It was after the club luncheon, and while the two young men were on their way to the smoking-room, that some one on business bent stopped Gantry in the corridor. Blount strolled on by himself, and, finding the smoking-room unoccupied, went to lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a little alcove lined with bookcases and half screened by the racks of the newspaper files. Notwithstanding the successful topic changing at table, he was still brooding over the false position in which his father's plans had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a chance to think things over fairly and without heat. Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently missing the half-concealed easy-chair and its occupant in the bookcase alcove, went his way. He had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one would say, before two men entered the smoking-room, coming down the corridor from the grill. Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw him. But when they had taken chairs on the other side of the sheltering newspaper files he was suddenly assured that they had not seen him. They were talking quite freely of him and of his father. "Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar dead to rights this time," remarked the older of the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on his first day in the capital, but whose name he could not now recall. "This scheme of the senator's for shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship is just about the foxiest thing he has ever put across. You can bet the air was blue in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the news got there." "What do you suppose McVickar will do?" asked the other. "He will do anything the senator wants him to--he's got to. Blount is land hungry, and I guess he'll take a few more sections of the railroad mesa-land under the Clearwater ditch. That was what he did two years ago when McVickar wanted the right of way for the branch through Carnadine County." "Don't you believe he's going to take any little Christmas gift this time!" was the rasping reply. "He'll sell the railroad something, and take good hard money for it. It's a cinch. The railroad can't afford to have the courts against it, and McVickar will be made to sweat blood this heat. You watch the wheels go round when McVickar comes out here." Evan Blount found himself growing strangely sick and faint. Could it be his father whom they were thus calmly accusing of graft and trickery and blackmailing methods too despicable to be imagined? His first impulse was to confront the two; to demand proofs; to do and say what a loyal son should. But the crushing conviction that they were discussing only well-known and well-assured facts unnerved him; and after that he was anxious for only one thing--that they might finish their cigars and go away without discovering him.