"I suppose we may as well cut out the preliminaries and come to the
point at once, Blount. Ackerton wired me that you had definitely
announced your son as a candidate for the attorney-generalship. Have
you?"

The senator had found an unopened box of cigars in a cabinet and he was
inserting the blade of his pocket-knife under the lid when he said, with
good-natured irony: "The primaries do the nominating in this State,
Hardwick. Didn't you know that?"

"See here, Blount; I've come half-way across the continent to thresh
this thing out with you, face to face, and I'm not in the humor to spar
for an opening. Do you mean to run your son or not? That is a plain
question, and I'd like to have an equally plain answer."

"I told you two weeks ago what you might expect if you insisted on
sticking your crow-bar in among the wheels this fall, McVickar, but you
wouldn't believe me. I'll say it again if you want to hear it."

"And I told you two weeks ago that we couldn't stand for any such
programme as the one you had mapped out. And I added that you might name
your own price for an alternative which wouldn't confiscate us and drive
us off the face of the earth."

"Yes; and I named the price, if you happen to remember."

"I know; you said you wanted us to turn everything over to the
Paramounters and take our chances on a clean administration. Naturally,
we're not going to do any such Utopian thing as that. What I want to
know now is what it is going to cost us to do the practical and possible
thing."

"Want to buy me outright this time, do you, Hardwick?" said the boss,
still smiling.

"We"--McVickar was going to say--"We have bought you before," but he
changed the retort to a less offensive phrasing--"We have had no
difficulty heretofore in arriving at some practical and sensible _modus
vivendi_, and we shouldn't have now. But as a condition binding upon any
sort of an arrangement, I am here to say that we can't let you nominate
and elect your son as attorney-general; that's out of the question. If
it's going to prove a personal disappointment to you, we'll be
reasonable and try to make it up to you in some other way."

Again the grimly humorous smile was twinkling in the gray eyes of the
old cattleman. "What is the market quotation on disappointments, right
now, Hardwick?" he inquired.

With another man McVickar might have been too diplomatic to show signs
of a shortening temper. But David Blount was an open-eyed enem