y-out," he mused, reading the type-written lines over
again, "but the little lady was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy.
She was just prophetess enough to guess where and how you would go off
the handle, clever enough to pass me the word to watch the wires after a
certain train should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman, that.
I believe she figures out more than half of the fine moves in the
Honorable Senator's game, though this particularly fine move of sending
Hathaway to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg is one that I
don't begin to understand." And he folded the telegram and carefully put
it away in his pocket-book.

Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the Inter-Mountain Hotel before
he had cooled down sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it
chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to the door of the public
garage patronized by his father. That thought of flying to Patricia for
counsel and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed by a
more militant desire to fight somebody; to go to his father and tell him
how completely and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president
to humiliate a son whose only offence was a decent regard for honor and
uprightness.

Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went in and asked if any of
Senator Blount's cars were in the city. There was one--the big roadster;
and Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first day at Wartrace
Hall his father had tried to give him one of the three motor-cars
outright, and when he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had
been made by which he was under promise to use any one of the machines
he could get hold of when the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes
later he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster, picking his
way through the traffic-burdened city streets and pointing straight for
the country road leading north to the sage-brush hills.

Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers--from the driver's
point of view--this: that it effectually sweeps the brain of all other
cares and distractions, sundry and several, since one may not drive a
high-powered car at speed and successfully think of anything but the
driving. Blount reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue at
Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour; and he was so far recovered
from the attack of righteous indignation that he was able to meet his
father and the others with a fair de