"I've come to ask you, first, if it is possible for you to stand from under. Can you?" "Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to." "Then do it, and do it quickly, dad! As there is a God above us, I'm going to push this thing through to the bitter end. To-morrow morning I shall give Gantry his time limit. If the time goes by, leaving the house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my promise to the letter. You know, and I know, what will happen after that." "Yes; I reckon I know," was the half-absent reply. Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his watch. "I've got to go back to the office and work a while," he said. And then: "I feel better for having had this talk with you, dad. I'm sorry you are finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand 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."