor in the School of Western Railroading, and
himself a keen observer, _in situ_, of the conditions which I have
herein sought to portray, this book is most affectionately
inscribed.

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO" 3

II. THE BOSS 26

III. A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES 40

IV. THE HIGHBINDERS 56

V. AT WARTRACE HALL 69

VI. ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS 86

VII. A BATTLE ROYAL 96

VIII. THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT 110

IX. THE RANK AND FILE 121

X. IN THE HERBARIUM 138

XI. THE GREAT GAME 148

XII. A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT 165

XIII. THE LIEGEMAN 178

XIV. BARRIERS INVISIBLE 193

XV. SWORD-PLAY 203

XVI. THE SAFE-BLOWER 213

XVII. ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS 230

XVIII. THE CHASM 241

XIX. A COG IN THE WHEEL 256

XX. A STONE FOR BREAD 264

XXI. THE UNDER-DOG 280

XXII. THE ICONOCLAST 293

XXIII. A CRY IN THE NIGHT 302

XXIV. FIELD HEADQUARTERS 320

XXV. BLOOD AND IRON 327

XXVI. APPLES OF GOLD 343

XXVII. IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES 356

XXVIII. THE GOSSIPING WIRES 367

XXIX. AT SHONOHO INN 379

XXX. THE RECKONING 390

XXXI. _A LA BONNE HEURE_ 407

THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH

I

BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"

Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who
was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be
resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust
its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was
like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read
the single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs.
Beverley's indulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the
veranda where the frivolities had not as yet intruded.

It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled
moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though
the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting
verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns.
At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and
one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear,
brought the guests of honor--three daughters of a Western senator lately
home from their summer abroad.

Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had
resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his
ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and
since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover,
the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of
the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.

Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself.
He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world,
and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than
poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained, and when he sat back in
his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow
spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of
motor-cars he was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation of the
disappointed lover the world over.

It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him;
a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner
dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who
were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was
unfeignedly glad.

"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed,
with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap
up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to
be bored stiff--" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shiftily
insincere with as old a friend as Evan Blount. But in the nature of
things it was baldly impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not
accidental.

"Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not too ungraciously,
considering his just cause to be more ungracious. "I was thinking of you
a little while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of
Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston,
and--well, at the present moment I'm not sure but you are the one man in
the world I wanted most to meet."

"Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed Gantry, settling himself
comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
"I've been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust
of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social
claw-hold. Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old
town keep going ever count 'em?"

"Boston is all right when you know it--or, rather, when it comes to know
you," returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge--which is
Boston in the process of elucidation--was the birth and dwelling place
of Patricia.

Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.

"The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you,
hasn't it, Evan?--to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it
would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the
Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you in for?"

"I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean--out and admitted
to the bar," said Blount. "If you get into trouble with the Boston
police let me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood
hills and Judge Lynch's court."

"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who
curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and
pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I
believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were
Western-born."

"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much
about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.

"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up.
"That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young
lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to
meet?"

Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across
the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.

Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to
the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried
the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"--the capital of
the State--and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent
arrival. Below the date-line he read:

TO EVAN SHELBY BLOUNT,
Standish Apartments, Boston.

You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me
nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied
to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up
with your native State?

DAVID BLOUNT.

It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of
friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of
a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original
creases before he passed it back.

"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.

"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be
fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a
few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."

"He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."

"_I_ didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what
you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it
were printed."

Blount's smile was altogether friendly.

"What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of
banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal
contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"

"Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic
manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded
moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me
that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you
regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me
any more."

"Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a
boyhood like other boys--or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I
was born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was--as it still is, I
believe--a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the
nearest shipping-corral on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,'
'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster,
and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself
surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than
Painted Hat."

"And what happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not
abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough
to warrant a quickening of interest.

"The greatest possible misfortune that can ever come to a half-grown
boy, Dick--my mother died."

Gantry's own boyhood was not so deeply buried in the past as to make
him forgetful of its joys and sorrows. "That was hard--mighty hard," he
assented. Then: "And pretty soon your father married again?"

"Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But for me the heavens were
fallen. I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came
here to the Law School. In all that time I've never seen the
'Circle-Bar' or my native State--in fact, I have never been west of
Chicago."

Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase. As a
railroad man, continent-crossing travel was to him the merest matter of
course. Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset Country Club on
the North Shore, it was well within the possibilities that the following
week-end might find him sweltering in New Orleans or buttoning his
overcoat against the raw evening fogs of San Francisco.

"Never been west of Chicago?" he echoed. "Never been--" He stopped
short, beginning to realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons;
reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college friendship, and the
confidences begotten thereby, in the rendering of them.

"No," said Blount.

"Then the senator's--that is--er--your father's political life has never
touched you."

The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount's steady gray
eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the
Blount grimness.

"It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick. I saw a large-hearted,
open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream
of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all his own--a woman's
ambition. In order that the woman might mix and mingle in Washington
society for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to fill out an
unexpired term of two months in the United States Senate--bought the
election, some said. That was three years ago, wasn't it?--a long time,
as political incidents or accidents go. But Washington hasn't forgotten.
When I was down there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were still
recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western naivete of 'The
Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"

Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter admission had got
itself fully made.

"Land of love, Evan!" he said, "you may be an educated post-graduate all
right, with the proper Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down
to a hard-glaze finish, but you've got a lot to learn yet--about the
senator and his politics, I mean. Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn't in it
a little bit for the social frills and furbelows; he never was. Let me
intimate a few things: Politically speaking, David Blount is by long
odds the biggest man in his State to-day. He can have anything he wants,
from the head of the ticket down. You spoke rather contemptuously just
now of his two months in the Senate; you probably didn't know that he
might have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually did a much
more difficult thing--named his successor."

David Blount's son stood up and put his shoulders against one of the
veranda pillars. From the new view-point he could look through the
reading-room windows and on into the assembly-room where the dancers
were keeping time to the measures of a two-step. But he was not thinking
of the dancers when he said:

"It's a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down here to-night like the
_deus ex machina_ of the old Greek plays. You've read this
telegram"--holding up the folded message--"it is just possible that you
can tell me what lies behind it. Why has my father sent it at this
particular time and in those words? He knows perfectly well that my
plans for settling here in Boston were definitely made more than a year
ago."

"I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood country, if that's
what you want to know," said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.

"Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding: "What I don't know
about the business or the political situation in the West would fill a
much larger book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes ago."

"'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese twins nowadays,"
returned the railroad man, with a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for
us out yonder in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a dozen
other States this year--east, west, north and south--everything
promising a renewal of the unreasoning, bull-headed legislative fight
against the railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As everybody
knows, the Transcontinental Railway has practically created two-thirds
of the States through which it passes--made them out of whole cloth.
Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced cattle ranges a
dozen years ago you will now find irrigation, tilled farms, orchards,
rich mines--development everywhere, with a rapidly growing population to
help it along. To make all this possible, the railroad took a chance; it
was a mighty long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."

"I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is summed up in some railroad
man's clever phrase, 'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can
remember one year when my father rose up in his wrath and drove his beef
cattle one hundred and fifty miles across the Transcontinental tracks to
the Overland Central."

"That was in the old days," protested Gantry, who was loyal to his salt.
"As the State has filled up, we've tried to meet the situation half-way,
as a straight business proposition. Fares and tariffs have been lowered
from time to time, and--"

"You are not making it simple enough by half," warned Blount
quizzically. "You are getting further away from my telegram every
minute."

Gantry paused to relight his cigar.

"I don't know how your telegram figures in it specially, but I do know
this: the legislature to be elected this fall in our State will be
chosen entirely without regard to the old party lines. There is only one
issue before the people and that is the Transcontinental Railway. The
'Paramounters,' as they call themselves, taking the name from the
assumption that it is the paramount duty of the voter to pinch any
business interest bigger than his own, would like to legislate us out of
existence; as against that we shall beat the tomtom and do our level
best to stay on top of earth."

"Naturally," Blount agreed, then half-absently, and with his eyes still
resting upon the merrymakers twirling like paired automatons in the
distant assembly-room: "And my father--how does he stand?"

"The idea of your having to ask me how the senator stands in his own
State!" exclaimed Gantry. "But really, Evan, I'd give a good bit of hard
cash to be able to tell you in so many words just where he does stand.
There are a good many people in our neck of woods who would like mighty
well to know. It will make all the difference in the world when it comes
to a show-down."

"Why will it?"

"Because, apart from the railroad and the anti-railroad factions, there
is a very complete and smoothly running machine organization."

"And my father is identified with the machine?"

Again Gantry choked over the singular lack of information discovering
itself in Blount's question.

"Land of glory!" he ejaculated. "Where have you been burying yourself,
Evan? Didn't I just tell you that he is the biggest man in the State?
Oh, no"--with heavy irony--"he isn't identified with the machine--not at
all; he merely owns it and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe
majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be just as firmly
convinced that they can. But before either side can turn a wheel it will
have to walk up to the captain's office and get its orders."

"Ah," said Blount, and a little later: "Thank you, Dick, I am pretty
badly out of touch with the Western political situation, as you've
discovered." Then he changed the subject abruptly. "How long will your
traffic meeting last?"

"We practically finished to-day. An hour or two on Monday will wind it
up."

"After which you'll go West?"

"After which I shall go West by the Monday noon train if I can make it.
You couldn't hire me to stay in Boston an hour longer than I have to."

Silence for a time until Blount broke in upon Gantry's tapping of the
dance-music rhythm with: "If I can close up a few unfinished business
matters and get ready I may go with you, Dick. Would you mind?"

"Yes; I should mind so much that I'd willingly miss a train or so and
worry out a few more of the chilly Boston hours rather than lose the
chance of having you along."

"That is good of you, I'm sure. I should bore myself to death if I had
to travel alone."

Blount's rejoinder might have passed for a mere friendly commonplace if
it had not been for the rather curiously worded telegram. But it was a
goodly portion of Gantry's business in life to put two and two together,
and that phrase in the senator's message about a woman's apron-string
interested him. Moreover, it was subtly suggestive.

"Ever meet your father's--er--the present Mrs. Blount, Evan?" he asked.

"No." Blount may have been Western-born, but the chilling discouragement
he could crowd into the two-letter negation spoke eloquently of his
Eastern training.

Gantry was rebuffed but not disheartened.

"She is a mighty fine woman," he ventured.

"So I have been given to understand." This time Blount's reply was icy.
But now Gantry's eyes were twinkling and he pressed his advantage.

"You'll have to reckon pretty definitely with her if you go out to the
greasewood country, Evan. Next to your father, she is the court of last
resort; indeed, there are a good many people who insist that she _is_
the court--the power behind the throne, you know."

There is one ditch out of which the most persistent and gladsome mocker
may not drive his victim, and that is the ditch of silence. Blount said
nothing. Nevertheless, Gantry tried once more.

"Not interested, Evan?"

Blount turned and looked his companion coldly in the eyes.

"Not in the slightest degree, Dick. Will you take that for your answer
now, and remember it hereafter?"

"Sure," laughed the railroad man. And then, to round out the forbidden
topic by adding worse to bad: "I didn't know it was a sore spot with
you. How should I know? But, as I say, you'll have to reckon with her
sooner or later, and--"

"Let's talk of something else," snapped Blount.

Gantry found a match and relighted his cigar. When he began again he was
still thinking of the "apron-string" clause in the senator's telegram.

"I can't understand how any man with Western blood in his veins could
ever be content to marry and settle down in this over-civilized neck of
woods," he remarked, looking down upon the parked automobiles and around
at the country-club evidences of the civilization.

"Can't you?" smiled Blount, with large lenience. One of the things the
civilization had done for him was to make him good-naturedly tolerant of
the crudeness of the outlander.

"No, I can't," asserted the Westerner. Then he added: "Of course, I
don't know the Eastern young woman even by sight. She may be all that is
lovely, desirable, and enticing--if a man could hope to live long
enough to get really well acquainted with her."

"She is," declared Blount, with the air of one who had lived quite long
enough to know.

Once more Gantry was putting two and two together. Blount's
determination to go West and grow up with the country--his father's
country--was apparently a very sudden one. Had the decision turned
entirely upon the senator's telegram? Gantry, wise in his generation,
thought not.

"You say that as if you'd been taking a few lessons," he laughed. Then,
with the friendly impudence which only a college comradeship could
excuse: "Is she here to-night?"

"No," said Blount, unguardedly making the response which admitted so
much more than it said.

"Tell me about her," Gantry begged. "I don't often read a love story,
but I like to hear 'em."

If it had been any one but Gantry, Blount would probably have had a
sharp attack of reticence, with outward symptoms unmistakable to the
dullest. But the time, the surroundings, and the exceeding newness of
Patricia's "No" combined to break down the barriers of reserve.

"There isn't much to tell, Dick," he began half humorously, half in
ill-concealed self-pity. "I've known her for a year, and I've loved her
from the first day. That is Chapter One; and Chapter Two ends the story
with one small word. She says 'No.'"

"The dickens she does!" said Gantry, in hearty sympathy. Then: "But
that's a good sign, isn't it? Haven't I heard somewhere that they always
say 'No' at first?"

Blount laughed in spite of himself. Gantry, the Dick Gantry of the
college period, had always been a man's man, gay, light-hearted, and
care-free to the outward eye, but in reality one who was carrying
burdens of poverty and distress which might well have crushed an older
and a stronger man. There had been no time for sentiment then, and
Blount wondered if there had been in any later period.

"I am afraid I can't get any comfort out of that suggestion," he
returned. "When Miss Patricia Anners says 'No,' I am quite sure she
means it."

"Think so?" said Gantry, still sympathetic. "Well, I suppose you are the
best judge. Tough, isn't it, old man? What's the obstacle?--if you can
tell it without tearing the bandages off and saying 'Ouch!'"

"It is Miss Anners's career."

"H'm," was the doubtful comment; "I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate
that a little for me. I'm not up in the 'career' classification."

"She has been studying at home and abroad in preparation for
social-settlement work in the large cities. Of course, I knew about it;
but I thought--I hoped--"

"You hoped it was only a young woman's fad--which it probably is,"
Gantry cut in.

"Y-yes; I'm afraid that was just what I did hope, Dick. But I couldn't
talk against it. Confound it all, you can't go about smashing ideals
for the people you love best!"

"Rich?" queried Gantry.

"Oh, no. Her father has the chair of paleontology, and never gets within
speaking distance of the present century. The mother has been dead many
years."

"And you say the girl has the Hull House ambition?"

"The social-betterment ambition. It's an ideal, and I can't smash it.
You wouldn't smash it, either, Dick."

"No; I guess that's so. If I were in your fix I should probably do what
you are doing--say 'Good-by, fond heart,' and hie me away to the
forgetful edge of things. And it's simply astonishing how quickly the
good old sage-brush hills will help a man to forget everything that ever
happened to him before he ducked."

Blount winced a little at that. It was no part of his programme to
forget Patricia. Indeed, for twenty-four hours, or the waking moiety of
that period, he had been assuring himself of the utter impossibility of
anything remotely approaching forgetfulness. This thought made him
instantly self-reproachful; regretful for having shown a sort of
disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and sacred things, even
to so good a friend as Dick Gantry; and from regretting to amending was
never more than a step for Evan Blount. There were plenty of
reminiscences to be threshed over, and Blount brought them forward so
tactfully that Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away from
the open door of the acuter personalities.

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