d times sorrier that I've
got to fight you. But I can't give ground now, and still be a man and
your son. Think it over and dodge. It'll break my heart a second time if
I have to pull the other fellow's house down and bury you in the wreck."

For some little time after his son had left the table and the private
dining-room, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with
his dessert-spoon. When he rose to go out, the battle light in the gray
eyes was the signal which not even his most faithful henchmen could
always interpret; but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight,
and one which many of them feared.

XVI

THE SAFE-BLOWER

About the time that Evan Blount was finishing the fourth week of the
campaign of education, the senator's wife began to detect signs of
country weariness in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.

"When you are tired of the out-door bignesses, you have only to say the
word," she told the professor's daughter one morning after they had
driven to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car. "As you have
doubtless discovered, the senator and I live either here or at the
capital indifferently during the season, and we shall be only too glad
to entertain you in town whenever you feel like going."

To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners had always returned prompt
refusals. But for a week or more some impulse which she had not taken
the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward the city. The
mesa roads were just as inviting, and the free pleasures of motoring, in
a country where speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their
absence, were just as keen. But now Patricia confessed to a restless
longing for the sight of city streets and the brabble of city noises.

"Only you mustn't consider us, or me, so much as you do, Mrs. Blount,"
she protested. "I have a dreadful suspicion that we have already
interfered shamefully with your autumn plans. You are simply too kind
and too hospitable to admit it."

"You have interfered with nothing," was the ready assurance. "We were
not going anywhere, or thinking of going anywhere. No inducement that
was ever invented would take the senator away from his own State in a
political year, and your coming has been a blessing. But for the good
excuse to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds, we should have
been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain Hotel from the firing of the opening
gun to the day after election. But that is