Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across
the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.

Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to
the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried
the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"--the capital of
the State--and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent
arrival. Below the date-line he read:

TO EVAN SHELBY BLOUNT,
Standish Apartments, Boston.

You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me
nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied
to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up
with your native State?

DAVID BLOUNT.

It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of
friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of
a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original
creases before he passed it back.

"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.

"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be
fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a
few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."