But that is, as you might say, a side issue.
The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it.
Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same
predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet
have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."

The senator's chuckle was barely audible.

"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he
suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating
over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it
won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of
the real thing by and by."

Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to
construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to
make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in
some mysterious way to insulate him--to make it impossible for him to
get into the real tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure,
at least.

"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together," he said with a tang
of abruptness in his tone. "We are diametrically opposed to each other
at every point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the will of the
people and its fullest and freest expression. You stand for--"

"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the father, and the question
was put with a quizzical smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to
Blount's cheeks.

"If I should say what all men say--what some of them are frank enough to
say even to me--" he stopped short, and then went on with better
self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."

"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on
the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at
the rest of us, I reckon."

Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his
chair.

"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of
admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been
going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding
out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the
railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"

The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have
you?" he commented.

"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad.
There's a thing behind th