Read Ebook: The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush by Lynde Francis

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Ebook has 1454 lines and 69439 words, and 30 pages

"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.

"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."

The small plotter nodded approval.

"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed; and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to finish his cigar.

IN THE HERBARIUM

The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them, kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic, no-thoroughfare of the capital city. Weatherford, the father, egged on by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view carefully tucked away inside of it--an outlook upon life which was a survival from his hard-working past--would willingly have dodged, but Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.

The reception for which the senator's wife and her guest had driven thirty miles through the dust of the sage-brush hills was one of the many moves in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the opening-gun occasion the great house in Mesa Circle was lighted from basement to turret--to all of the numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street to the grand entrance, an army of lackeys paraded in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters of the bravest and best in the capital city's political contingent stood with Mrs. Weatherford in the long receiving-line.

From room to room in the vast house a curiously assorted throng of the bidden ones worked its way as the jam and crush permitted. A firm believer in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the hostess had made her invitation-list long and catholic. For the gossips there were the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables, and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.

It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs. Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.

Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty. Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia, little Mrs. Blount looked about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled to him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for her centre-rush to wedge a way through the crowded rooms, was presently lost to sight--at least from Miss Anners's point of view.

Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of her appearance at the hostess's end of the long receiving-line, the senator's wife had been marked and followed in her slow progress through the rooms by a thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying to hunch himself into better relations with his ill-fitting dress-coat, an eager gentleman whose hawk-like eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her hand on Gantry's arm. Only the senator saw and remarked this bit of by-play, and he looked as if he were enjoying it, the shrewd gray eyes lighting humorously as he bent to hear what Patricia was saying.

When his quarry stopped, as she did frequently to chat with one or another of the guests, the man with the hawk-like profile and the nervous hunch circled warily, and once or twice seemed about to make the opportunity which was so slow in making itself. But it was not until the little lady in the claret-colored party-gown had drifted, still with a hand on Gantry's arm, in among the palm and banana trees of the herbarium that the bird-of-prey person made his swoop. A moment later Gantry, taking a low-toned command from his companion, was disappearing in the direction of the refreshment-tables, and the lady looked up to say: "Dear me, Mr. Hathaway, you almost startled me!"

"Did I?" said the lumber-king, rather grimly, if he meant the query to be apologetic. "I am sorry. I didn't mean to; but Mrs. Gordon said I would find you here, and so I took the liberty of following you. I'm needing a little straightening out, you know, and--ah--would you mind letting me talk business with you for a minute or two, Mrs. Blount?"

She drew her gown aside, and made room for him on the carved rustic settee, which was exceedingly uncomfortable to sit in, but which was in perfect harmony with the background of gigantic palmettos. He nodded gratefully and took the place, and the manner of his sitting down was that of a man who wears evening-clothes only under compulsion.

"Business?" she was saying. "Certainly not; if you can talk business in such a place as this"--giving him the coveted permission.

"Perhaps it ain't what you'd call business--maybe it's only politics," he resumed; then, with the abruptness of one whose dealings have been with men oftener than with women: "In the first place, I wish you'd tell me what I've been doing to get myself into your bad books."

She laughed easily. "Who said you had been doing anything, Mr. Hathaway?" she asked.

"The senator," he answered shortly, adding: "He told me I'd have to make my peace with you."

She had developed a sudden interest in the quaint Japanese figures on the ivory sticks of her fan. "You want something, Mr. Hathaway; what is it?" she inquired.

"I want to be put next in this pigs-in-clover railroad puzzle," was the blunt statement of the need. "Our freight contract with the Transcontinental is about to expire, and I'd like to get it renewed on the same terms as before."

"Well," she said ingenuously, "why don't you do it?"

The small person in the fetching party-gown reached up and pinched a leaf from a fragrant shrub fronting the settee.

"Mr. Gantry has gone to fetch me an ice, and he will be back in a very few minutes," she suggested mildly. "Consider your peace made, Mr. Hathaway, and tell me what I can do for you."

"You can put me next," said the lumber lord, going back to the only phrase that seemed to fit the exigencies of the case. "Why the--why can't we get our contract renewed?"

The little lady was opening and shutting her fan slowly. "What was your contract?" she inquired innocently.

"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you," he said bluntly. "But you do know. It's the rebate lumber rate from our mills at Twin Buttes and elsewhere, and it was given us two years ago, a few days before election."

"And the consideration?" she asked, looking up quickly.

"You know that, too, Mrs. Blount. It was the swinging of the solid employees' vote of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company over to the railroad ticket."

"And you wish to make the same arrangement again?"

"Exactly. We've got to have that preferential rate or go out of business."

"With whom did you make the contract two years ago?"

"With Mr. McVickar, verbally. Of course, there wasn't anything put down in black and white, but the railroad folks did their part and we did ours."

"I see--a gentleman's agreement," she murmured; and then: "You have tried Mr. McVickar again?"

"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."

"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"

"I couldn't get him to say anything with any sense in it," said the lumber magnate grittingly. "The most I could get out of him was that I would have to see the boss."

"And instead of doing that you went to see the senator?" she asked.

"Of course I did. Who else would Gantry mean by 'the boss'?" demanded the befogged one.

"Possibly he meant the senator's son," she ventured, tapping a pretty cheek with the folded fan. "Have you been leaving Evan Blount out in all of this?"

"I didn't know where to put him in. That's what brings me here to-night. The senator, or McVickar, or both of them together, have set the whole State to running around in circles with this appointment of young Blount. Some say it's a deal between the senator and McVickar, and some say it's a fight. Half of the professional spellbinders are walking in their sleep over it right now. I thought maybe you could tell me, Mrs. Blount."

"I can't tell you anything that would help the people who are walking in their sleep," she returned, "but I might offer a suggestion in your personal affair. Mr. Evan Blount is your man."

Hathaway pursed his thin lips and frowned. "I'm in bad there--right at the jump," he objected.

"I know," she shot back quickly. "For some reason best known to yourself, you saw fit to have Mr. Evan waylaid and man-handled on the first night of his return to his native State. But you needn't worry about that. He won't hold it against you. I'm sure you'll find him entirely amenable to reason."

The tyrant of "timber-jacks" frowned again. "H'm--reason, eh? How big a block of Twin Buttes stock shall I offer him?"

Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.

"You always figure in dollars and cents, don't you, Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway?" she mocked.

"I have always found it the cheapest in the end."

"Listen," she said, with the folded fan held up like a monitory finger. "Mr. Gantry may be back any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest hint. You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal to him frankly, as one business man to another."

"But I have heard--they say he's all kinds of a crank."

"Never mind what you have heard. Tell him all the facts and ask him to help you, and for mercy's sake don't offer him a block of your stock. Put it where it will do the most good. Put it in the name of Professor William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and show Mr. Blount how dreadfully disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate would be to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders--including Professor Anners."

Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil memorandum of the name and address of the new beneficiary.

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