anager. "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