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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Real Man, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Real Man
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Illustrator: Arthur E. Becher
+
+Release Date: July 27, 2011 [EBook #36869]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE REAL MAN
+
+                           BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+    _ILLUSTRATED BY_
+    ARTHUR E. BECHER
+
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+    NEW YORK :::::::::: 1915
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+    Published August, 1915
+
+
+
+
+                         TO
+           THOSE FRIENDS OF UNACQUAINTANCE
+                  AMONG HIS READERS
+    WHO FROM TIME TO TIME EXPRESS, THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF
+           KINDLY AND HEART-WARMING LETTERS,
+       THEIR APPRECIATIVE SYMPATHY AND APPROVAL,
+                     THIS BOOK
+             IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED,
+         WITH GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FROM
+                     THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: There was time only for a mighty heave and shove.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I. HOST AND GUEST
+
+II. METASTASIS
+
+III. THE HOBO
+
+IV. THE HIGH HILLS
+
+V. THE SPECIALIST
+
+VI. THE TWIG
+
+VII. A NOTICE TO QUIT
+
+VIII. TIMANYONI DITCH
+
+IX. RELAPSINGS
+
+X. THE SICK PROJECT
+
+XI. WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK
+
+XII. THE ROCKET AND THE STICK
+
+XIII. THE NARROW WORLD
+
+XIV. A REPRIEVE
+
+XV. "SWEET FORTUNE'S MINION"
+
+XVI. BROKEN THREADS
+
+XVII. A NIGHT OF FIASCOS
+
+XVIII. A CHANCE TO HEDGE
+
+XIX. TWO WOMEN
+
+XX. TUCKER JIBBEY
+
+XXI. AT ANY COST
+
+XXII. THE MEGALOMANIAC
+
+XXIII. THE ARROW TO THE MARK
+
+XXIV. A LITTLE LEAVEN
+
+XXV. THE PACE-SETTER
+
+XXVI. THE COLONEL'S "DEFI"
+
+XXVII. TWO WITNESSES
+
+XXVIII. THE STRADDLER
+
+XXIX. THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT
+
+XXX. A STRONG MAN ARMED
+
+XXXI. A RACE TO THE SWIFT
+
+XXXII. FREEDOM
+
+XXXIII. IN SUNRISE GULCH
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+There was time only for a mighty heave and shove
+
+In a flash Smith knew what he had done
+
+"Your friends have money, Montague--plenty of it"
+
+"Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield, and he's going
+to dy-dynamite the dam!"
+
+Sketch map of the Timanyoni
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Sketch map of the Timanyoni]
+
+
+
+
+THE REAL MAN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Host and Guest
+
+
+It is conceivable that, in Noah's time--say, on the day before the
+heavens opened and the floods descended--a complacent citizenry of
+Antediluvia might have sat out on its front porches, enjoying the sunset
+over Mount Ararat and speculating upon the probable results of the next
+patriarchal election, all unsuspicious of chaotic cataclysms. Under
+similar conditions--fair skies, a good groundwork of creature comforts,
+and a total lack of threatening portents--there was no reason why the
+two men, smoking their after-dinner cigars on the terrace of the
+Lawrenceville Country Club, should suspect that the end of the world
+might be lying in wait for either of them just beyond the hour's
+relaxation.
+
+They had been dining together--Debritt, a salesman for the Aldenguild
+Engraving Company of New York and the elder of the two, as the guest,
+and Smith, cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust, as the host.
+After banking hours, Smith had taken the engraving company's salesman in
+his runabout for a drive through the residence district and up the river
+road; and business, the business of printing a new issue of
+stock-certificates for the local bank, had been laid aside. The return
+drive had paused at the Country Club for dinner; and since Debritt's
+train would not leave until eight o'clock, there was ample leisure for
+the tobacco burning and for the jocund salesman's appreciative
+enthusiasm.
+
+"Monty, my son, for solid satisfaction and pure unadulterated enjoyment
+of the safe-and-sane variety, you fellows in the little cities have us
+metropolitans backed off the map," he said, after the cigars were fairly
+alight. "In New York, believe me, you might be the cashier of a bank the
+size of the Lawrenceville B. and T.--only you wouldn't be at your
+age--for a thousand years and never get a glimpse out over the top of
+things; never know the people who lived next door to you. Here you know
+everybody worth knowing, drive your own motor, have more dinner
+invitations than you can accept, and by and by--when you get
+deliberately good and ready--you can marry the prettiest girl in town.
+Am I right?"
+
+The carefully groomed, athletically muscled younger man in the big
+wicker lounging-chair laughed easily.
+
+"You are not so far wrong, Boswell," he conceded. "I guess we get all
+that is coming to us, and I get my share. Since we have only one
+multimillionaire we can't afford to be very exclusive, and my bank job
+answers the social purpose well enough."
+
+"I'll bet it does!" the jocose one went on. "I've been piping you off
+ever since we left the hotel. It's ''lo, Monty-boy,' everywhere you go,
+and I know exactly what that means in a town of this size; a stand-in
+with all the good people, a plate at anybody's table, the pick of
+partners at all the social dew-dabs. Tell me if I'm wrong."
+
+Again the younger man laughed.
+
+"You might be reading it out of a book," he confessed. "That is the life
+here in Lawrenceville, and I live it, like thousands of my kind all over
+the land. You may scoff at it if you like, but it is pleasant and
+harmless and exceedingly comfortable. I shouldn't know how to live any
+other kind."
+
+"I don't know why you should want to live any other kind," was the
+prompt rejoinder. "To be a rising young business man in a rich little
+inland city, beloved of the gods and goddesses--especially of the
+goddesses.... Say, by Jove! here comes one of them, right now. Heavens!
+isn't she a pomegranate!"
+
+A handsome limousine had rolled silently up to the club carriage
+entrance, and the young woman in question was descending from it. Only a
+miser of adjectives--or a Debritt--would have tried to set forth her
+triumphant charm in a single word. She was magnificent: a brown-eyed
+blonde of the Olympian type, exuberantly feminine in the many dazzling
+luxuriances of ripe-lipped, full-figured maidenhood. The salesman saw
+his companion make a move to rise, but the beauty passed on into the
+club-house without looking their way.
+
+"You know her, I suppose; you know everybody in town," Debritt said,
+after the cashier had again settled himself in the lounging-chair.
+
+Smith's nod was expressive of something more than a fellow townsman's
+degree of intimacy.
+
+"I ought to," he admitted. "She is Miss Verda Richlander, the daughter
+of our one and only multimillionaire. Also, I may add that she is my
+very good friend."
+
+Debritt's chuckling laugh proved that his prefigurings had already
+outrun the mere statement of fact.
+
+"Better and more of it," he commented. "I'm going to congratulate you
+before you can escape--or is it a bit premature?"
+
+"Some of the Lawrenceville gossips would tell you that it isn't; but it
+is, just the same. Mr. Josiah Richlander has but one measure for the
+stature of a man, and the name of it is money. The fellow who asks him
+for Miss Verda is going to have a chance to show up his bank-account and
+the contents of his safety-deposit box in short order."
+
+"In that case, I should imagine you'd be lying awake nights trying to
+study up some get-rich-quick scheme," joked the guest.
+
+"Perhaps I am," was the even-toned rejoinder. "Who knows?"
+
+The round-bodied salesman broke an appreciative cough in the middle and
+grew suddenly thoughtful.
+
+"Don't do that, Monty," he urged soberly; "try to take any of the short
+cuts, I mean. It's the curse of the age; and, if you'll take it from me,
+your chances are too good--and too dangerous."
+
+The good-looking, athletic young cash-keeper planted in the opposite
+chair met the salesman's earnest gaze level-eyed.
+
+"Having said that much, you can hardly refuse to say more," he
+suggested.
+
+"I will say more; a little more, anyway. I've been wanting to say it all
+the afternoon. My job takes me into nearly every bank in the Middle
+West, as you know, and I can't very well help hearing a good bit of
+gossip, Montague. I'm not going to insult your intelligence by assuming
+that you don't thoroughly know the man you are working under."
+
+The cashier withheld his reply until the Olympian young woman, who was
+coming out, had stepped into her limousine to be driven away townward.
+Then he said:
+
+"Mr. Dunham--our president? Oh, yes; I know him very well, indeed."
+
+"I'm afraid you don't."
+
+"I ought to know him," was the guarded assumption. "I've been with him
+six years, and during that time I have served a turn at every job in the
+bank up to, and now and then including, Mr. Dunham's own desk."
+
+"Then you can hardly help knowing what people say of him."
+
+"I know: they say he is a chance-taker, and some of them add that he is
+not too scrupulous. That is entirely true; true, not only of Mr. Dunham,
+but of nine out of every ten business men of to-day who make a success.
+The chance-taking is in the air, the Lawrenceville air, at any rate,
+Debritt. We are prosperous. The town is growing by leaps and bounds, and
+we've got the money."
+
+The ash had grown half an inch longer on the salesman's cigar before he
+spoke again.
+
+"They say worse things of Mr. Watrous Dunham than that he is a
+chance-taker, Montague. There are men, good, solid business men, in the
+neighboring cities and towns who tell some pretty savage stories about
+the way in which he has sometimes dropped his friends into a hole to
+save himself."
+
+"And you are a good enough friend of mine to want to give me a tip,
+Boswell? I appreciate that, but I don't need it. It may be as you say.
+Possibly Mr. Dunham does carry a knife up his sleeve for emergencies.
+But I wasn't born yesterday, and I have a few friends of my own here in
+Lawrenceville. My only present worry is that I'm not making money fast
+enough."
+
+The salesman waved the subject aside with the half-burned cigar. "Forget
+it," he said shortly; "the Dunham end of it, I mean. And I don't blame
+you for wanting to assemble money enough to call Mr. Richlander's hand."
+Then, with the jocose smile wrinkling again at the corners of his
+well-buried eyes: "You've got all the rest of it, you know; even to the
+good half of a distinguished name. 'Mrs. J. Montague Smith.' That fits
+her down to the ground. If it were just plain 'John,' now, it might be
+different. Does she, too, call you 'Monty-boy'?"
+
+The young man whose name pointed the jest grinned good-naturedly.
+
+"The 'J' does stand for 'John,'" he admitted. "I was named for my
+maternal grandfather, John Montague, and had both halves of the good old
+gentleman's signature wished upon me. I stood for it until I grew old
+enough to realize that 'John Smith' is practically nothing but an
+_alias_, and then I dropped the 'John' part of it, or rather, let it
+shrink to an initial. I suppose you can count all the Debritts there are
+in the country on your fingers; but there are millions of
+indistinguishable Smiths."
+
+The fat salesman was chuckling again when he threw the cigar end away
+and glanced at his watch.
+
+"I don't blame you for parting your name in the middle," he said; "I'd
+have done it myself, maybe. But if you should ever happen to need an
+_alias_ you've got one ready-made. Just drop the 'Montague' and call
+yourself 'John' and the trick's turned. You might bear that in mind.
+It'll come in handy if the big ego ever happens to get hold of you."
+
+"The big what?"
+
+"The big ego; the German philosophers' 'Absolute Ego,' you know."
+
+Smith laughed. "I haven't the pleasure of the gentleman's acquaintance.
+I'm long on commercial arithmetic and the money market; long, again,
+Lawrenceville will tell you, on the new dancing steps and things of that
+sort. But I've never dabbled much in the highbrow stuff."
+
+"It's a change," said the salesman, willing to defend himself. "I read a
+little now and then, just to get away from the commercial grind. The ego
+theory is interesting. It is based on the idea that no man is altogether
+the man he thinks he is, or that others think he is; that association,
+environment, training, taste, inclination, and all those things have
+developed a personality which might have been altogether different if
+the constraining conditions had been different. Do you get that?"
+
+"Perfectly. If I'd been brought up some other way I might have been
+cutting meat in a butcher's shop instead of taking bank chances on more
+or less doubtful notes of hand. What's the next step?"
+
+"The German hair-splitters go a little farther and ring in what they
+call the 'Absolute Ego,' by which they mean the ego itself, unshackled
+by any of these conditions which unite in forming the ordinary
+personality. They say that if these conditions could be suddenly swept
+away or changed completely, a new man would emerge, a man no less
+unrecognizable, perhaps, to his friends than he would be to himself."
+
+"That's rather far-fetched, don't you think?" queried the
+practical-minded listener. "I can see how a man may be what he is
+chiefly because his inherited tastes and his surroundings and his
+opportunities have made him so. But after the metal has once been poured
+in the mould it's fixed, isn't it?"
+
+Debritt shook his head.
+
+"I'm only a wader in the edges of the pool, myself," he admitted. "I
+dabble a little for my own amusement. But, as I understand it, the
+theory presupposes a violent smashing of the mould and a remelting of
+the metal. Let me ask you something: when you were a boy did you mean
+to grow up and be a bank cashier?"
+
+Smith laughed. "I fully intended to be a pirate or a stage-robber, as I
+remember it."
+
+"There you are," drawled the travelling man. "The theory goes on to say
+that in childhood the veil is thin and the absolute ego shows through.
+I'm not swallowing the thing whole, you understand. But in my own
+experience I've seen a good man go hopelessly into the discard, and a
+bad one turn over a new leaf and pull up, all on account of some sudden
+earthquake in the conditions. Call it all moonshine, if you like, and
+let's come down to earth again. How about getting back to town? I'd be
+glad to stay here forever, but I'm afraid the house might object. When
+did you say Mr. Dunham would be home?"
+
+"We are looking for him to-morrow, though he may be a day or two late.
+But you needn't worry about your order, if that is what is troubling
+you. I happen to know that he intends giving the engraving of the new
+stock-certificates to your people."
+
+The New York salesman's smile had in it the experience-taught wisdom of
+all the ages.
+
+"Montague, my son, let me pay for my dinner with a saying that is as old
+as the hills, and as full of meat as the nuts that ripen on 'em: in
+this little old round world you have what you have when you have it.
+This evening we've enjoyed a nice little five-course dinner, well cooked
+and well served, in a pretty nifty little club, and in a few minutes
+we'll be chasing along to town in your private buzz-wagon, giving our
+dust to anybody who wants to take it. Do you get that?"
+
+"I do. But what's the answer?"
+
+"The answer is the other half of it. This time to-morrow we may both be
+asking for a hand-out, and inquiring, a bit hoarsely, perhaps, if the
+walking is good. That is just how thin the partitions are. You don't
+believe it, of course; couldn't even assume it as a working hypothesis.
+What could possibly happen to you or to me in the next twenty-four
+hours? Nothing, nothing on top of God's green earth that could pitch
+either or both of us over the edge, you'd say--or to Mr. Dunham to make
+him change his mind about the engraving job. Just the same, I'll drop
+along in the latter part of the week and get his name signed to the
+order for those stock-certificates. Let's go and crank up the little
+road-wagon. I mustn't miss that train."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Metastasis
+
+
+It was ten minutes of eight when J. Montague Smith, having picked up the
+salesman's sample cases at the town hotel, set Debritt down at the
+railroad station and bade him good-by. Five minutes later he had driven
+the runabout to its garage and was hastening across to his suite of
+bachelor apartments in the Kincaid Terrace. There was reason for the
+haste. Though he had been careful, from purely hospitable motives, to
+refrain from intimating the fact to Debritt, it was his regular evening
+for calling upon Miss Verda Richlander, and time pressed.
+
+The New York salesman, enlarging enthusiastically upon the provincial
+beatitudes, had chosen a fit subject for their illustration in the young
+cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. From his earliest
+recollections Montague Smith had lived the life of the well-behaved and
+the conventional. He had his niche in the Lawrenceville social
+structure, and another in the small-city business world, and he filled
+both to his own satisfaction and to the admiration of all and sundry.
+Ambitions, other than to take promotions in the bank as they came to
+him, and, eventually, to make money enough to satisfy the demands which
+Josiah Richlander might make upon a prospective son-in-law, had never
+troubled him. An extremely well-balanced young man his fellow townsmen
+called him, one of whom it might safely be predicted that he would go
+straightforwardly on his way to reputable middle life and old age;
+moderate in all things, impulsive in none.
+
+Even in the affair with Miss Richlander sound common sense and sober
+second thought had been made to stand in the room of supersentiment.
+Smith did not know what it was to be violently in love; though he was a
+charter member of the Lawrenceville Athletic Club and took a certain
+pride in keeping himself physically fit and up to the mark, it was not
+his habit to be violent in anything. Lawrenceville expected its young
+men and young women to marry and "settle down," and J. Montague Smith,
+figuring in a modest way as a leader in the Lawrenceville younger set,
+was far too conservative to break with the tradition, even if he had
+wished to. Miss Richlander was desirable in many respects. Her father's
+ample fortune had not come early enough or rapidly enough to spoil her.
+In moments when his feeling for her achieved its nearest approach to
+sentiment the conservative young man perceived what a graciously
+resplendent figure she would make as the mistress of her own house and
+the hostess at her own table.
+
+Arrived at his rooms in the Kincaid, Smith snapped the switch of the
+electrics and began to lay out his evening clothes, methodically and
+with a careful eye to the spotlessness of the shirt and the fresh
+immaculacy of the waistcoat. There were a number of little preliminaries
+to the change; he made the preparations swiftly but with a certain air
+of calm deliberation, inserting the buttons in the waistcoat, choosing
+hose of the proper thinness, rummaging a virgin tie out of its box in
+the top dressing-case drawer.
+
+It was in the search for the tie that he turned up a mute reminder of
+his nearest approach to any edge of the real chasm of sentiment: a small
+glove, somewhat soiled and use-worn, with a tiny rip in one of the
+fingers. It had been a full year since he had seen the glove or its
+owner, whom he had met only once, and that entirely by chance. The girl
+was a visitor from the West, the daughter of a ranchman, he had
+understood; and she had been stopping over with friends in a
+neighboring town. Smith had driven over one evening in his runabout to
+make a call upon the daughters of the house, and had found a lawn-party
+in progress, with the Western visitor as the guest of honor.
+
+Acquaintance--such an acquaintance as can be achieved in a short social
+hour--had followed, and the sight of the small glove reminded him
+forcibly of the sharp little antagonisms that the hour had developed. At
+all points the bewitching young woman from the barbaric wildernesses,
+whose dropped glove he had surreptitiously picked up and pocketed, had
+proved to be a mocking critic of the commonplace conventions, and had
+been moved to pillory the same in the person of her momentary
+entertainer. Smith had recalled his first tasting of a certain French
+liqueur with perfume in it, and the tingling sense of an awakening of
+some sort running through his veins as an after effect not altogether
+pleasant, but vivifying to a degree. Some similar thrillings this young
+person from the wide horizons had stirred in him--which was his only
+excuse for stealing her glove.
+
+Though he was far enough from recognizing it as such, the theft had been
+purely sentimental. A week later, when he would have courted a return of
+the thrills, he had learned that she had gone back to her native wilds.
+It was altogether for the best, he had told himself at the time, and at
+other times during the year which now intervened. Perfumed liqueurs are
+not for those whose tastes and habits are abstemious by choice; and
+there remained now nothing of the clashing encounter at the lawn-party
+save the soiled glove, a rather obscure memory of a face too piquant and
+attractive to be cheapened by the word "pretty"; these and a thing she
+had said at the moment of parting: "Yes; I am going back home very soon.
+I don't like your smug Middle-West civilization, Mr. Smith--it smothers
+me. I don't wonder that it breeds men who live and grow up and die
+without ever having a chance to find themselves."
+
+He was recalling that last little thrust and smiling reminiscently over
+it as he replaced the glove among its fellow keepsakes: handkerchief
+boxes, tie-holders, and what not, given him on birthdays and Christmases
+by the home-town girls who had known him from boyhood. Some day,
+perhaps, he would tell Verda Richlander of the sharp-tongued little
+Western beauty. Verda--and all sensible people--would smile at the idea
+that he, John Montague Smith, was of those who had not "found"
+themselves, or that the finding--by which he had understood the Western
+young woman to mean something radical and upsetting--could in any way be
+forced upon a man who was old enough and sane enough to know his own
+lengths and breadths and depths.
+
+He had closed the drawer and was stripping off his coat to dress when he
+saw that, in entering the room in the dark, he had overlooked two
+letters which had evidently been thrust under the door during his
+absence with Debritt. One of the envelopes was plain, with his name
+scribbled on it in pencil. The other bore a typewritten address with the
+card of the Westfall Foundries Company in its upper left-hand corner.
+Smith opened Carter Westfall's letter first and read it with a little
+twinge of shocked surprise, as one reads the story of a brave battle
+fought and lost.
+
+     "Dear Monty," it ran. "I have been trying to reach you by
+     'phone off and on ever since the adjournment of our
+     stockholders' meeting at three o'clock. We, of the little
+     inside pool, have got it where the chicken got the axe.
+     Richlander had more proxies up his sleeve than we thought he
+     had, and he has put the steam-roller over us to a finish. He
+     was able to vote fifty-five per cent of the stock straight, and
+     you know what that means: a consolidation with the Richlander
+     foundry trust, and the hearse and white horses for yours truly
+     and the minority stockholders. We're dead--dead and buried.
+
+     "Of course, I stand to lose everything, but that isn't all of
+     it. I'm horribly anxious for fear you'll be tangled up
+     personally in some way in the matter of that last loan of
+     $100,000 that I got from the Bank and Trust. You will remember
+     you made the loan while Dunham was away, and I am certain you
+     told me you had his consent to take my Foundries stock as
+     collateral. That part of it is all right, but, as matters
+     stand, the stock isn't worth the paper it is printed on,
+     and--well, to tell the bald truth, I'm scared of Dunham.
+     Brickley, the Chicago lawyer they have brought down here, tells
+     me that your bank is behind the consolidation deal, and if that
+     is so, there is going to be a bank loss to show up on my paper,
+     and Dunham will carefully cover his tracks for the sake of the
+     bank's standing.
+
+     "It is a hideous mess, and it has occurred to me that Dunham
+     can put you in bad, if he wants to. When you made that $100,000
+     loan, you forgot--and I forgot for the moment--that you own ten
+     shares of Westfall Foundries in your own name. If Dunham wants
+     to stand from under, this might be used against you. You must
+     get rid of that stock, Monty, and do it quick. Transfer the ten
+     shares to me, dating the transfer back to Saturday. I still
+     have the stock books in my hands, and I'll make the entry in
+     the record and date it to fit. This may look a little crooked,
+     on the surface, but it's your salvation, and we can't stop to
+     split hairs when we've just been shot full of holes.
+
+     "WESTFALL."
+
+Smith folded the letter mechanically and thrust it into his pocket.
+Carter Westfall was his good friend, and the cashier had tried,
+unofficially, to dissuade Westfall from borrowing after he had admitted
+that he was going to use the money in an attempt to buy up the control
+of his own company's stock. As Smith took up the second envelope he was
+not thinking of himself, or of the possible danger hinted at in
+Westfall's warning. The big bank loss was the chief thing to be
+considered--that and the hopeless ruin of a good fellow like Carter
+Westfall. He was thinking of both when he tore the second envelope
+across and took out the enclosed slip of scratch-paper. It was a note
+from the president and it was dated within the hour. Mr. Dunham had
+evidently anticipated his itinerary. At all events, he was back in
+Lawrenceville, and the note had been written at the bank. It was a curt
+summons; the cashier was wanted, at once.
+
+At the moment, Smith did not connect the summons with the Westfall
+cataclysm, or with any other untoward thing. Mr. Watrous Dunham had a
+habit of dropping in and out unexpectedly. Also, he had the habit of
+sending for his cashier or any other member of the banking force at
+whatever hour the notion seized him. Smith went to the telephone and
+called up the Richlander house. The promptness with which the
+multimillionaire's daughter came to the 'phone was an intimation that
+his ring was not entirely unexpected.
+
+"This is Montague," he said, when Miss Richlander's mellifluous "Main
+four six eight--Mr. Richlander's residence" came over the wire. Then:
+"What are you going to think of a man who calls you up merely to beg
+off?" he asked.
+
+Miss Richlander's reply was merciful and he was permitted to go on and
+explain. "I'm awfully sorry, but it can't very well be helped, you know.
+Mr. Dunham has returned, and he wants me at the bank. I'll be up a
+little later on, if I can break away, and you'll let me come.... Thank
+you, ever so much. Good-by."
+
+Having thus made his peace with Miss Richlander, Smith put on his street
+coat and hat and went to obey the president's summons. The Lawrenceville
+Bank and Trust, lately installed in its new marble-veneered quarters in
+the town's first--seven-storied--sky-scraper, was only four squares
+distant; two streets down and two across. As he was approaching the
+sky-scraper corner, Smith saw that there were only two lights in the
+bank, one in the vault corridor and another in the railed-off open space
+in front which held the president's desk and his own. Through the big
+plate-glass windows he could see Mr. Dunham. The president was
+apparently at work, his portly figure filling the padded swing-chair. He
+had one elbow on the desk, and the fingers of the uplifted hand were
+thrust into his thick mop of hair.
+
+Smith had his own keys and he let himself in quietly through the door on
+the side street. The night-watchman's chair stood in its accustomed
+place in the vault corridor, but it was empty. To a suspicious person
+the empty chair might have had its significance; but Montague Smith was
+not suspicious. The obvious conclusion was that Mr. Dunham had sent the
+watchman forth upon some errand; and the motive needed not to be tagged
+as ulterior.
+
+Without meaning to be particularly noiseless, Smith--rubber heels on
+tiled floor assisting--was unlatching the gate in the counter-railing
+before his superior officer heard him and looked up. There was an
+irritable note in the president's greeting.
+
+"Oh, it's you, at last, is it?" he rasped. "You have taken your own good
+time about coming. It's a half-hour and more since I sent that note to
+your room."
+
+Smith drew out the chair from the stenographer's table and sat down.
+Like the cashiers of many little-city banks, he was only a salaried man,
+and the president rarely allowed him to forget the fact. None the less,
+his boyish gray eyes were reflecting just a shade of the militant
+antagonism in Mr. Watrous Dunham's when he said: "I was dining at the
+Country Club with a friend, and I didn't go to my rooms until a few
+minutes ago."
+
+The president sat back in the big mahogany swing-chair. His face, with
+the cold, protrusive eyes, the heavy lips, and the dewlap lower jaw, was
+the face of a man who shoots to kill.
+
+"I suppose you've heard the news about Westfall?"
+
+Smith nodded.
+
+"Then you also know that the bank stands to lose a cold hundred thousand
+on that loan you made him?"
+
+The young man in the stenographer's chair knew now very well why the
+night-watchman had been sent away. He felt in his pocket for a cigar but
+failed to find one. It was an unconscious effort to gain time for some
+little readjustment of the conventional point of view. The president's
+attitude plainly implied accusation, and Smith saw the solid foundations
+of his small world--the only world he had ever known--crumbling to a
+threatened dissolution.
+
+"You may remember that I advised against the making of that loan when
+Westfall first spoke of it," he said, after he had mastered the
+premonitory chill of panic. "It was a bad risk--for him and for us."
+
+"I suppose you won't deny that the loan was made while I was away in New
+York," was the challenging rejoinder.
+
+"It was. But you gave your sanction before you went East."
+
+The president twirled his chair to face the objector and brought his
+palm down with a smack upon the desk-slide.
+
+"No!" he stormed. "What I told you to do was to look up his collateral;
+and you took a snap judgment and let him have the money! Westfall is
+your friend, and you are a stockholder in his bankrupt company. You took
+a chance for your own hand and put the bank in the hole. Now I'd like to
+ask what you are going to do about it."
+
+Smith looked up quickly. Somewhere inside of him the carefully erected
+walls of use and custom were tumbling in strange ruins and out of the
+debris another structure, formless as yet, but obstinately sturdy, was
+rising.
+
+"I am not going to do what you want me to do, Mr. Dunham--step in and be
+your convenient scapegoat," he said, wondering a little in his inner
+recesses how he was finding the sheer brutal man-courage to say such a
+thing to the president of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. "I suppose
+you have reasons of your own for wishing to shift the responsibility for
+this particular loss to my shoulders. But whether you have or haven't, I
+decline to accept it."
+
+The president tilted his chair and locked his hands over one knee.
+
+"It isn't a question of shifting the responsibility, Montague," he said,
+dropping the bullying weapon to take up another. "The loan was made in
+my absence. Perhaps you may say that I went away purposely to give you
+the chance of making it, but, if you do, nobody will believe you. When
+it comes down to the matter of authorization, it is simply your word
+against mine--and mine goes. Don't you see what you've done? As the
+matter stands now, you have let yourself in for a criminal indictment,
+if the bank directors choose to push it. You have taken the bank's money
+to bolster up a failing concern in which you are a stockholder. Go to
+any lawyer in Lawrenceville--the best one you can find--and he'll tell
+you exactly where you stand."
+
+While the big clock over the vault entrance was slowly ticking off a
+full half-minute the young man whose future had become so suddenly and
+so threateningly involved neither moved nor spoke, but his silence was
+no measure of the turmoil of conflicting emotions and passions that were
+rending him. When he looked up, the passions, passions which had
+hitherto been mere names to him, were still under control, but to his
+dismay his restraining hold upon them seemed to be growing momentarily
+less certain.
+
+"I may not prove quite the easy mark that your plan seems to prefigure,
+Mr. Dunham," he returned at length, trying to say it calmly. "But
+assuming that I am all that you have been counting upon, and that you
+will carry out your threat and take the matter into the courts, what is
+the alternative? Just what are you expecting me to do?"
+
+"Now you are talking more like a grown man," was the president's crusty
+admission. "You are in a pretty bad boat, Montague, and that is why I
+sent for you to-night. It didn't seem safe to waste any time if you were
+to be helped out. Of course, there will be a called meeting of the bank
+board to-morrow, and it will all come out. With the best will in the
+world to do you a good turn, I shan't be able to stand between you and
+trouble."
+
+"Well?" said the younger man, still holding the new and utterly
+incomprehensible passions in check.
+
+"You can see how it will be. If I can say to the directors that you have
+already resigned--and if you are not where they can too easily lay hands
+on you--they may not care to push the charge against you. There is a
+train west at ten o'clock. If I were in your place, I should pack a
+couple of suitcases and take it. That is the only safe thing for you to
+do. If you need any ready money----"
+
+It was at this point that J. Montague Smith rose up out of the
+stenographer's chair and buttoned his coat.
+
+"'If I need any ready money,'" he repeated slowly, advancing a step
+toward the president's desk. "That is where you gave yourself away, Mr.
+Dunham. You authorized that loan, and you meant to authorize it. More
+than that, you did it because you were willing to use the bank's money
+to put Carter Westfall in the hole so deep that he could never climb
+out. Now, it seems, you are willing to bribe the only dangerous witness.
+I don't need money badly enough to sell my good name for it. I shall
+stay right here in Lawrenceville and fight it out with you!"
+
+The president turned abruptly to his desk and his hand sought the row of
+electric bell-pushes. With a finger resting upon the one marked
+"police," he said: "There isn't any room for argument, Montague. You can
+have one more minute in which to change your mind. If you stay, you'll
+begin your fight from the inside of the county jail."
+
+Now, as we have seen, there had been nothing in John Montague Smith's
+well-ordered quarter century of boyhood, youth, and business manhood to
+tell him how to cope with the crude and savage emergency which he was
+confronting. But in the granted minute of respite something within him,
+a thing as primitive and elemental as the crisis with which it was
+called upon to grapple, shook itself awake. At the peremptory bidding of
+the newly aroused underman, he stepped quickly across the intervening
+space and stood under the shaded desk light within arm's reach of the
+man in the big swing-chair.
+
+"You have it all cut and dried, even to the setting of the police trap,
+haven't you?" he gritted, hardly recognizing his own voice. "You meant
+to hang me first and try your own case with the directors afterward. Mr.
+Dunham, I know you better than you think I do: you are not only a damned
+crook--you are a yellow-livered coward, as well! You don't dare to press
+that button!"
+
+While he was saying it, the president had half risen, and the hand which
+had been hovering over the bell-pushes shot suddenly under the piled
+papers in the corner of the desk. When it came out it was gripping the
+weapon which is never very far out of reach in a bank.
+
+Good judges on the working floor of the Lawrenceville Athletic Club had
+said of the well-muscled young bank cashier that he did not know his
+own strength. It was the sight of the pistol that maddened him and put
+the driving force behind the smashing blow that landed upon the big
+man's chest. Two inches higher or lower, the blow might have been merely
+breath-cutting. As it was, the lifted pistol dropped from Mr. Watrous
+Dunham's grasp and he wilted, settling back slowly, first into his
+chair, and then slipping from the chair to the floor.
+
+In a flash Smith knew what he had done. Once, one evening when he had
+been induced to put on the gloves with the Athletic Club's trainer, he
+had contrived to plant a body blow which had sent the wiry little
+Irishman to the mat, gasping and fighting for the breath of life. "If
+ever yez'll be givin' a man that heart-punch wid th' bare fisht, Misther
+Montygue, 'tis you f'r th' fasht thrain widout shtoppin' to buy anny
+ticket--it'll be murdher in th' first degree," the trainer had said,
+when he had breath to compass the saying.
+
+With the unheeded warning resurgent and clamoring in his ears, Smith
+knelt horror-stricken beside the fallen man. On the president's heavy
+face and in the staring eyes there was a foolish smile, as of one mildly
+astonished. Smith loosened the collar around the thick neck and laid his
+ear upon the spot where the blow had fallen. It was as the Irish
+trainer had told him it would be. The big man's heart had stopped like a
+smashed clock.
+
+[Illustration: In a flash Smith knew what he had done.]
+
+Smith got upon his feet, turned off the electric light, and, from mere
+force of habit, closed and snap-locked the president's desk. The
+watchman had not yet returned. Smith saw the empty chair beside the
+vault door as he passed it on his way to the street. Since the first
+impulse of the unwilling or unwitting homicide is usually sharply
+retributive, the cashier's only thought was to go at once to police
+headquarters and give himself up. Then he remembered how carefully the
+trap had been set, and how impossible it would be for him to make any
+reasonable defense. As it would appear, he had first taken the bank's
+money to help Westfall, and afterward, when exposure had threatened, he
+had killed the president. No one would ever believe that the blow had
+been struck in self-defense.
+
+It was at the hesitating instant that Debritt's curiously prophetic
+words came back to him with an emphasis that was fairly appalling:
+"To-morrow we may both be asking for a hand-out, and inquiring, a bit
+hoarsely, perhaps, if the walking is good. That is just how thin the
+partitions are." With one glance over his shoulder at the darkened
+front windows of the bank, Smith began to run, not toward the police
+station, but in the opposite direction--toward the railroad station.
+
+This was at nine o'clock or, perhaps, a few minutes later. Coincident
+with J. Montague Smith's dash down the poorly lighted cross street, a
+rather weak-faced young man of the sham black-sheep type of the smaller
+cities was lounging in the drawing-room of an ornate timber-and-stucco
+mansion on Maple Street hill and saying to his hostess: "Say--I thought
+this was Monty's night to climb the hill, Miss Verda. By Jove, I've got
+it in for Monty, don't y' know. He's comin' here a lot too regular to
+please me."
+
+"Mr. Smith always puts business before pleasure; haven't you found that
+out yet, Mr. Jibbey?" was the rather cryptic rejoinder of the Olympian
+beauty; and after that she talked, and made the imitation rounder talk,
+pointedly of other things.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The Hobo
+
+
+For J. Montague Smith, slipping from shadow to shadow down the scantily
+lighted cross street and listening momently for the footfalls of
+pursuit, a new hour had struck. Psychology to the contrary
+notwithstanding, the mental mutations are not always, or of necessity,
+gradual. In one flaming instant the ex-cashier had been projected across
+the boundary lying between the commonplace and the extraordinary; but
+for the time he was conscious only of a great confusion, shot through
+with a sense of his own present inability to cope with the
+strangenesses.
+
+In the projecting instant, time and the graspable realities had both
+been annihilated. Was it conceivable that this was the evening of the
+same day in which he had entertained Boswell Debritt at the Country
+Club? Was it remotely thinkable that, only an hour or such a matter
+earlier, he had been getting ready to call upon Verda Richlander?--that,
+at this very moment, his dress clothes were lying on the bed in his
+rooms, ready to be put on?
+
+It was all prodigiously incredible; in the collapse of the universe one
+scene alone stood out clearly cut and vivid: the railed space in the
+bank, with the shaded drop-light and the open desk, and a fleshy man
+stretched out upon the floor with his arms flung wide and a foolish
+smile of mild astonishment fixed, as for all eternity, about the
+loosened lips and in the staring eyes.
+
+Smith hurried on. The crowding sensations were terrifying, but they were
+also precious, in their way. Long-forgotten bits of brutality and
+tyranny on Watrous Dunham's part came up to be remembered and, in this
+retributive aftermath, to be triumphantly crossed off as items in an
+account finally settled. On the Smith side the bank cashier's forebears
+had been plodding farmers, but old John Montague had been the village
+blacksmith and a soldier--a shrewd smiter in both trades. Blood will
+tell. Parental implantings may have much to say to the fruit of the
+womb, but atavism has more. Smith's jaw came up with a snap and the
+metamorphosis took another forward step. He was no longer an
+indistinguishable unit in the ranks of the respectable and the
+well-behaved; he was a man fleeing for his life. What was done was
+done, and the next thing to do was to avert the consequences.
+
+At the railroad station a few early comers for the westbound
+passenger-train due at ten o'clock were already gathering, and at the
+bidding of a certain new and militant craftiness Smith avoided the
+lighted waiting-rooms as if they held the pestilence. Nor was it safe to
+pass beyond the building. The May night was fine, and there were
+strollers on the train platform. Smith took no risks. A string of box
+cars had been pushed up from the freight unloading platforms, and in the
+shadow of the cars he worked his way westward to the yard where a night
+switching crew was making up a train.
+
+Thus far he had struck out no plan. But the sudden shift from the normal
+to the extraordinary had not shorn him of the ability to think quickly
+and to the definite end. A placed road-engine, waiting for the
+conclusion of the car sorting, told him that the next train to leave the
+yard would be a westbound freight. He would have given much to know its
+exact leaving time, but he was far too clear-headed to give the pursuers
+a clew by asking questions.
+
+Keeping to the shadows, he walked back along the line of cars on the
+make-up track, alertly seeking his opportunity. If worst came to worst,
+he could select a car with four truss-rods and crawl in on top of the
+rods after the manner of the professional ride-stealers. But this was a
+last resort; the risk was large for his inexperience, and he was very
+well aware that there must be some sort of an apprenticeship, even to
+the "brake-beamer's" trade.
+
+Half-way down the length of the train he found what he was looking for:
+a box car with its side-door hasped but not locked. With a bit of stick
+to lengthen his reach, he unfastened the hasp, and at the switching
+crew's addition of another car to the "make-up" he took advantage of the
+noise made by the jangling crash and slid the door. Then he ascertained
+by groping into the dark interior that the car was empty. With a foot on
+the truss-rod he climbed in, and at the next coupling crash closed the
+door.
+
+So far, all was well. Unless the start should be too long delayed, or
+the trainmen should discover the unhasped door, he was measurably safe.
+Still cool and collected, he began to cast about for some means of
+replacing the outside fastening of the door from within. There was loose
+hay under-foot and it gave him his idea. Groping again, he found a piece
+of wire, a broken bale-tie. The box car was old and much of its inner
+sheathing had disappeared. With the help of his pocket-knife he enlarged
+a crack in the outer sheathing near the door, and a skilful bit of
+juggling with the bent wire sufficed to lift the hasp into place on the
+outside and hook it.
+
+Following this clever removal of one of the hazards, he squatted upon
+the floor near the door and waited. Though he was familiar with the
+schedules of the passenger-trains serving the home city, he knew nothing
+of the movements of the freights. Opening the face of his watch, he felt
+the hands. It was half-past nine, and the thrust and whistle of the
+air-brakes under the cars gave notice that the road engine had been
+coupled on. Still the train did not pull out.
+
+After a little he was able to account for the delay. Though his
+knowledge of railroad operating was limited, common sense told him that
+the freight would not be likely to leave, now, ahead of the ten o'clock
+passenger. That meant another half-hour of suspense to be paid for in
+such coin as one might be able to offer. The fugitive paid in keen
+agonies of apprehension. Surely, long before this the watchman would
+have returned to the bank, and the hue and cry being raised, the pursuit
+must now be afoot. In that case, the dullest policeman on the force
+would know enough to make straight for the railroad yard.
+
+Smith knelt at the crack of the car door and listened, while the minutes
+dragged slowly in procession. Once, through the crack, he had a glimpse
+of the smoky flare of a kerosene torch in the hands of a passing
+car-inspector; and once again, one of the trainmen walked back over the
+tops of the cars, making a creaky thundering overhead as he tramped from
+end to end of the "empty." But as yet there was no hue and cry, or, if
+there were, it had not reached the railroad yard.
+
+Keenly alive to every passing sound, Smith finally heard the
+passenger-train coming in from the east; heard the hoarse stridor of the
+engine's pop-valve at the station stop, and the distance-diminished
+rumblings of the baggage and express trucks over the wooden station
+platform. The stop was a short one, and in a few minutes the
+passenger-train came down through the yard, its pace measured by the
+sharp staccato blasts of the exhaust. It was the signal of release, and
+as the quickening staccato trailed away into silence, Smith braced
+himself for the slack-taking jerk of the starting freight.
+
+The jerk did not come. Minute by minute the interval lengthened, and at
+last the listener in the "empty" heard voices and saw through the crack
+of the door a faint nimbus of lantern light approaching from the rear of
+the train. The voices came nearer. By the dodging movements of the light
+rays, Smith knew instantly what was coming. His pursuers were out, and
+they were overhauling the waiting freight-train, searching it for a
+stowaway.
+
+He hardly dared breathe when the lantern-bearers reached his car. There
+were a number of them, just how many he could not determine. But
+McCloskey, the Lawrenceville chief of police, was one of the number.
+Also, there was an Irish yardman who was carrying one of the lanterns
+and swinging it under the cars to show that the truss-rods and
+brake-beams were empty.
+
+"'Tis not the likes of him that do be brake-beamin' their way out of
+town, Chief," the Irishman was saying. "'Tis more likely he's tuk an
+autymobile and the middle of the big road."
+
+"There's no automobile missing, and his own car is still in the garage,"
+Smith heard the police chief say. And then: "Hold your lantern up here,
+Timmy, till we see if this car door is fastened shut."
+
+It was a measure of the distance that the bank clerk and small-city
+social leader had already travelled on the road toward a complete
+metamorphosis that the only answer to this threat of discovery was a
+tightening of the muscles, a certain steeling of thews and sinews for
+the wild-beast spring if the door should be opened. One thought
+dominated all others: if they took him they should not take him alive.
+
+Happily or unhappily, as one may wish to view it, the danger passed.
+"The door's fastened, all right," said one of the searchers, and the
+menace went on, leaving Smith breathing hard and chuckling grimly to
+himself over the cunning forethought which had prompted him to grope for
+the bit of wire bale-tie.
+
+Past this there was another interval of waiting--a brief one, this time.
+Then the long freight began to move out over the switches. When he could
+no longer see the sheen of the city electrics in the strip of sky
+visible through his door crack, Smith gathered up the leavings of hay on
+the car floor and stretched himself out flat on his back. And it was
+another measure of the complete triumph of the elemental underman over
+the bank clerk that he immediately fell asleep and did not awaken until
+a jangling of draw-bars and a ray of sunlight sifting through the crack
+of the door told him that the train had arrived at some destination, and
+that it was morning.
+
+Sitting up to rub his eyes and look at his watch, the fugitive made a
+hasty calculation. If the train had been in motion all night, this early
+morning stopping-place should be Indianapolis. Getting upon his feet, he
+applied an investigative eye to the crack. The train, or at least his
+portion of it, was side-tracked in a big yard with many others. Working
+the pick-lock wire again, he unhasped the door and opened it. There was
+no one in sight in this particular alley of the crowded yard, and he
+dropped to the ground and slid the door back into place.
+
+Making a note of the initials and number, so that he might find the car
+again, he crawled under three or four standing trains and made his way
+to a track-side lunch-counter. The thick ham sandwich and the cup of
+muddy coffee eaten and drunk with the appetite of a starved vagrant set
+up another mile-stone in the distances traversed. Was it, indeed, only
+on the morning of yesterday that he had sent his toast back because,
+forsooth, the maid at Mrs. Gilman's select boarding-house for single
+gentlemen had scorched it a trifle? It seemed as incredible as a
+fairytale.
+
+Beyond the quenching of his hunger and the stuffing of his pockets with
+two more of the sad sandwiches, he went back to his box car, knowing
+that, in the nature of things, his flight was as yet only fairly begun.
+His train, or some train in which his car was a unit, was just pulling
+out, and he was barely in time to slide the door and scramble in. Once
+inside, he made haste to close the opening before the train should
+emerge from the shelter of its mate on the next track. But before he
+could brace himself for the shove, a hand came down from the car roof, a
+brakeman's coupling-stick was thrust into the riding-rail of the door,
+and the closing operation was effectively blocked.
+
+Smith stood back and waited for a head to follow the hand. It came
+presently; the bare, tousled head of a young brakeman who had taken off
+his cap and was lying on his stomach on the car roof to look under the
+eaves into the interior. Smith made a quick spring and caught the
+hanging head in the crook of his elbow. "You're gone," he remarked to
+the inverted face crushed in the vise of forearm and biceps. "If you
+turn loose, you'll break your back as you come over, and if you don't
+turn loose, I can pull your head off."
+
+"Leggo of me!" gasped the poor prisoner, drumming with his toes on the
+roof. "Wha--whadda you want with my head? You can't do nothin' with it
+when you get it!"
+
+"I have got it," said Smith, showing his teeth. "By and by, when we get
+safely out of town, I'm going to jump up and bite you."
+
+The brakeman tried to cry out that he was slipping; that the fall would
+kill him. Smith felt him coming and shifted his hold just in time to
+make the fall an assisted somersault, landing the man clumsily, but
+safely, inside of the car. The trigging stick had been lost in the
+scuffle, and Smith's first care was to slide the door.
+
+"Say; what kind of a 'bo are you, anyway?" gasped the railroad man,
+flattening himself against the side of the car and struggling to regain
+his suddenly lost prestige; the time-honored authority of the trainman
+over the ride-stealer. "Don't you know you might 'a' killed me, pullin'
+me off'm the roof that way?"
+
+"I can do it yet, if you feel that you've missed anything that was
+rightfully coming to you," Smith laughed. Then: "Do you happen to have a
+pipe and a bit of tobacco in your clothes?"
+
+"My gosh!" said the brakeman, "I like your nerve!" Nevertheless, he
+rummaged in his pocket and handed over a corn-cob pipe and a sack of
+tobacco. "Maybe you'll want a match, too."
+
+"No, thanks; I have one."
+
+Smith filled the pipe, lighted it, and returned the tobacco. The nickel
+mixture was not quite like the Turkish blend in the humidor jar on the
+Kincaid Terrace mantel, but it sufficed. At the pipe-puffing the
+brakeman looked him over curiously.
+
+"Say; you're no Weary Willie," he commented gruffly; "you're wearin' too
+good clothes. What's your lay?"
+
+More and more Smith could feel the shacklings of the reputable
+yesterdays slipping from him. Civilization has taken its time ambling
+down the centuries, but the short cuts to the primitive are neither hard
+to find nor long to traverse.
+
+"My 'lay' just now is to get a free ride on this railroad," he said.
+"How far is this 'empty' going?"
+
+"To St. Louis," was the reply, extorted by the very matter-of-fact
+calmness of the question. "But you're not goin' to St. Louis in it--not
+by a jugful. You're goin' to hop off at the first stop we make."
+
+"Am I? Wait until I have finished my smoke. Then we'll open the door and
+scrap for it; the best man to stay in the car, and the other to take a
+chance turning handsprings along the right of way. Does that appeal to
+you?"
+
+"No, by jacks! You bet your life it don't!"
+
+"All right; what's the other answer?"
+
+If the brakeman knew any other answer he did not suggest it. A few miles
+farther along, the train slowed for a stop. The brakeman felt his
+twisted neck tenderly and said: "If you'll tell me that you ain't
+runnin' away from some sheriff 'r other...."
+
+"Do I look it?"
+
+"I'm dogged if I know what you do look like--champeen middle-weight,
+maybe. Lemme open that door."
+
+Smith took a final whiff and returned the pipe. "Suppose I say that I'm
+broke and haven't had a chance to pawn my watch," he suggested. "How
+does that strike you?"
+
+The trainman slid the door open a foot or so as the train ground and
+jangled to a stand at the grade crossing with another railroad.
+
+"I'll think about it," he growled. "You pulled me off'm the roof; but
+you kep' me from breakin' my back, and you've smoked my pipe. My run
+ends at Terre Haute."
+
+"Thanks," said Smith; and at that the tousle-headed young fellow dropped
+off and disappeared in the direction of the caboose.
+
+Smith closed the door and hooked it with his wire, and the train jogged
+on over the crossing. Hour after hour wore away and nothing happened. By
+the measured click of the rail joints under the wheels it was evident
+that the freight was a slow one, and there were many halts and
+side-trackings. At noon Smith ate one of the pocketed sandwiches. The
+ham was oversalted, and before long he began to be consumed with thirst.
+He stood it until it became a keen torture, and then he found the bit of
+wire again and tried to pick the hasp-lock, meaning to take advantage of
+the next stop for a thirst-quenching dash.
+
+For some reason the wire refused to work, and he could not make it free
+the hasp. After many futile attempts he whittled another peep-hole,
+angling it so that it pointed toward the puzzling door hook. Then he saw
+what had been done. Some one--the somersaulting brakeman, no doubt--had
+basely inserted a wooden peg in the staple in place of the hook and the
+empty box car was now a prison-van.
+
+Confronting the water famine, Smith drew again upon the elemental
+resources and braced himself to endure. When night came the slow train
+was still jogging along westward somewhere in Illinois, and the box-car
+prisoner was so thirsty that he did not dare to eat the meat in the
+remaining sandwich; could eat the bread only in tiny morsels, chewed
+long and patiently. Still he would not make the outcry that the tricky
+brakeman had doubtless counted upon; the noise that would bring help at
+any one of the numerous stops--and purchase relief at the price of an
+arrest for ride-stealing.
+
+Grimly resolute, Smith made up his mind to hang on until morning. Every
+added mile was a mile gained in the flight from the gallows or the
+penitentiary, and the night's run would put him just that much farther
+beyond the zone of acute danger. Such determination fights and wins its
+own battle, and though he dreamed of lakes and rivers and cool-running
+brooks and plashing fountains the greater part of the night, he slept
+through it and awoke to find his car side-tracked in a St. Louis yard.
+
+One glance through the whittled peep-hole showed him that the
+imprisoning peg was still in its staple, so now there was no alternative
+but the noise. A brawny switchman was passing, and he came and unhasped
+the door in response to Smith's shower of kicks upon it.
+
+"Come down out o' that, ye scut! 'Tis the stone pile f'r the likes of
+yez in this State, and it's Michael Toomey that'll be runnin' ye in,"
+remarked the brawny person, when the door had been opened.
+
+"Wait," said Smith hoarsely. He had caught sight of a bucket of water
+with a dipper in it standing by the door of the switch shanty, and he
+jumped down and ran for it. With the terrible thirst assuaged, he
+wheeled and went back to the big switchman. "Now I'm ready to be run
+in," he said. "But first, you know, you've got to prove that you're the
+better man," and with that he whipped off his coat and squared himself
+for the battle.
+
+It was joined at once, the big man being Irish and nothing loath. Also,
+it was short and sweet. Barring a healthy and as yet unsatisfied
+appetite, Smith was in the pink of condition, and the little trainer in
+the Lawrenceville Athletic Club had imparted the needful skill. In three
+swift rounds the big switchman was thrashed into a proper state of
+submission and hospitality, and again, being Irish, he bore no grudge.
+
+"You're a pugnayshus young traithor, and I'm fair sick for to be doin'
+ye a fayvor," spluttered the big man, after the third knock-out. "What
+is ut ye'll be wantin'?"
+
+Smith promptly named three things; breakfast directions, a morning
+paper, and a railroad man's advice as to the best means of getting
+forward on his journey. His new ally put him in the way of compassing
+all three, and when the westward faring was resumed--this time in the
+hollow interior of a huge steel smoke-stack loaded in sections on a pair
+of flat cars--he went eagerly through the newspaper. The thing he was
+looking for was there, under flaring headlines; a day late, to be sure,
+but that was doubtless owing to Lawrenceville's rather poor wire
+service.
+
+                ATTEMPTED MURDER OF BANK PRESIDENT
+
+     Society-Leader Cashier Embezzles $100,000 and Makes Murderous
+     Assault on President
+
+     LAWRENCEVILLE, May 15.--J. Montague Smith, cashier of the
+     Lawrenceville Bank and Trust Company, and a leader in the
+     Lawrenceville younger set, is to-day a fugitive from justice
+     with a price on his head. At a late hour last night the
+     watchman of the bank found President Dunham lying unconscious
+     in front of his desk. Help was summoned, and Mr. Dunham, who
+     was supposed to be suffering from some sudden attack of
+     illness, was taken to his hotel. Later, it transpired that the
+     president had been the victim of a murderous assault.
+     Discovering upon his return to the city yesterday evening that
+     the cashier had been using the bank's funds in an attempt to
+     cover a stock speculation of his own, Dunham sent for Smith and
+     charged him with the crime. Smith made an unprovoked and
+     desperate assault upon his superior officer, beating him into
+     insensibility and leaving him for dead. Since it is known that
+     he did not board any of the night trains east or west, Smith is
+     supposed to be in hiding somewhere in the vicinity of the city.
+     A warrant is out, and a reward of $1,000 for his arrest and
+     detention has been offered by the bank. It is not thought
+     possible that he can escape. It was currently reported not long
+     since that Smith was engaged to a prominent young society woman
+     of Lawrenceville, but this has proved to be untrue.
+
+Smith read the garbled news story with mingled thankfulness and rage;
+thankfulness because it told him that he was not a murderer, and rage,
+no less at Dunham's malignant ingenuity than at his own folly in setting
+the seal of finality upon the false accusation by running away. But the
+thing was done, and it could not be undone. Having put himself on the
+wrong side of the law, there was nothing for it now but a complete
+disappearance; exile, a change of identity, and an absolute severance
+with his past.
+
+While he was folding the St. Louis newspaper and putting it into his
+pocket, he was wondering, half cynically, what Verda Richlander was
+thinking of him. Was it she, herself, who had told the newspaper people
+that there was nothing in the story of the engagement? That she would
+side with his accusers and the apparent, or at least uncontradicted,
+facts he could hardly doubt. There was no very strong reason why she
+should not, he told himself, rather bitterly. He had not tried to bind
+her to him in any shackling of sentiment. Quite the contrary, they had
+both agreed to accept the modern view that sentiment should be regarded
+as a mildly irruptive malady which runs, or should run, its course, like
+measles or chicken-pox, in early adolescence. That being the case, Miss
+Verda's leaf--like all other leaves in the book of his past--might be
+firmly pasted down and forgotten. As an outlaw with a price on his head
+he had other and vastly more important things to think about.
+
+Twenty-four hours beyond this final decision he reached Kansas City,
+where there was a delay and some little diplomacy to be brought into
+play before he could convince a freight crew on the Union Pacific that
+he had to be carried, free of cost, to Denver. In the Colorado capital
+there was another halt and more trouble; but on the second day he found
+another empty box car and was once more moving westward, this time
+toward a definite destination.
+
+During the Denver stop-over he had formulated his plan, such as it was.
+In a newspaper which he had picked up, he had lighted upon an
+advertisement calling for laborers to go over into the Timanyoni country
+to work on an irrigation project. By applying at the proper place he
+might have procured free transportation to the work, but there were two
+reasons why he did not apply. One was prudently cautionary and was based
+on the fear that he might be recognized. The other was less easily
+defined, but no less mandatory in the new scheme of things. The
+vagabonding had gotten into his blood, and he was minded to go on as he
+had begun, beating his way to the job like other members of the vagrant
+brotherhood.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The High Hills
+
+
+Train Number Seventeen, the Nevada through freight, was two hours late
+issuing from the western portal of Timanyoni Canyon. Through the early
+mountain-climbing hours of the night and the later flight across the Red
+Desert, the dusty, travel-grimed young fellow in the empty box car
+midway of the train had slept soundly, with the hard car floor for a bed
+and his folded coat for a pillow. But on the emergence of the train from
+the echoing canyon depths the sudden cessation of the crash and roar of
+the shut-in mountain passage awoke him and he got up to open the door
+and look out.
+
+It was still no later than a lazy man's breakfast time, and the May
+morning was perfect, with a cobalt sky above and a fine tingling quality
+in the air to set the blood dancing in the veins. Over the top of the
+eastern range the sun was looking, level-rayed, into a parked valley
+bounded on all sides by high spurs and distant snow peaks. In its nearer
+reaches the valley was dotted with round hills, some of them bare,
+others dark green to their summits with forestings of mountain pine and
+fir. Now that it was out of the canyon, the train was skirting the foot
+of the southern boundary spur, the railroad track holding its level by
+heading the gulches and rounding the alternating promontories.
+
+From the outer loopings of the curves, the young tramp at the car door
+had momentary glimpses of the Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its
+canyon, and the swiftest of upland rivers even here where it had the
+valley in which to expand. A Copah switchman had told him that the
+railroad division town of Brewster lay at the end of the night's run, in
+a river valley beyond the eastern Timanyonis, and that the situation of
+the irrigation project which was advertising for laborers in the Denver
+newspapers was a few miles up the river from Brewster.
+
+For reasons of his own, he was not anxious to make a daylight entry into
+the town itself. Sooner or later, of course, the scrutiny of curious
+eyes must be met, but there was no need of running to meet the risk. Not
+that the risk was very great. While he was killing time in the Copah
+yard the day before, waiting for a chance to board the night freight, he
+had picked up a bit of broken looking-glass and put it in his pocket.
+The picture it gave back when he took it out and looked into it was that
+of a husky young tramp with a stubble beard a week old, and on face and
+neck and hands the accumulated grime of two thousand miles of
+freight-train riding. Also, the week's wear and tear had been, if
+anything, harder on the clothes than on the man. His hat had been lost
+in one of the railroad-yard train-boardings and he had replaced it in
+Denver with a workman's cap. It was a part of the transformation,
+wrought and being wrought in him, that he was able to pocket the bit of
+looking-glass with a slow grin of satisfaction. When one is about to
+apply for a job as a laboring man it is well to look the part.
+
+As the train swept along on its way down the grades the valley became
+more open and the prospect broadened. At one of the promontory roundings
+the box-car passenger had a glimpse of a shack-built construction camp
+on the river's margin some distance on ahead. A concrete dam was rising
+in sections out of the river, and dominating the dam and the shacks two
+steel towers, with a carrying cable stretched between them, formed the
+piers of the aerial spout conveyer for the placing of the material in
+the forms.
+
+A mile or more short of the construction camp the railroad made another
+of the many gulch loopings; and on its next emergence the train had
+passed the site of the dam, leaving it fully a mile in the rear. Here
+the young man at the car door saw the ditch company's unloading
+side-track with a spur branching away from the main line and crossing
+the river on a temporary trestle. There were material yards on both
+sides of the stream, and in one of the opposing hills a busy quarry.
+
+The train made no stop at the construction siding, but a half-mile
+farther along the brakes began to grind and the speed was slackened.
+Sliding the car door another foot or two, the young tramp with the
+week-old stubble beard on his face leaned out to look ahead. His
+opportunity was at hand. A block semaphore was turned against the
+freight and the train was slowing in obedience to the signal. Waiting
+until the brakes shrilled again, the tramp put his shoulder to the
+sliding door, sat for a moment in the wider opening, and then swung off.
+
+After the train had gone on he drew himself up, took a deep
+chest-filling breath of the crisp morning air, and looked about him. The
+sun was an hour high over the eastern mountains, and the new world
+spread itself in broad detail. His alighting was upon one of the
+promontory embankments. To the westward, where the curving railroad
+track was lost in the farther windings of the river, lay the little
+intermountain city of Brewster, a few of its higher buildings showing
+clear-cut in the distance. Paralleling the railroad, on a lower level
+and nearer the river, a dusty wagon road pointed in one direction toward
+the town, and in the other toward the construction camp.
+
+The young man who had crossed four States and the better part of a fifth
+as a fugitive and vagrant turned his back upon the distant town as a
+place to be avoided. Scrambling down the railroad embankment, he made
+his way to the wagon road, crossed it, and kept on until he came to the
+fringe of aspens on the river's edge, where he broke all the trampish
+traditions by stripping off the travel-worn clothes and plunging in to
+take a soapless bath. The water, being melted snow from the range, was
+icy-cold and it stabbed like knives. Nevertheless, it was wet, and some
+part of the travel dust, at least, was soluble in it. He came out
+glowing, but a thorn from his well-groomed past came up and pricked him
+when he had to put the soiled clothes on again. There was no present
+help for that, however; and five minutes later he had regained the road
+and was on his way to the ditch camp.
+
+When he had gone a little distance he found that the wagon road dodged
+the railroad track as it could, crossing and recrossing the right of way
+twice before the construction camp came into view. The last of the
+crossings was at the temporary material yard for which the side-track
+had been installed, and from this point on, the wagon road held to the
+river bank. The ditch people were doubtless getting all their material
+over the railroad so there would be little hauling by wagon. But there
+were automobile tracks in the dust, and shortly after he had passed the
+material yard the tramp heard a car coming up behind him. It was a
+six-cylinder roadster, and its motor was missing badly.
+
+He gave the automobile passing room when it came along, glancing up to
+note that its single occupant was a big, bearded man, wearing his gray
+tweeds as one to whom clothes were merely a convenience. He was chewing
+a black cigar, and the unoccupied side of his mouth was busy at the
+passing moment heaping objurgations upon the limping motor. A hundred
+yards farther along the motor gave a spasmodic gasp and stopped. When
+the young tramp came up, the big man had climbed out and had the hood
+open. What he was saying to the stalled motor was picturesque enough to
+make the young man stop and grin appreciatively.
+
+"Gone bad on you?" he inquired.
+
+Colonel Dexter Baldwin, the Timanyoni's largest landowner, and a breeder
+of fine horses who tolerated motor-cars only because they could be
+driven hard and were insensate and fit subjects for abusive language,
+took his head out of the hood.
+
+"The third time this morning," he snapped. "I'd rather drive a team of
+wind-broken mustangs, any day in the year!"
+
+"I used to drive a car a while back," said the tramp. "Let me look her
+over."
+
+The colonel stood aside, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, while the
+young man sought for the trouble. It was found presently in a loosened
+magneto wire; found and cleverly corrected. The tramp went around in
+front and spun the motor, and when it had been throttled down, Colonel
+Baldwin had his hand in his pocket.
+
+"That's something like," he said. "The garage man said it was carbon.
+You take hold as if you knew how. What's your fee?"
+
+The tramp shook his head and smiled good-naturedly.
+
+"Nothing; for a bit of neighborly help like that."
+
+The colonel put his coat on, and in the act took a better measure of the
+stalwart young fellow who looked like a hobo and talked and behaved like
+a gentleman. Colonel Dexter was a fairly shrewd judge of men, and he
+knew that the tramping brotherhood divides itself pretty evenly on a
+distinct line of cleavage, with the born vagrant on one side and the man
+out of work on the other.
+
+"You are hiking out to the dam?" he asked brusquely.
+
+"I am headed that way, yes," was the equally crisp rejoinder.
+
+"Hunting a job?"
+
+"Just that."
+
+"What sort of a job?"
+
+"Anything that may happen to be in sight."
+
+"That usually means a pick and shovel or a wheelbarrow on a construction
+job. We're needing quarrymen and concrete handlers, and we could use a
+few more rough carpenters on the forms. But there isn't much office
+work."
+
+The tramp looked up quickly.
+
+"What makes you think I'm hunting for an office job?" he queried.
+
+"Your hands," said the colonel shortly.
+
+The young man looked at his hands thoughtfully. They were dirty again
+from the tinkering with the motor, but the inspection went deeper than
+the grime.
+
+"I'm not afraid of the pick and shovel, or the wheelbarrow, and on some
+accounts I guess they'd be good for me. But on the other hand, perhaps
+it _is_ a pity to spoil a middling good office man to make an
+indifferent day-laborer--to say nothing of knocking some honest fellow
+out of the only job he knows how to do."
+
+Colonel Baldwin swung in behind the steering-wheel of the roadster and
+held a fresh match to the black cigar. Though he was from Missouri, he
+had lived long enough in the high hills to know better than to judge any
+man altogether by outward appearances.
+
+"Climb in," he said, indicating the vacant seat at his side. "I'm the
+president of the ditch company. Perhaps Williams may be able to use you;
+but your chances for office work would be ten to one in the town."
+
+"I don't care to live in the town," said the man out of work, mounting
+to the proffered seat; and past that the big roadster leaped away up
+the road and the roar of the rejuvenated motor made further speech
+impossible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a full fortnight or more after this motor-tinkering incident on
+the hill road to the dam, when Williams, chief engineer of the ditch
+project, met President Baldwin in the Brewster offices of the ditch
+company and spent a busy hour with the colonel going over the
+contractors' estimates for the month in prospect. In an interval of the
+business talk, Baldwin remembered the good-looking young tramp who had
+wanted a job.
+
+"Oh, yes; I knew there was something else that I wanted to ask you," he
+said. "How about the young fellow that I unloaded on you a couple of
+weeks ago? Did he make good?"
+
+"Who--Smith?"
+
+"Yes; if that's his name."
+
+The engineer's left eyelid had a quizzical droop when he said dryly:
+"It's the name he goes by in camp; 'John Smith.' I haven't asked him his
+other name."
+
+The ranchman president matched the drooping eyelid of unbelief with a
+sober smile. "I thought he looked as if he might be out here for his
+health--like a good many other fellows who have no particular use for a
+doctor. How is he making it?"
+
+The engineer, a hard-bitten man with the prognathous lower jaw
+characterizing the tribe of those who accomplish things, thrust his
+hands into his pockets and walked to the window to look down into the
+Brewster street. When he turned to face Baldwin again, it was to say:
+"That young fellow is a wonder, Colonel. I put him into the quarry at
+first, as you suggested, and in three days he had revolutionized things
+to the tune of a twenty-per-cent saving in production costs. Then I gave
+him a hack at the concrete-mixers, and he's making good again in the
+cost reduction. That seems to be his specialty."
+
+The president nodded and was sufficiently interested to follow up what
+had been merely a casual inquiry.
+
+"What are you calling him now?--a betterment engineer? You know your
+first guess was that he was somebody's bookkeeper out of a job."
+
+Williams wagged his head.
+
+"He's a three-cornered puzzle to me, yet. He isn't an engineer, but when
+you drag a bunch of cost money up the trail, he goes after it like a dog
+after a rabbit. I'm not anxious to lose him, but I really believe you
+could make better use of him here in the town office than I can on the
+job."
+
+Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
+
+"I'm afraid he'd have to loosen up on his record a little before we
+could bring him in here. Badly as we're needing a money man, we can
+hardly afford to put a 'John Smith' into the saddle--at least not
+without knowing what his other name used to be."
+
+"No; of course not. I guess, after all, he's only a 'lame duck,' like a
+good many of the rest of them. Day before yesterday, Burdell, the deputy
+sheriff, was out at the camp looking the gangs over for the fellow who
+broke into Lannigan's place last Saturday night. When he came into the
+office Smith was busy with an estimate, and Burdell went up and touched
+him on the shoulder, just to let him know that it was time to wake up.
+Suffering cats! It took three of us to keep him from breaking Burdell in
+two and throwing him out of the window!"
+
+"That looks rather bad," was the president's comment. Colonel Dexter
+Baldwin had been the first regularly elected sheriff of Timanyoni County
+in the early days and he knew the symptoms. "Was Burdell wearing his
+star where it could be seen?"
+
+The engineer nodded.
+
+"What explanation did Smith make?"
+
+"Oh, he apologized like a gentleman, and said he was subject to little
+nervous attacks like that when anybody touched him unexpectedly. He took
+Burdell over to Pete Simm's shack saloon and bought him a drink.
+Perkins, the timekeeper, says he's going to get a megaphone so he can
+give due notice in advance when he wants to call Smith's attention."
+
+The colonel pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of diplomatic
+cigars and passed it to the engineer, saying: "Light up a sure-enough
+good one, and tell me what you think Smith has been doing back yonder in
+the other country."
+
+Williams took the cigar but he shied at the conundrum.
+
+"Ask me something easy," he said. "I've stacked up a few guesses. He's
+from the Middle West--as the Bible says, his 'speech bewrayeth' him--and
+he's had a good job of some kind; the kind that required him to keep
+abreast of things. If there's anything in looks, you'd say he wasn't a
+thief or an embezzler, and yet it's pretty apparent that he's been used
+to handling money in chunks and making it work for its living. I've put
+it up that there's a woman in it. Perhaps the other fellow got in his
+way, or came up behind him and touched him unexpectedly, or something of
+that sort. Anyway, I'm not going to believe he's a crooked crook until I
+have to."
+
+Colonel Baldwin helped himself to one of his own cigars, and the talk
+went back to business. In the irrigation project, Williams was a
+stockholder as well as the chief of construction, and Baldwin had more
+than once found him a safe adviser. There was need for counsel. The
+Timanyoni Ditch Company was in a rather hazardous condition financially,
+and the president and Williams rarely met without coming sooner or later
+to a threshing out of the situation.
+
+The difficulties were those which are apt to confront a small and local
+enterprise when it is so unfortunate as to get in the way of larger
+undertakings. Colonel Baldwin, and a group of his neighbors on the north
+side of the river, were reformed cattlemen and horse breeders. Instead
+of drifting farther west in advance of the incoming tide of population
+following the coming of the railroad, they had availed themselves of
+their homestead rights and had taken up much of the grass-land in the
+favorable valleys, irrigating it at first with water taken out of the
+river in private or neighborhood ditches.
+
+Later on came the sheep-feeding period, and after that the utilization
+of larger crop-raising areas. The small ditches proving inadequate for
+these, Colonel Baldwin had formed a stock company among his neighbors in
+the grass-lands and his friends in Brewster for the building of a
+substantial dam in the eastern hills. The project had seemed simple
+enough in the beginning. The stock was sold for cash and each
+stockholder would be a participating user of the water. Williams, who
+had been a United States reclamation man before he came to the
+Timanyoni, had made careful estimates, and the stock subscription
+provided money enough to cover the cost of the dam and the main ditch.
+
+After some little bargaining, the dam site and the overflow land for the
+reservoir lake had been secured, and the work was begun. Out of a clear
+sky, however, came trouble and harassment. Alien holders of mining
+claims in the reservoir area turned up and demanded damages. Some few
+homesteaders who had promised to sign quitclaims changed their minds and
+sued for relief, and after the work was well under way it appeared that
+there was a cloud on the title of the dam site itself. All of these
+clashings were carried into court, and the rancher promoters found
+themselves confronting invisible enemies and obstacle-raisers at every
+turn.
+
+The legal fight, as they soon found out, cost much money in every phase
+of it; and now, when the dam was scarcely more than half completed, a
+practically empty treasury was staring them in the face. This was the
+situation which called for its regular threshing out in every conference
+between Colonel Baldwin and his chief of construction. There was no
+disguising the fact that a crisis was approaching, a financial crisis
+which no one among the amateur promoters was big enough to cope with.
+
+"We've got to go in deeper, Colonel; there is nothing else to do," was
+the engineer's summing up of the matter at the close of the conference.
+"The snow is melting pretty rapidly on the range now, and when we get
+the June rise we'll stand to lose everything we have if we can't keep
+every wheel turning to get ready for the high water."
+
+Baldwin was holding his cigar between his fingers and scowling at it as
+if it had mortally offended him.
+
+"Assessments on the stock, you mean?" he said. "I'm afraid our crowd
+won't stand for that. A good part of it is ready to lie down in the
+harness right now."
+
+"How about a bond issue?" asked the engineer.
+
+"Lord of heavens! What do we, or any of us, know about bond issues? Why,
+we knew barely enough about the business at the start to chip in
+together and buy us a charter and go to work on a plan a little bit
+bigger than the neighborhood ditch idea. You couldn't float bonds in
+Timanyoni Park, and we're none of us foxy enough to go East and float
+'em."
+
+"I guess that's right, too," admitted Williams. "Besides, with the stock
+gone off the way it has, it would take a mighty fine-haired financial
+sharp to sell bonds."
+
+"What's that?" demanded the president. "Who's been selling any stock?"
+
+"Buck Gardner, for one; and that man Bolling, up at the head of Little
+Creek, for another. Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, told me about
+it, and he says that the price offered, and accepted, was thirty-nine."
+
+"Dad burn a cuss with a yellow streak in him!" rasped the Missouri
+colonel. "We had a fair and square agreement among ourselves that if
+anybody got scared he was to give the rest of us a chance to buy him
+out. Who bought from these welshers?"
+
+"Maxwell didn't know that. He said it was done through Kinzie's bank.
+From what I've heard on the outside, I'm inclined to suspect that
+Crawford Stanton was the buyer."
+
+"Stanton, the real-estate man?"
+
+"The same."
+
+Again the president stared thoughtfully at the glowing end of his cigar.
+
+"There's another of the confounded mysteries," he growled. "Who is
+Crawford Stanton, and what is he here for? I know what he advertises,
+but everybody in Brewster knows that he hasn't made a living dollar in
+real estate since he came here last winter. Williams, do you know, I'm
+beginning to suspect that there is a mighty big nigger in our little
+wood-pile?"
+
+"You mean that all these stubborn hold-ups have been bought and paid
+for? You'll remember that is what Billy Starbuck tried to tell us when
+the first of the missing mining-claim owners began to shout at us."
+
+"Starbuck has a long head, and what he doesn't know about mining claims
+in this part of the country wouldn't fill a very big book. I remember he
+said there had never been any prospecting done in the upper Timanyoni
+gulches, and now you'd think half the people in the United States had
+been nosing around up there with a pick and shovel at one time or
+another. But it was a thing that Starbuck told me no longer ago than
+yesterday that set me to thinking," Baldwin went on. "As you know, the
+old Escalante Spanish Grant corners over in the western part of this
+park. When the old grants were made, they were ruled off on the map
+without reference to mountain ranges or other natural barriers."
+
+Williams nodded.
+
+"Well, as I say, one corner of the Escalante reaches over the Hophras
+and out into the park, covering about eight or ten square miles of the
+territory just beyond us on our side of the river. Starbuck told me
+yesterday that a big Eastern colonization company had got a bill through
+Congress alienating that tract."
+
+The chief of construction bounded out of his chair and began to walk the
+floor. "By George!" he said; and again: "By George! That's what we're up
+against, Colonel! Where will those fellows get the water for their land?
+There is no site for a dam lower down than ours, and, anyway, that land
+lies too high to be watered by anything but a high-line ditch!"
+
+"Nice little brace game, isn't it?" growled Baldwin. "If we hadn't been
+a lot of hayseed amateurs, we might have found out long ago that some
+one was running in a cold deck on us. What's your notion? Are we done
+up, world without end?"
+
+Williams's laugh was grim.
+
+"What we need, Colonel, is to go out on the street and yell for a
+doctor," he said. "It's beginning to look as if we had acquired a pretty
+bad case of malignant strangle-itis."
+
+Baldwin ran his fingers through his hair and admitted that he had lost
+his sense of humor.
+
+"It's hell, Williams," he said soberly. "You know how recklessly I've
+waded into this thing--how recklessly we've all gone into it for that
+matter. I'll come down like a man and admit that it has climbed up the
+ladder to a place where I can't reach it. This Eastern crowd is trying
+to freeze us out, to get our dam and reservoir and ditch rights for
+their Escalante scheme. When they do, they'll turn around and sell us
+water--at fifty dollars an inch, or something like that!"
+
+"What breaks my heart is that we haven't been able to surround the
+sure-enough fact while there was still time to do something," lamented
+the ex-reclamation man. "The Lord knows it's been plain enough, with
+Stanton right here on the ground, and probably every one of the
+interferences traceable directly to him. He has begun to close in on
+us; his purchase of the Gardner and Bolling stockholdings is the
+beginning of the end. You know as well as I do, Colonel, what a
+contagious disease 'the yellows' is. Others will get it, and the first
+thing we know, Stanton will own a majority of the stock and be voting us
+all out of a job. You'll have to come around to my suggestion, after
+all, and advertise for a doctor." It was said of the chief of
+construction that he would have joked on his death-bed, and, as a
+follower for the joke, he added: "Why don't you call Smith in and give
+him the job?"
+
+"Smith be damned," growled the colonel, who, as we have seen, had become
+completely color-blind on the sense-of-humor side.
+
+"I wouldn't put it beyond him to develop into the young Napoleon of
+finance that we seem to be needing just now," Williams went on, carrying
+the jest to its legitimate conclusion.
+
+Baldwin, like other self-made promoters in their day of trouble, was in
+the condition of the drowning man who catches at straws.
+
+"You don't really mean that, Williams, do you?" he asked.
+
+"No, I didn't mean it when I said it," was the engineer's admission; "I
+was only trying to get a rise out of you. But really, Colonel, on
+second thought I don't know but it is worth considering. As I say,
+Smith seems to know the money game from start to finish. What is better
+still, he is a fighter from the word go--what you might call a joyous
+fighter. Suppose you drive out to-morrow or next day and pry into him a
+little."
+
+The rancher president had relapsed once more into the slough of
+discouragement.
+
+"You are merely grabbing for handholds, Bartley--as I was a minute ago.
+We are in a bad row of stumps when we can sit here and talk seriously
+about roping down a young hobo and putting him into the financial
+harness. Let's go around to Frascati's and eat before you go back to
+camp. It's bread-time, anyway."
+
+The chief of construction said no more about his joking suggestion at
+the moment, but when they were walking around the square to the Brewster
+Delmonico's he went back to the dropped subject in all seriousness,
+saying: "Just the same, I wish you could know Smith and size him up as I
+have. I can't help believing, some way, that he's all to the good."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Specialist
+
+
+Though the matter of calling in an expert doctor of finance to diagnose
+the alarming symptoms in Timanyoni Ditch had been left indeterminate in
+the talk between Colonel Baldwin and himself, Williams did not let it go
+entirely by default. On the day following the Brewster office conference
+the engineer sent for Smith, who was checking the output of the crushers
+at the quarry, and a little later the "betterment" man presented himself
+at the door of the corrugated-iron shack which served as a field office
+for the chief.
+
+Williams looked the cost-cutter over as he stood in the doorway. Smith
+was thriving and expanding handsomely in the new environment. He had let
+his beard grow and it was now long enough to be trimmed to a point. The
+travel-broken clothes had been exchanged for working khaki, with lace
+boots and leggings, and the workman's cap had given place to the
+campaign felt of the engineers. Though he had been less than a month on
+the job, he was already beginning to tan and toughen under the healthy
+outdoor work--to roughen, as well, his late fellow members of the
+Lawrenceville Cotillon Club might have said, since he had fought three
+pitched battles with as many of the camp bullies, and had in each of
+them approved himself a man of his hands who could not only take
+punishment, but could hammer an opponent swiftly and neatly into any
+desired state of subjection.
+
+"Come in here and sit down; I want to talk to you," was the way Williams
+began it; and after Smith had found a chair and had lighted a gift cigar
+from the headquarters desk-box, the chief went on: "Say, Smith, you're
+too good a man for anything I've got for you here. Haven't you realized
+that?"
+
+Smith pulled a memorandum-book from his hip pocket and ran his eye over
+the private record he had been keeping.
+
+"I've shown you how to effect a few little savings which total up
+something like fifteen per cent of your cost of production and
+operation," he said. "Don't you think I'm earning my wages?"
+
+"That's all right; I've been keeping tab, too, and I know what you're
+doing. But you are not beginning to earn what you ought to, either for
+yourself or the company," put in the chief shrewdly. And then: "Loosen
+up, Smith, and tell me something about yourself. Who are you, and where
+do you come from, and what sort of a job have you been holding down?"
+
+Smith's reply was as surprising as it was seemingly irrelevant.
+
+"If you're not too busy, Mr. Williams, I guess you'd better make out my
+time-check," he said quietly.
+
+Williams took a reflective half-minute for consideration, turning the
+sudden request over deliberately in his mind, as his habit was.
+
+"I suppose, by that you mean that you'll quit before you will consent to
+open up on your record?" he assumed.
+
+"You've guessed it," said the man who had sealed the book of his past.
+
+Again Williams took a little time. It was discouraging to have his own
+and the colonel's prefigurings as to Smith's probable state and standing
+so promptly verified.
+
+"I suppose you know the plain inference you're leaving, when you say a
+thing like that?"
+
+Smith made the sign of assent. "It leaves you entirely at liberty to
+finish out the story to suit yourself," he admitted, adding: "The back
+numbers--my back numbers--are my own, Mr. Williams. I've kept a file of
+them, as everybody does, but I don't have to produce it on request."
+
+"Of course, there's nothing compulsory about your producing it. But
+unless you are what they call in this country a 'crooked' crook, you are
+standing in your own light. You have such a staving good head for
+figures and finances that it seems a pity for you to be wasting it here
+on an undergraduate's job in cost-cutting. Any young fellow just out of
+a technical school could do what you're doing in the way of paring down
+expenses."
+
+The cost-cutter's smile was mildly incredulous.
+
+"Nobody seemed to be doing it before I came," he offered.
+
+"No," Williams allowed, "that's the fact. To tell the plain truth, we've
+had bigger things to wrestle with; and we have them yet, for that
+matter--enough of them to go all around the job twice and tie in a
+bow-knot."
+
+"Finances?" queried Smith, feeling some of the back-number instincts
+stirring within him.
+
+The chief engineer nodded; then he looked up with a twinkle in his
+closely set gray eyes. "If you'll tell me why you tried to kill Burdell
+the other day, maybe I'll open up the record--our record--for you."
+
+This time the cost-cutter's smile was good-naturedly derisive, and it
+ignored the reference to Burdell.
+
+"You don't have to open up your record--for me; it's the talk of the
+camp. You people are undercapitalized--to boil it down into one word.
+Isn't that about the way it sizes up?"
+
+"That is the way it has turned out; though we had capital enough to
+begin with. We've been bled to death by damage suits."
+
+Smith shook his head. "Why haven't you hired a first-class attorney, Mr.
+Williams?"
+
+"We've had the best we could find, but the other fellows have beaten us
+to it, every time. But the legal end of it hasn't been the whole thing
+or the biggest part of it. What we are needing most is a man who knows a
+little something about corporation fights and high finance." And at this
+the engineer forgot the Smith disabilities, real or inferential, and
+went on to explain in detail the peculiar helplessness of the Timanyoni
+Company as the antagonist of the as yet unnamed land and irrigation
+trust.
+
+Smith heard him through, nodding understandingly when the tale was
+told.
+
+"It's the old story of the big fish swallowing the little one; so old
+that there is no longer any saving touch of novelty in it," he
+commented. "I've been wondering if there wasn't something of that kind
+in your background. And you say you haven't any Belmonts or Morgans or
+Rockefellers in your company?"
+
+"We have a bunch of rather badly scared-up ranch owners and local
+people, with Colonel Baldwin in command, and that's all. The colonel is
+a fighting man, all right, and he can shoot as straight as anybody, when
+you have shown him what to shoot at. But he is outclassed, like all the
+rest of us, when it comes to a game of financial freeze-out. And that is
+what we are up against, I'm afraid."
+
+"There isn't the slightest doubt in the world about that," said the one
+who had been called in as an expert. "What I can't understand is why
+some of you didn't size the situation up long ago--before it got into
+its present desperate shape. You are at the beginning of the end, now.
+They've caught you with an empty treasury, and these stock sales you
+speak of prove that they have already begun to swallow you by littles.
+Timanyoni Common--I suppose you haven't any Preferred--at thirty-nine is
+an excellent gamble for any group of men who can see their way clear to
+buying the control. With an eager market for the water--and they can
+sell the water to you people, even if they don't put their own Escalante
+project through--the stock can be pushed to par and beyond, as it will
+be after you folks are all safely frozen out. More than that, they can
+charge you enough, for the water you've got to have, to finance the
+Escalante scheme and pay all the bills; and their investment, at the
+present market, will be only thirty-nine cents in the dollar. It's a
+neat little play."
+
+Williams was by this time far past remembering that his adviser was a
+man with a possible _alias_ and presumably a fugitive from justice.
+
+"Can't something be done, Smith? You've had experience in these things;
+your talk shows it. Have we got to stand still and be shot to pieces?"
+
+"The necessity remains to be demonstrated. But you will be shot to
+pieces, to a dead moral certainty, if you don't put somebody on deck
+with the necessary brains, and do it quickly," said Smith with frank
+bluntness.
+
+"Hold on," protested the engineer. "Every man to his trade. When I said
+that we had nobody but the neighbors and our friends in the company, I
+didn't mean to give the impression that they were either dolts or
+chuckleheads. As a matter of fact, we have a pretty level-headed bunch
+of men in Timanyoni Ditch--though I'll admit that some of them are
+nervous enough, just now, to want to get out on almost any terms. What I
+meant to say was that they don't happen to be up in all the crooks and
+turnings of the high-finance buccaneers."
+
+"I didn't mean to reflect upon Colonel Baldwin and his friends,"
+rejoined the ex-cashier good-naturedly. "It is nothing especially
+discrediting to them that they are not up in all the tricks of a trade
+which is not theirs. The financing of a scheme like this has come to be
+a business by itself, Mr. Williams, and it is hardly to be expected that
+a group of inexperienced men could do it successfully."
+
+"I know that, blessed well. That is what I said from the beginning, and
+I think Colonel Baldwin leaned that way, too. But it seemed like a very
+simple undertaking. A number of stockmen and crop growers wanted a dam
+and a ditch, and they had the money to pay for them. That seemed to be
+all there was to it in the beginning."
+
+Smith was leaning back in his chair and smoking reflectively.
+
+"Did you call me in here to get an expert opinion?" he asked, half
+humorously.
+
+"Something of that kind--yes; just on the bare chance that you could,
+and would, give us one," Williams admitted.
+
+"Well, I'm hardly an expert," was the modest reply; "but if I were in
+your place I should hire the best financial scrapper that money could
+pay for. I can't attempt to tell you what such a man would do, but he
+would at least rattle around in the box and try to give you a fighting
+chance, which is more than you seem to have now."
+
+The construction chief turned abruptly upon his cost-cutter.
+
+"Keeping in mind what you said a few minutes ago about 'back numbers,'
+would it be climbing over the fence too far for me to ask if your
+experience has been such as would warrant you in tackling a job of this
+kind?"
+
+"That is a fair question, and I can answer it straight," said the man
+under fire. "I've had the experience."
+
+"I thought so; and that brings on more talk. I'm not authorized to make
+you any proposal. But Colonel Baldwin and I were talking the matter over
+yesterday and your name was mentioned. I told the colonel that it was
+very evident that you were accustomed to handling bigger financial
+matters than these labor-and-material cost-cuttings you've been figuring
+on out here. If the colonel should ask you to, would you consider as a
+possibility the taking of the doctor's job on this sick project of
+ours?"
+
+"No," was the brief rejoinder.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Smith looked away out of the one square window in the shack at the busy
+scene on the dam stagings.
+
+"Let us say that I don't care to mix and mingle with my kind, Mr.
+Williams, and let it go at that," he said.
+
+"You are not interested in that side of it?"
+
+"Interested, but not to the point of enlisting."
+
+"You don't think of anything that might make you change your mind?"
+
+"There is nothing that you could offer which would be a sufficient
+inducement."
+
+"Why isn't there?"
+
+"Because I'm not exactly a born simpleton, Mr. Williams. There are a
+number of reasons which are purely personal to me, and at least one
+which cuts ice on your side of the pond. Your financial 'doctor,' as you
+call him, would have to be trusted absolutely in the handling of the
+company's money and its negotiable securities. You would have a perfect
+right to demand any and every assurance of his fitness and
+trustworthiness. You could, and should, put him under a fairly heavy
+bond. I'll not go into it any deeper than to say that I can't give a
+bond."
+
+Williams took his defeat, if it could be called a defeat, without
+further protest.
+
+"I thought it might not be amiss to talk it over with you," he said. "I
+don't know that the colonel will make any move, but if he does, he will
+deal with you direct. You say it is impossible, and perhaps it is. But
+it won't do any harm for you to think it over, and if I were you, I
+shouldn't burn all the bridges behind me. There ought to be considerable
+money in it for the right man, if he succeeds, and nothing much to lose
+if he should fail."
+
+Smith went back to his work in the quarry with a troubled mind. The
+little heart-to-heart talk with Williams had been sharply depressive. It
+had shown him, as nothing else could, how limited for all the remainder
+of his life his chances must be. That he would be pursued, that
+descriptions and photographs of the ex-cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank
+and Trust Company were already circulating from hand to hand among the
+paid man-catchers, he did not doubt for a moment. While he could remain
+as a workman unit in an isolated construction camp, there was some
+little hope that he might be overlooked. But to become the public
+character of Williams's suggestion in a peopled city was to run to meet
+his fate.
+
+In a way the tentative offer was a keen temptation. One of the lustiest
+growths pushing its way up through the new soil of the metamorphosis was
+a strong and mounting conviction that J. Montague Smith, of the
+Lawrenceville avatar, had been only half a man; was, at his best, only a
+pale shadow of the plain John Smith to whom accident and a momentary
+impulse of passion had given birth. With a clear field he would have
+asked for nothing better than a chance to take the leadership in the
+fight which Williams had outlined, and the new and elemental stirrings
+were telling him that he could win the fight. But with a price on his
+head it was not to be thought of.
+
+That night, when he rolled himself in his blankets in the bunk tent, he
+had renewed his prudent determination and it was crystallizing itself in
+words.
+
+"No, not for money or gratitude or any other argument they can bring to
+bear," he said to himself, and thereupon fell asleep with the mistaken
+notion that he had definitely pushed the temptation aside for good and
+all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The Twig
+
+
+It is said that the flow of a mighty river may owe its most radical
+change in direction to the chance thrusting of a twig into the current
+at some critical instant in the rise or fall of the flood. To the
+reincarnated Smith, charting his course upon the conviction that his
+best chance of immunity lay in isolation and a careful avoidance of the
+peopled towns, came the diverting twig in this wise.
+
+On the second morning following the unofficial talk with Bartley
+Williams in the iron-sheeted headquarters office at the dam, a delayed
+consignment of cement, steel, and commissary supplies was due at the
+side-track a mile below the camp. Perkins, the timekeeper, took the
+telephone call from Brewster giving notice of the shipment, and started
+the camp teams to meet the train, sending a few men along to help with
+the unloading. Later, he called Smith in from the quarry and gave him
+the invoices covering the shipment.
+
+"I guess you'd better go down to the siding and check this stuff in, so
+that we'll know what we're getting," was his suggestion to the general
+utility man; and Smith put the invoices into his pocket and took the
+road, a half-hour or more behind the teams.
+
+When the crookings of the tote-road let him get his first sight of the
+side-track, he saw that the train was already in and the mixed shipment
+of camp supplies had been transferred to the wagons. A few minutes
+sufficed for the checking, and since there was nothing more to be done,
+he sent the unloading gang back to camp with the teams, meaning to walk
+back, himself, after he should have seen the car of steel and the two
+cars of cement kicked in at the upper end of the side-track.
+
+While he was waiting for the train to pull up and make the shift he was
+commenting idly upon the clumsy lay-out of the temporary unloading yard,
+and wondering if Williams were responsible for it. The siding was on the
+outside of a curve and within a hundred yards of the river bank. There
+was scanty space for the unloading of material, and a good bit of what
+there was was taken up by the curving spur which led off from the siding
+to cross the river on a trestle, and by the wagon road itself, which
+came down a long hill on the south side of the railroad and made an
+abrupt turn to cross the main track and the siding fairly in the midst
+of things.
+
+As the long train pulled up to clear the road crossing, Smith stepped
+back and stood between the two tracks. A moment later the cut was made,
+and the forward section of the train went on to set the three loaded
+cars out at the upper switch, leaving the rear half standing on the main
+line. From his position between the tracks there was a clear view past
+the caboose at the end of the halted section and beyond, to the road
+crossing and the steep grade down which the dusty wagon road made a
+rough gash in the shoulder of the mountain spur which had crowded it
+from the river-bank side of the railroad right of way. At the bottom of
+the steep grade, where the road swerved to cross the two tracks, there
+was a little sag; and between the sag and the crossing a sharp bit of
+up-grade made to gain the level of the railroad embankment.
+
+One of the men of the unloading gang, a leather-faced grade shoveller
+who had helped to build the Nevada Short Line, had lagged behind the
+departing wagons to fill and light his pipe.
+
+"Wouldn't that jar you up right good and hard f'r a way to run a
+railroad," he said to Smith, indicating the wholly deserted standing
+section of the freight with the burnt match-end. "Them fellies 've all
+gone off up ahead, a-leavin' this yere hind end without a sign of a
+man'r a flag to take keer of it. S'pose another train 'd come boolgin'
+'round that curve. Wouldn't it rise merry hell with things 'long about
+this-away?"
+
+Smith was listening only with the outward ear to what the pipelighter
+was saying. Somewhere in the westward distances a thunderous murmur was
+droning upon the windless air of the June morning, betokening, as it
+seemed, the very catastrophe the ex-grade-laborer was prefiguring. Smith
+stripped his coat for a flag and started to run toward the crossing, but
+before he had caught his stride a dust cloud swept up over the shoulder
+of the wagon-road hill and the portentous thunderings were accounted
+for. A big gray automobile, with the cut-out open, was topping the
+side-hill grade, and Smith recognized it at once. It was Colonel Dexter
+Baldwin's roadster, and it held a single occupant--namely, the young
+woman who was driving it.
+
+Smith stopped running and transferred his anxiety from the train and
+railroad affairs to the young woman. Being himself a skilful driver of
+cars--and a man--he had a purely masculine distrust of the woman, any
+woman, behind a steering-wheel. To be sure, there was no danger, as yet.
+Turning to look up the track, he saw that the three loaded cars had been
+set out, that the forward section of the train had been pulled up over
+the switch, and that it was now backing to make the coupling with the
+standing half. He hoped that the trainmen had seen the automobile, and
+that they would not attempt to make the coupling until after the gray
+car had crossed behind the caboose. But in the same breath he guessed,
+and guessed rightly, that they were too far around the curve to be able
+to see the wagon-road approach.
+
+Still there was time enough, and room enough. The caboose on the rear
+end of the standing section was fully a hundred feet clear of the road
+crossing; and if the entire train should start backward at the coupling
+collision, the speed at which the oncoming roadster was running should
+take it across and out of danger. Nevertheless, there was no margin for
+the unexpected. Smith saw the young woman check the speed for the abrupt
+turn at the bottom of the hill, saw the car take the turn in a skidding
+slide, heard the renewed roar of the motor as the throttle was opened
+for a run at the embankment grade. Then the unexpected dropped its bomb.
+There was a jangling crash and the cars on the main track were set in
+motion toward the crossing. The trainmen had tried to make their
+coupling, the drawheads had failed to engage, and the rear half of the
+train was surging down upon the point of hazard.
+
+Smith's shout, or the sight of the oncoming train, one of the two, or
+both, put the finishing touch on the young woman's nerve. There was
+still time in which to clear the train, but at the critical instant the
+young woman apparently changed her mind and tried to stop the big car
+short of the crossing. The effort was unsuccessful. When the stop was
+made, the front wheels of the roadster were precisely in the middle of
+the main track, and the motor was killed.
+
+By this time Smith had thrown his coat away and was racing the backing
+train, with the ex-grade-laborer a poor second a dozen yards to the rear.
+Having ridden in the roadster, Smith knew that it had no self-starter.
+"_Jump!_" he yelled. "Get out of the car!" and then his heart came into
+his mouth when he saw that she was struggling to free herself and
+couldn't; that she was entangled in some way behind the low-hung
+tiller-wheel.
+
+Smith was running fairly abreast of the caboose when he made this
+discovery, and the hundred feet of clearance had shrunk to fifty. In
+imagination he could already see the gray car overturned and crushed
+under the wheels of the train. In a flying spurt he gained a few yards
+on the advancing menace and hurled himself against the front of the
+stopped roadster. He did not attempt to crank the motor. There was time
+only for a mighty heave and shove to send the car backing down the slope
+of the crossing approach; for this and for the quick spring aside to
+save himself; and the thing was done.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A Notice to Quit
+
+
+Once started and given its push, the gray roadster drifted backward from
+the railroad crossing and kept on until it came to rest in the sag at
+the turn in the road. Running to overtake it, Smith found that the young
+woman was still trying, ineffectually, to free herself. In releasing the
+clutch her dress had been caught and Smith was glad enough to let the
+extricating of the caught skirt and the cranking of the engine serve for
+a breath-catching recovery.
+
+When he stepped back to "tune" the spark the young woman had subsided
+into the mechanician's seat and was retying her veil with fingers that
+were not any too steady. She was small but well-knit; her hair was a
+golden brown and there was a good deal of it; her eyes were set well
+apart, and in the bright morning sunlight they were a slaty gray--of the
+exact shade of the motor veil she was rearranging. Smith had a sudden
+conviction that he had seen the wide-set eyes before; also the straight
+little nose and the half boyish mouth and chin, though where he had seen
+them the conviction could give no present hint.
+
+"I sup-pup-pose I ought to say something appropriate," she was
+beginning, half breathlessly, while Smith stood at the fender and
+grinned in character-not with the ex-leader of the Lawrenceville younger
+set, but with the newer and more elemental man of all work on a desert
+dam-building job. "Wha-what _is_ the proper thing to say when you have
+just been sus-snatched out of the way of a railroad train?"
+
+As J. Montague, the rescuer would have had a neatly turned rejoinder at
+his tongue's end; but the well-mannered phrases were altogether too
+conventional to suggest themselves to a strapping young barbarian in
+ill-fitting khaki and leggings and a slouch felt. Being unable to recall
+them, he laughed and pushed the J. Montague past still farther into the
+background.
+
+"You don't have to say anything. It's been a long time since I've had a
+chance to make such a bully grand-stand play as this." And then: "You're
+Colonel Baldwin's daughter, aren't you?"
+
+She nodded, saying:
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"I know the car. And you have your father's eyes."
+
+She did not seem to take it amiss that he was making her eyes a basis
+for comparisons. One William Starbuck, a former cattleman and her
+father's time-tried friend, paid Miss Corona the compliment of saying
+that she never allowed herself to get "bogged down in the
+haughtinesses." She was her father's only son, as well as his only
+daughter, and she divided her time pretty evenly in trying to live up to
+both sets of requirements.
+
+"You have introduced me; wo-won't you introduce yourself?" she said,
+when a second crash of the shifting freight-train spent itself and gave
+her an opening.
+
+"I'm Smith," he told her; adding: "It's my real name."
+
+Her laugh was an instant easing of tensions.
+
+"Oh, yes; you're Mr. Williams's assistant. I've heard Colonel-da--my
+father, speak of you."
+
+"No," he denied in blunt honesty, "I'm not Williams's assistant; at
+least, the pay-roll doesn't say so. Up at the camp they call me 'The
+Hobo,' and that's what I was a week or so ago when your father picked me
+up and gave me a lift to the dam in this car."
+
+The young woman had apparently regained whatever small fraction of
+self-possession the narrow escape had shocked aside.
+
+"Are they never going to take that miserable train out of the way?" she
+exclaimed. "I've got to see Mr. Williams, and there isn't a minute to
+spare. That is why I was breaking all the speed limits."
+
+"They are about ready to pull out now," he returned, with a glance over
+his shoulder at the train. "I'm a sort of general utility man up at the
+camp: can you use me in any way?"
+
+"I'm afraid you won't do," she replied, with a little laughing grimace
+that made him wonder where and when in the past he had seen some young
+woman do the same thing under exactly similar conditions. "It's a matter
+of business--awfully urgent business. Colonel-da--I mean my father, has
+gone up to Red Butte, and a little while ago they telephoned over to the
+ranch from the Brewster office to say that there was going to be some
+more trouble at the dam."
+
+"They?" he queried.
+
+"Mr. Martin, the head bookkeeper. He said he'd been trying to get Mr.
+Williams, but the wires to the camp were out of order."
+
+"They're not," said Smith shortly, remembering that Perkins had been
+talking from the camp to the Brewster railroad agent within the
+half-hour. "But never mind that: go on."
+
+Again she let him see the piquant little grimace.
+
+"You say that just as if you _were_ Mr. Williams's assistant," she threw
+back at him. "But I haven't time to quarrel with you this morning, Mr.
+Real-name Smith. If you'll take your foot off the fender I'll go on up
+to the dam and find Mr. Williams."
+
+"You couldn't quarrel with me if you should try," was the good-natured
+rejoinder, and Smith tried in vain to imagine himself taking his present
+attitude with any of the young women he had known in his cotillon
+days--with Verda Richlander, for example. Then he added: "You won't find
+Williams at the camp. He started out early this morning to ride the
+lower ditch lines beyond Little Creek, and he said he wouldn't be back
+until some time to-morrow. Now will you tell me what you're needing--and
+give me a possible chance to get my pay raised?"
+
+"_Oh!_" she exclaimed, with a little gasp of disappointment, presumably
+for the Williams absence. "I've simply _got_ to find Mr. Williams--or
+somebody! Do you happen to know anything about the lawsuit troubles?"
+
+"I know all about them; Williams has told me."
+
+"Then I'll tell you what Mr. Martin telephoned. He said that three
+men were going to pretend to relocate a mining claim in the hills
+back of the dam, somewhere near the upper end of the reservoir
+lake-that-is-to-be. They're doing it so that they can get out an
+injunction, or whatever you call it, and then we'll have to buy them
+off, as the others have been bought off."
+
+Smith was by this time entirely familiar with the maps and profiles and
+other records of the ditch company's lands and holdings.
+
+"All the land within the limits of the flood level has been bought and
+paid for--some of it more than once, hasn't it?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes; but that doesn't make any difference. These men will claim
+that their location was made long ago, and that they are just now
+getting ready to work it. It's often done in the case of mining claims."
+
+"When is all this going to happen?" he inquired.
+
+"It is already happening," she broke out impatiently. "Mr. Martin said
+the three men left town a little after daybreak and crossed on the
+Brewster bridge to go up on the other side of the Timanyoni. They had a
+two-horse team and a camping outfit. They are probably at work long
+before this time."
+
+The young woman had taken her place again behind the big tiller-wheel,
+and Smith calmly motioned her out of it.
+
+"Take the other seat and let me get in here," he said; and when she had
+changed over, he swung in behind the wheel and put a foot on the clutch
+pedal.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"I'm going to take you on up to the camp, and then, if you'll lend me
+this car, I'll go and do what you hoped to persuade Williams to do--run
+these mining-claim jokers into the tall timber."
+
+"But you can't!" she protested; "you can't do it alone! And, besides,
+they are on the other side of the river, and you can't get anywhere with
+the car. You'll have to go all the way back to Brewster to get across
+the river!"
+
+It was just here that he stole another glance at the very-much-alive
+little face behind the motor veil; at the firm, round chin and the
+resolute, slaty-gray eyes.
+
+"I suppose I ought to take you to the camp," he said. "But you may go
+along with me, if you want to--and are not afraid."
+
+She laughed in his face.
+
+"I was born here in the Timanyoni, and you haven't been here three
+weeks: do you think I'd be afraid to go anywhere that you'll go?"
+
+"We'll see about that," he chuckled, matching the laugh; and with that
+he let the clutch take hold and sent the car rolling gently up to the
+level of the railroad embankment and across the rails of the main track.
+
+On the right of way of the paralleling side-track he steered off the
+crossing and pulled the roadster around until it was headed fairly for
+the upper switch. Then he climbed down and recovered his coat which had
+been flung aside in the race with the train. Resuming his place behind
+the tiller-wheel, he put the motor in the reverse and began to back the
+car on the siding, steering so that the wheels on one side hugged the
+inside of one rail.
+
+"What in the world are you trying to do?" questioned the young woman who
+had said she was not afraid.
+
+"Wait," he temporized; "just wait a minute and get ready to hang on like
+grim death. We're going across on that trestle."
+
+He fully expected her to shriek and grab for the steering-wheel. That,
+he told himself, was what the normal young woman would do. But Miss
+Corona disappointed him.
+
+"You'll put us both into the river, and smash Colonel-daddy's car, but I
+guess the Baldwin family can stand it if you can," she remarked quite
+calmly.
+
+Smith kept on backing until the car had passed the switch from which the
+spur branched off to cross to the material yard on the opposite side of
+the river. A skilful bit of juggling put the roadster over on the ties
+of the spur-track. Then he turned to his fellow risk.
+
+"Sit low, and hang on with both hands," he directed. "_Now!_" and he
+opened the throttle.
+
+The trestle was not much above two hundred feet long, and, happily, the
+cross-ties were closely spaced. Steered to a hair, the big car went
+bumping across, and in his innermost recesses Smith was saying to his
+immediate ancestor, the well-behaved bank clerk: "You swab! _you_ never
+saw the day when you could do a thing like this ... you thought you had
+me tied up in a bunch of ribbon, didn't you?"
+
+If Miss Baldwin were frightened, she did not show it; and when the
+crossing was safely made, Smith caught a little side glance that told
+him he was making good. He jerked the roadster out of the entanglement
+of the railroad track and said: "You may sit up now and tell me which
+way to go. I don't know anything about the roads over here."
+
+She pointed out the way across the hills, and a four-mile dash followed
+that set the blood dancing in Smith's veins. He had never before driven
+a car as fast as he wanted to; partly because he had never owned one
+powerful enough, and partly because the home-land speed laws--and his
+own past _metier_--would not sanction it. Up hill and down the big
+roadster raced, devouring the interspaces, and at the topping of the
+last of the ridges the young woman opened the small tool-box in the
+dividing arm between the seats and showed her reckless driver a large
+and serviceable army automatic snugly holstered under the lid.
+
+"Daddy always keeps it there for his night drives on the horse ranges,"
+she explained. But Smith was shaking his head.
+
+"We're not going to need anything of that sort," he assured her, and the
+racing search for three men and a two-horse team was continued.
+
+Beyond the final hill, in a small, low-lying swale which was well hidden
+from any point of view in the vicinity of the distant dam, they came
+upon the interlopers. There were three men and two horses and a covered
+wagon, as Martin's telephone message had catalogued them. The horses
+were still in the traces, and just beyond the wagon a long, narrow
+parallelogram, of the length and breadth of a legal mining claim, had
+been marked out by freshly driven stakes. In one end of the
+parallelogram two of the men were digging perfunctorily, while the third
+was tacking the legal notice on a bit of board nailed to one of the
+stakes.
+
+Smith sent the gray car rocketing down into the swale, brought it to a
+stand with a thrust of the brakes, and jumped out. Once more the
+primitive Stone Age man in him, which had slept so long and so quietly
+under the Lawrenceville conventionalities, was joyously pitching the
+barriers aside.
+
+"It's moving day for you fellows," he announced cheerfully, picking the
+biggest of the three as the proper subject for the order giving. "You're
+on the Timanyoni Ditch Company's land, and you know it. Pile into that
+wagon and fade away!"
+
+The big man's answer was a laugh, pointed, doubtless, by the fact that
+the order giver was palpably unarmed. But on second thought he began to
+supplement the laugh with an oath. Smith's right arm shot out, and when
+the blow landed there were only two left to close in on him. In such
+sudden hostilities the advantages are all with the beginner. Having
+superior reach and a good bit more skill than either of the two
+tacklers, Smith held his own until he could get in a few more of the
+smashing right-handers, but in planting them he took punishment enough
+to make him Berserk-mad and so practically invincible. There was a
+fierce mingling of arms, legs, and bodies, sufficiently terrifying, one
+would suppose, to a young woman sitting calmly in an automobile a
+hundred yards away; but she neither cried out nor attempted to go to the
+rescue with the weapon which it seemed as if Smith might be needing.
+
+The struggle was short in just proportion to its vigor, and at the end
+of it two of the trespassers were knocked out, and Smith was dragging
+the third over to the wagon, into which he presently heaved the man as
+if he had been a sack of meal. Miss Baldwin, sitting in the car, saw her
+ally dive into the covered wagon and come out with a pair of
+Winchesters. Pausing only long enough to smash the guns, one after the
+other, over the wagon-wheel, he started back after the two other men.
+They were not waiting to be carried to the wagon; they were up and
+running in a wide semicircle to reach their hope of retreat unslain, if
+that might be. It was all very brutal and barbarous, no doubt, but the
+colonel's daughter was Western born and bred, and she clapped her hands
+and laughed in sheer enthusiasm when she saw Smith make a show of
+chasing the circling runners.
+
+He did not return to her until after he had pulled up the freshly driven
+stakes and thrown them away, and by that time the wagon, with the horses
+lashed to a keen gallop, was disappearing over the crest of the northern
+ridge.
+
+"That's one way to get rid of them, isn't it?" said the emancipated bank
+man, jocosely, upon taking his place in the car to cramp it for the
+turn. "Was that something like the notion you had in mind?"
+
+"Mercy, no!" she rejoined. And then: "Are you sure you are not hurt?"
+
+"Not worth mentioning," he evaded. "Those duffers couldn't hurt anybody,
+so long as they couldn't get to their guns."
+
+"But you have saved the company at your own expense. They will be sure
+to have you arrested."
+
+"We won't cross that bridge until we come to it," he returned. "And,
+besides, there were no witnesses. _You_ didn't see anything."
+
+"Of course, I didn't; not the least little thing in the world!" she
+agreed, laughing with him.
+
+"I thought not. There were too many of us for any single eye-witness to
+get more than the general effect." Then, in easy assertion of his victor
+rights: "If we were back in the country from which I have lately escaped
+it would be proper for me to ask your permission to drive you safely
+home. Since we are not, I shall assume the permission and do it anyway."
+
+"Oh, is that necessary?" she asked, meaning, as he took it, nothing more
+than comradely deprecation at putting him to the trouble of it.
+
+"Not absolutely necessary, perhaps, but decently prudent. You might drop
+me opposite the dam, but you'd have to pass those fellows somewhere on
+the way and they might try to make it unpleasant for you."
+
+She made no further comment, and he sent the car spinning along over the
+hills to the westward. A mile short of the trestle river crossing they
+overtook and passed the wagon. Because he had the colonel's daughter
+with him, Smith put on a burst of speed and so gave the claim-jumpers no
+chance to provoke another battle. With the possible unpleasantnesses
+thus left in the rear, Smith knew well enough that there was really no
+reason for his going any farther than the spur-track trestle. None the
+less, he held to his announced determination, driving briskly down the
+north-side river road and on toward the grass-land ranches.
+
+In the maze of cross-roads opposite the little city on the south bank of
+the river, Smith was out of his reckoning, and was obliged to ask his
+companion to direct him.
+
+"I thought you weren't ever going to say anything any more," she sighed,
+in mock despair. "Take this road to the right."
+
+"I can't talk and drive a speed-wagon at the same time," he told her,
+twisting the gray car into the road she had indicated, and he made the
+assertion good by covering the four remaining miles in the same
+preoccupied fashion.
+
+There was a reason, of a sort, for his silence; two of them, to be
+exact. For one, he was troubled by that haunting sense of familiarity
+which was still trying to tell him that this was not his first meeting
+with Colonel Baldwin's daughter; and the other was much bigger, and more
+depressing. Though he was continually assuring himself that he had
+buried the former bank clerk and all of his belongings in a deep grave,
+some of the bank-clerk convictions still refused to remain decently in
+the coffin. One of these--and it had been daggering him sharply for the
+past half-hour--was the realization that in breaking with his past, he
+had broken also with the world of women--good women--at least to the
+extent of ever asking one of them to marry him.
+
+Truly, though shadows are insubstantial things for the greater part,
+there is one exception. The shadow of a crime may involve both the
+innocent and the guilty quite as effectually as the thing itself, and
+Smith saw himself shut out automatically from the married beatitudes....
+He pushed the thought aside, coming back to the other one--the puzzle of
+familiarity--when Miss Baldwin pointed to a transplanted Missouri farm
+mansion, with a columned portico, standing in a grove of cottonwoods on
+the left-hand side of the road, telling him it was Hillcrest.
+
+There was a massive stone portal fronting the road, and when he got down
+to open the gates the young woman took the wheel and drove through;
+whereupon, he decided that it was time for him to break away, and said
+so.
+
+"But how will you get back to the camp?" she asked.
+
+"I have my two legs yet, and the walking isn't bad."
+
+"No; but you might meet those men again."
+
+"That is the least of my troubles."
+
+Miss Corona Baldwin, like the Missouri colonel, her father, came upon
+moments now and then when she had the ultimate courage of her impulses.
+
+"I should have said you hadn't a trouble in the world," she asserted,
+meeting his gaze level-eyed.
+
+The polite paraphrases of the coffined period were slipping to the end
+of his tongue, but he set his teeth upon them and said, instead: "That's
+all you know about it. What if I should tell you that you've been
+driving this morning with an escaped convict?"
+
+"I shouldn't believe it," she said calmly.
+
+"Well, you haven't--not quite," he returned, adding the qualifying
+phrase in sheer honesty.
+
+She had untied her veil and was asking him hospitably if he wouldn't
+come in and meet her mother. Something in the way she said it, some
+little twist of the lips or look of the eyes, touched the spring of
+complete recognition and the familiarity puzzle vanished instantly.
+
+"You forget that I am a workingman," he smiled. "My gang in the quarry
+will think I've found a bottle somewhere." And then: "Did you ever lose
+a glove, Miss Baldwin--a white kid with a little hole in one finger?"
+
+"Dozens of them," she admitted; "and most of them had holes, I'm afraid.
+But what has that got to do with your coming in and meeting mamma and
+letting her thank you for saving my life?"
+
+"Nothing at all, of course," he hastened to say; and with that he bade
+her good-by rather abruptly and turned his back upon the transplanted
+Missouri mansion, muttering to himself as he closed the portal gates
+behind him: "'Baldwin,' of course! What an ass I was not to remember the
+name! And now I've got the other half of it, too; it's 'Corona.'"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Timanyoni Ditch
+
+
+Smith had his vote of thanks from Colonel Dexter Baldwin in person late
+in the afternoon of the day following the summary eviction of the sham
+mine locators in the upper reservoir; presidential thanks for his prompt
+defense of the company's interests, and a warm outhanding of fatherly
+gratitude for the rescue at the unloading side-track. The vote was
+passed in Williams's sheet-iron office at the dam, the colonel having
+driven out to the camp for the express purpose; and the chief of
+construction himself was not present.
+
+"You've loaded us up with a tolerably heavy obligation, Smith--Corry's
+mother and me," was the way the colonel summed up in the personal field.
+"If you hadn't been on deck and strictly on the job at that railroad
+crossing yesterday morning----"
+
+"Don't mention it, Colonel," Smith broke in, protesting honestly as
+plain "John" where a "J. Montague" might have made self-gratulatory
+capital. "There is only one thing in this world more onerous than owing
+an obligation, and that is the feeling that you've got to live up to
+one. I did nothing more than any man would have done for any woman. You
+know it, and I know it. Let's leave it that way and forget it."
+
+The tall Missourian's laugh was entirely approbative.
+
+"I like that," he said. "It's a good, man-fashion way of looking at it.
+Corry wanted me to tell her what I was going to say to you, and I said
+I'd be hanged if I knew. I owe you one for making it easy. You know how
+I feel about it--how any father would feel; and that's enough."
+
+"Plenty," was the brief rejoinder.
+
+"But there's another chapter to it that neither of us can cross out;
+you'll have to come out to the ranch and let Corry's mother have a hack
+at you," Baldwin went on. "I couldn't figure you out of that if I should
+try. And now about those claim-jumpers: I suppose you didn't know any of
+them by name?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Corry says you gave them the time of their lives. By George, I wish I'd
+been there to see!" and the colonel slapped his leg and laughed. "Did
+they look like the real thing--sure-enough prospectors?"
+
+"They looked like a bunch of hired assassins," said Smith, with a grin.
+"It's some more of the interference, isn't it?"
+
+The colonel's square jaw settled into the fighting angle.
+
+"How much do you know about this business mix-up of ours, Smith?" he
+asked.
+
+"All that Williams could tell me in a little heart-to-heart talk we had
+the other day."
+
+"You agreed with him that there was a tolerably big nigger in the
+wood-pile, didn't you?"
+
+"I had already gathered that much from the camp gossip."
+
+"Well, it's so. We're just about as helpless as a bunch of cattle in a
+sink-hole," was the ranchman president's confirmation of the camp
+guesses. "As long as it was a straightaway stunt of buying land and
+building a dam and digging a few ditches, we were in the fight. We knew
+what we wanted, and we had the money to go out and buy it. But now it
+looks as if we were aiming to get it where the chicken got the cleaver.
+If our hunch about the Escalante irrigation trust is right, we are not
+only going to lose our money and our work; we've run slap up against a
+proposition that will shut us out of the water altogether and force us
+to buy it of these Eastern sharks--at their own price. When it comes to
+that, we may as well make 'em a present of the entire Little Creek
+district. They can take it whenever they have a mind to."
+
+Smith was thinking of the young woman with the resolute slaty-gray eyes
+when he said: "That is, of course, if you lie down and let them put the
+steam-roller over you. But you're not going to do that, are you?"
+
+Baldwin shook his head as one who will not permit himself to minimize a
+hazard.
+
+"Keep that notion of the cattle in a sink-hole in front of you, Smith,
+and you'll get a pretty fair idea of the chances. What in the name of
+the great horn spoon can we do--more than we have done?"
+
+"There are a number of things that might be done," said Smith, falling
+back reflectively upon the presumably dead and buried bank-cashier part
+of him. "In the first place, these trust people can't take your dam and
+your ditch right of way until after they have bought up a voting control
+of your stock. It is very pointedly up to you and your fellow
+stockholders to say whether or not you are going to let them scare or
+force you into selling, isn't it?"
+
+"I reckon maybe it is. But two of our men have already sold out, and
+more will follow. These Eastern sharks 've got the bulge on us; they
+have the money, and we're just about as good as dead broke."
+
+"Of course," said the younger man. "That was part of the game; to swamp
+you with costly lawsuits, use up your capital, and break your credit.
+It's done every day in business, and in a thousand different ways, some
+of them pure robberies, but most of them legally defensible. You folks
+have made the mistake of letting it go too far on too small a
+capitalization. You're left without a fighting fund. Still, while there
+is life there is always hope. And if you can manage to stay in the game
+and play it out, there is big money in it for all of you; enough to make
+it well worth while for you to put up the fight of your lives."
+
+"Big money?--you mean in saving our investment?"
+
+"Oh, no; not at all; in cinching the other fellows," Smith put in
+genially. "As Williams explained it to me, there is the biggest kind of
+a killing in it for you people, if you can hold on and win out."
+
+Colonel Dexter Baldwin lifted his soft hat and ran his fingers through
+his grizzled hair.
+
+"Say, Smith; you mustn't forget that I'm from Missouri," he said half
+quizzically.
+
+"But I shouldn't think you'd need to be 'shown' in this particular
+instance," was the smiling rejoinder. "Why are these Eastern capitalists
+spending their good money on a scheme to freeze out your little handful
+of ranch owners, Colonel? Surely you've asked yourself that question
+long before this, haven't you?"
+
+"Why, yes; it's because they want to get something for nothing, isn't
+it?"
+
+"In a general sense, of course, that is the basis of all crooked
+business schemes. But the chance to sell you people water from your own
+dam isn't the only thing or the main thing in this case; that part of it
+is merely incidental. Didn't Williams tell me that they are obliged to
+have this dam site, or, at least, one as high up the river as this, in
+order to get the water over to their newly alienated grant in the
+western half of the park?"
+
+"I don't know what Bartley told you, but that is the fact."
+
+"No way of dodging that, is there? They couldn't possibly build a dam of
+their own, lower down, and make it work, could they? I'm asking because
+what I don't know about irrigation engineering would fill a Carnegie
+library in a good-sized little city."
+
+"You've got it straight," said the colonel. "A good part of the
+Escalante Grant lies higher than our Little Creek ranches. From any
+point farther down the river than this, they'd have to pump the water to
+get it up to the Escalante mesas."
+
+"Very good. Then they're simply obliged to have your dam, or--Don't you
+see the alternative now, Colonel?"
+
+"Heavens to Betsy!" exclaimed the breeder of fine horses, bringing his
+fist down upon Williams's desk with a crash that made the ink-bottles
+dance. And then: "The Lord have mercy! What a lot of fence-posts we
+are--the whole kit and b'ilin' of us! If they get the dam, they sell
+water to us; if they don't get it, _we sell it to them_!"
+
+"That's it, exactly," Smith put in quietly. "And I should say that your
+stake in the game is worth the stiffest fight you can make to save it.
+Don't you agree with me?"
+
+"Great Jehu! I should say so!" ejaculated the amateur trust fighter.
+Then he broke down the barriers masterfully. "That settles it, Smith.
+You can't wiggle out of it now, no way or shape. You've got to come over
+into Macedonia and help us. Williams tells me you refused him, but you
+can't refuse me."
+
+If Smith hesitated, it was only partly on his own account. He was
+thinking again of the young woman with the honest eyes when he said: "Do
+you know why I turned Williams down when he spoke to me the other day?"
+
+Colonel Dexter Baldwin had his faults, like other men, but they were not
+those of indirection.
+
+"I reckon I do know, son," he said, with large tolerance. "You're a
+'lame duck' of some sort; you've made that pretty plain in your talks
+with Williams, haven't you? But that's our lookout. Bartley is ready to
+swear that you are not a crooked crook, whatever else it is that you're
+dodging for, and if we want to shut our eyes to the way you won't loosen
+up about yourself.... Besides, there's yesterday; and what you did down
+at the railroad crossing and out yonder in the hills----"
+
+"We agreed to forget the yesterday incidents," the lame duck reminded
+him quickly. And then: "I ought to say 'No,' Colonel Baldwin; say it
+straight out, and stick to it. If I don't say it--if I ask for a little
+time--it is because I want to weigh up a few things--the things I can't
+talk about to you or to Williams. If, in the end, I should be fool
+enough to say 'Yes,' it will be merely because, the way things have
+turned out with me, I'd a little rather fight than eat. But even in that
+case it is only fair to you to say that, right in the middle of the
+scrap, I may fall to pieces on you."
+
+Baldwin was too shrewd to try to push his advantage when there was, or
+seemed to be, a chance that the desired end was as good as half
+attained. And it was a purely manful prompting that made him get up and
+thrust out his hand to the young fellow who was trying to be as frank as
+he dared to be.
+
+"Put it there, John," he said heartily. "Nobody in the Timanyoni is
+going to pry into you an inch farther than you care to let 'em; and if
+you get into trouble by helping us, you can count on at least one backer
+who will stand by you until the cows come home. Now then, hunt up your
+coat, and we'll drive over to Hillcrest for a bite to eat. I know you
+won't be easy in your mind until you've had it out with Corry's
+mother--about that little railroad trick--and you may as well do it now
+and have it over with. No; excuses don't go, this time. I had my orders
+from the Missus before I left town, and I know better than to go home
+without you. Never mind the commissary khaki. It won't be the first time
+that the working-clothes have figured at the Hillcrest table--not by a
+long shot."
+
+And because he did not know how to frame a refusal that would refuse,
+Smith got his coat and went.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Relapsings
+
+
+Given his choice between the two, Smith would cheerfully have faced
+another hand-to-hand battle with the claim-jumpers in preference to even
+so mild a dip into the former things as the dinner at Hillcrest
+foreshadowed. The reluctance was not forced; it was real. The primitive
+man in him did not wish to be entertained. On the fast auto drive down
+to Brewster, across the bridge, and out to the Baldwin ranch Smith's
+humor was frankly sardonic. Dinners, social or grateful, were such
+childish things; so little worth the time and attention of a real man
+with work to do!
+
+It mattered nothing that he had lived twenty-five years and more without
+suspecting this childishness of things social. That door was closed and
+another had been opened; beyond the new opening the prospect was as yet
+rather chaotic and rugged, to be sure, but the color scheme, if somewhat
+raw, was red-blood vivid, and the horizons were illimitable. Smith sat
+up in the mechanician's seat and straightened the loose tie under the
+soft collar of his working-shirt, smiling grimly as his thought leaped
+back to the dress clothes he had left lying on the bed in his
+Lawrenceville quarters. He cherished a small hope that Mrs. Baldwin
+might be shocked at the soft shirt and the khaki. It would serve her
+right for taking a man from his job.
+
+The colonel did not try to make him talk, and the fifteen-mile flight
+down the river and across into the hills was shortly accomplished. At
+the stone-pillared portal he got out to open the gates. Down the road a
+little distance a horseman was coming at a smart gallop--at least, the
+rider figured as a man for the gate-opener until he saw that it was
+Corona Baldwin, booted and spurred and riding a man's saddle.
+
+Smith let the gray car go on its way up the drive without him and held
+the gates open for the horse and its rider.
+
+"So you weakened, did you? I'm disappointed in you," was Miss Baldwin's
+greeting. "You've made me lose my bet with Colonel-daddy. I said you
+wouldn't come."
+
+"I had no business to come," he answered morosely. "But your father
+wouldn't let me off."
+
+"Of course, he wouldn't; daddy never lets anybody off, unless they owe
+him money. Where are your evening clothes?"
+
+Smith let the lever of moroseness slip back to the grinning notch. "They
+are about two thousand miles away, and probably in some second-hand shop
+by this time. What makes you think I ever wore a dress suit?" He had
+closed the gates and was walking beside her horse up the driveway.
+
+"Oh, I just guessed it," she returned lightly, "and if you'll hold your
+breath, I'll guess again."
+
+"Don't," he laughed. "You are going to say that at some time in my life
+I knew better than to accept anybody's dinner invitation undecorated.
+Maybe there was such a time, but if so, I am trying to forget it."
+
+Her laugh was good-naturedly derisive.
+
+"You'll forget it just so long as you are able to content yourself in a
+construction camp. I know the symptoms. There are times when I feel as
+if I'd simply blow up if I couldn't put on the oldest things I've got
+and go and gallop for miles on Shy, and other times when I want to put
+on all the pretty things I have and look soulful and talk nonsense."
+
+"But you've been doing that--the galloping, I mean--all your life,
+haven't you?"
+
+"Not quite. There were three wasted years in a finishing school back
+East. It is when I get to thinking too pointedly about them that I have
+to go out to the stable and saddle Shy."
+
+They had reached the steps of the pillared portico, and a negro
+stable-boy, one of the colonel's importations from Missouri, was waiting
+to take Miss Baldwin's horse. Smith knew how to help a woman down from a
+side-saddle; but the two-stirruped rig stumped him. The young woman saw
+his momentary embarrassment and laughed again as she swung out of her
+saddle to stand beside him on the step.
+
+"The women don't ride that way in your part of the country?" she
+queried.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"I'm sorry for them," she scoffed. And then: "Come on in and meet mamma;
+you look as if you were dreading it, and, as Colonel-daddy says, it's
+always best to have the dreaded things over with."
+
+Smith did not find his meeting with the daughter's mother much of a
+trial. She was neither shocked at his clothes nor disposed to be
+hysterically grateful over the railroad-crossing incident. A large,
+calm-eyed, sensible matron, some ten or a dozen years younger than the
+colonel, Smith put her, and with an air of refinement which was
+reflected in every interior detail of her house.
+
+Smith had not expected to find the modern conveniences in a Timanyoni
+ranch-house, but they were there. The room to which the Indian house-boy
+led him had a brass bedstead and a private bath, and the rugs, if not
+true Tabriz, were a handsome imitation. Below stairs it was much the
+same. The dining-room was a beamed baronial hall, with a rough-stone
+fireplace big enough to take a cord-wood length, and on the hearth
+andirons which might have come down from the Elizabethan period. It was
+mid-June and the fireplace was empty, but its winter promise was so
+hospitable that Smith caught himself hoping that he might stay out of
+jail long enough to be able to see it in action.
+
+The dinner was strictly a family meal, with the great mahogany table
+shortened to make it convenient for four. There were cut glass and
+silver and snowy napery, and Smith was glad that the colonel did most of
+the talking. Out of the past a thousand tentacles were reaching up to
+drag him back into the net of the conventional. With the encompassments
+to help, it was so desperately easy to imagine himself once more the
+"debutantes' darling," as Westfall had often called him in friendly
+derision. When the table-talk became general, he found himself joining
+in, and always upon the lighter side.
+
+By the time the dessert came on, the transformation was complete. It was
+J. Montague, the cotillon leader, who sat back in his chair and told
+amiable little after-dinner stones, ignoring the colonel's heartinesses,
+and approving himself in the eyes of his hostess as a dinner guest of
+the true urban quality. Now and then he surprised a look in the younger
+woman's eyes which was not wholly sympathetic, he thought; but the
+temptation to show her that he was not at all the kind of man she had
+been taking him for was too strong to be resisted. Since she had seen
+fit to charge him with a dress-clothes past he would show her that he
+could live up to it.
+
+Contrary to Smith's expectations, the colonel did not usurp him
+immediately after dinner. A gorgeous sunset was flaming over the western
+Timanyonis and there was time for a quiet stroll and a smoke under the
+silver-leafed cottonwoods with his hostess for a companion. In the
+little talk and walk, Smith found himself drawn more and more to the
+calm-eyed, well-bred matron who had given a piquant Corona to an
+otherwise commonplace world. He found her exceedingly well-informed;
+she had read the books that he had read, she had heard the operas that
+he had always wanted to hear, and if any other bond were needed, he
+found it in the fact that she was a native of his own State.
+
+Under such leadings the relapse became an obsession. He abandoned
+himself shamelessly to the J. Montague attitude, and the events crowding
+so thickly between the tramp-like flight from Lawrenceville and the
+present were as if they had not been. Mrs. Baldwin saw nothing of the
+rude fighter of battles her daughter had drawn for her, and wondered a
+little. She knew Corona's leanings, and was not without an amused
+impression that Corona would not find this later Smithsonian phase
+altogether to her liking.
+
+A little later the daughter, who had been to the horse corral with her
+father, came to join them, and the mother, smiling inwardly, saw her
+impression confirmed. Smith was talking frivolously of _thes dansants_
+and dinner-parties and club meets; whereat the mother smiled and Miss
+Corona's lip curled scornfully.
+
+Smith got what he had earned, good measure, pressed down, shaken
+together and running over, a few minutes after Mrs. Baldwin had gone in,
+leaving him to finish his cigar under the pillared portico with Corona
+to keep him company. He never knew just what started it, unless it was
+his careful placing of a chair for the young woman and his
+deferential--and perfectly natural--pause, standing, until she was
+seated.
+
+"Do, for pity's sake, sit down!" she broke out, half petulantly. And
+when he had obeyed: "Well, you've spoiled it all, good and hard.
+Yesterday I thought you were a real man, but now you are doing your best
+to tell me that you were only shamming."
+
+Smith was still so far besotted as to be unable to imagine wherein he
+had offended.
+
+"Really?" he said. "I'm sorry to have disappointed you. All I need now
+to make me perfectly happy is to be told what I have done."
+
+"It isn't what you've done; it's what you are," she retorted.
+
+"Well, what am I?" he asked patiently.
+
+Her laugh was mocking. "You are politely good-natured, for one thing;
+but that wasn't what I meant. You have committed the unpardonable sin by
+turning out to be just one of the ninety-nine, after all. If you knew
+women the least little bit in the world, you would know that we are
+always looking for the hundredth man."
+
+Under his smile, Smith was searching the Lawrenceville experience
+records minutely in the effort to find something that would even
+remotely match this. The effort was a complete failure. But he was
+beginning to understand what this astonishingly frank young woman meant.
+She had seen the depth of his relapse, and was calmly deriding him for
+it. A saving sense of humor came to remind him of his own sardonic
+musings on the silent drive from the camp with the colonel; how he had
+railed inwardly at the social trivialities.
+
+"You may pile it on as thickly as you please," he said, the good-natured
+smile twisting itself into the construction-camp grin. Then he added: "I
+may not be the hundredth man, but you, at least, are the hundredth
+woman."
+
+"Why? Because I say the first thing that asks to be said?"
+
+"That, and some other things," he rejoined guardedly. Then, with malice
+aforethought: "Is it one of the requirements that your centennial man
+should behave himself like a boor at a dinner-table, and talk shop and
+eat with his knife?"
+
+"You know that isn't what I meant. Manners don't make the man. It's what
+you talked about--the trumpery little social things that you found your
+keenest pleasure in talking about. I don't know what has ever taken you
+out to a construction camp and persuaded you to wear khaki. Perhaps it
+was only what Colonel-daddy calls a 'throw-back.' I don't believe you
+ever did a day's hard work in your life before you came to the
+Timanyoni."
+
+Smith looked at his hands. They were large and shapely, but the only
+callouses they could show were accusingly recent.
+
+"If you mean manual labor, you are right," he admitted thoughtfully.
+"Just the same, I think you are a little hard on me."
+
+It was growing dark by this time, and the stars were coming out. Some
+one had turned the lights on in the room the windows of which opened
+upon the portico, and the young woman's chair was so placed that he
+could still see her face. She was smiling rather more amicably when she
+said:
+
+"You mustn't take it too hard. It isn't you, personally, you know; it's
+the type. I've met it before. I didn't meet any other kind during my
+three years in the boarding-school; nice, pleasant young gentlemen, as
+immaculately dressed as their pocketbooks would allow, up in all the
+latest little courtesies and tea-table shop-talk. They were all men, I
+suppose, but I'm afraid a good many of them had never found it out--will
+never find it out. I've been calling it environment; I don't like to
+admit that the race is going down-hill."
+
+By this time the sardonic humor was once more in full possession and he
+was enjoying her keenly.
+
+"Go on," he said. "This is my night off."
+
+"I've said enough; too much, perhaps. But a little while ago at the
+dinner-table, and again out there in the grove where you were walking
+with mamma, you reminded me so forcibly of a man whom I met just for a
+part of one evening about a year ago."
+
+"Tell me about him," he urged.
+
+"I was coming back from school and I stopped over in a small town in the
+Middle West to visit some old friends of mamma's. There were young
+people in the family, and one evening they gave a lawn-party for me. I
+met dozens of the pleasant young gentlemen, more than I had ever seen
+together at any one time before; clerks and book-keepers, and rich
+farmers' sons who had been to college."
+
+"But the man of whom I am reminding you?"
+
+"He was one of them. He drove over from some neighboring town in his
+natty little automobile and gave me fully an hour of his valuable time.
+He made me perfectly furious!"
+
+"Poor you!" laughed Smith; but he was thankful that the camp sunburn and
+his four weeks' beard were safeguarding his identity. "I hope you didn't
+tell him so. He was probably doing his level best to give you a good
+time in the only definition of the term that the girls of his own set
+had ever given him. But why the fury in his case in particular?"
+
+"Just because, I suppose. He was rather good-looking, you know; and down
+underneath all the airy little things he persisted in talking about it
+seemed as if I could now and then get tiny glimpses of something that
+might be a real man, a strong man. I remember he told me he was a bank
+cashier and that he danced. He was quite hopeless, of course. Without
+being what you would call conceited, you could see that the crust was so
+thick that nothing short of an earthquake would ever break it."
+
+"But the earthquakes do come, once in a blue moon," he said, still
+smiling at her. "Let's get it straight. You are not trying to tell me
+that you object to decent clothes and good manners _per se_, are you?"
+
+"Not at all; I like them both. But the hundredth man won't let either
+his clothes or his manners wear him; he'll wear _them_."
+
+"Still, you think the type of man you have been describing is entirely
+hopeless; that was the word you used, I believe."
+
+The colonel was coming out, and he had stopped in the doorway to light a
+long-stemmed pipe. The young woman got up and fluffed her hair with the
+ends of her fingers--a little gesture which Smith remembered, recalling
+it from the night of the far-away lawn-party.
+
+"Daddy wants you, and I'll have to vanish," she said; "but I'll answer
+your question before I go. Types are always hopeless; it's only the
+hundredth man who isn't. It's a great pity you couldn't go on whipping
+claim-jumpers all the rest of your life, Mr. Smith. Don't you think so?
+Good night. We'll meet again at breakfast. Daddy isn't going to let you
+get away short of a night's lodging, I know."
+
+Two cigars for Smith and four pipes for the colonel further along, the
+tall Missourian rose out of the split-bottomed chair which he had drawn
+up to face the guest's and rapped the ashes from the bowl of the
+corn-cob into the palm of his hand.
+
+"I think you've got it all now, Smith, every last crook and turn of it,
+and I reckon you're tired enough to run away to bed. You see just where
+we stand, and how little we've got to go on. If I've about talked an arm
+off of you, it's for your own good. I don't know how you've made up your
+mind, or if you've made it up at all; but it was only fair to show you
+how little chance we've got on anything short of a miracle. I wouldn't
+want to see you butt your head against a stone wall, and that's about
+what it looks like to me."
+
+Smith took a turn up and down the stone-flagged floor of the portico
+with his hands behind him. Truly, the case of Timanyoni Ditch was
+desperate; even more desperate than he had supposed. Figuring as the
+level-headed bank cashier of the former days, he told himself soberly
+that no man in his senses would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Then the
+laughing gibes of the hundredth woman--gibes which had cut far deeper
+than she had imagined--came back to send the blood surging through his
+veins. It would be worth something to be able to work the miracle the
+colonel had spoken of; and afterward....
+
+Colonel Dexter Baldwin was still tapping his palm absently with the
+pipe when Smith came back and said abruptly:
+
+"I have decided, Colonel. I'll start in with you to-morrow morning, and
+we'll pull this mired scheme of yours out of the mud, or break a leg
+trying to. But you mustn't forget what I told you out at the camp. Right
+in the middle of things I may go rotten on you and drop out."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+The Sick Project
+
+
+Brewster, owing its beginnings to the completion of the Nevada Short
+Line, and the fact that the railroad builders designated it as a
+division headquarters, had grown into city-charter size and importance
+with the opening of the gold-mines in the Gloria district, and the
+transformation of the surrounding park grass-lands into cultivated
+ranches. To the growth and prosperity of the intermountain city a summer
+hotel on the shore of Lake Topaz--reached only by stage from
+Brewster--had added its influence; and since the hotel brought people
+with well-lined pocketbooks, there was a field for the enthusiastic
+real-estate promoters whose offices filled all the odd corners in the
+Hophra House block.
+
+In one of these offices, on the morning following Smith's first dinner
+at Hillcrest, a rather caustic colloquy was in progress between the man
+whose name appeared in gilt lettering on the front windows and one of
+his unofficial assistants. Crawford Stanton, he of the window name, was
+a man of many personalities. To summer visitors with money to invest, he
+was the genial promoter, and if there were suggestions of iron hardness
+in the sharp jaw and in the smoothly shaven face and flinty eyes, there
+was also a pleasant reminder of Eastern business methods and alertness
+in the promoter's manner. But Lanterby, tilting uneasily in the
+"confidential" chair at the desk-end, knew another and more biting side
+of Mr. Stanton, as a hired man will.
+
+"Good Gad! do you sit there and tell me that the three of them let that
+hobo of Williams's push them off the map?" Stanton was demanding
+raucously. "I thought you had at least sense enough to last you
+overnight. I told you to pick out a bunch with sand--fellows that could
+hang on and put up a fight if they had to. And you say all this happened
+the day before yesterday: how does it come that you are just now
+reporting it?"
+
+The hard-faced henchman in the tilting chair made such explanations as
+he could.
+
+"Boogerfield and his two partners 've been hidin' out somewhere; I allow
+they was plumb ashamed to come in and tell how they'd let one man run
+'em off. You'd think that curly-whiskered helper o' Williams's was a
+holy terror, to hear Boogerfield talk. They'd left their artillery in
+the chuck-wagon, and they say he come at 'em barehanded--with the
+colonel's girl settin' in the ortamobile a-lookin' on. Boogerfield wants
+to know who's goin' to pay him for them two Winchesters that His
+Whiskers bu'sted over the wagon-wheel."
+
+Mr. Crawford Stanton was carelessly unconcerned about the claim-jumpers'
+loss, either in gear or skin.
+
+"Damn the Winchesters!" he said morosely. "What do you know about this
+fellow Smith? Who is he, and where did he come from?"
+
+Lanterby told all that was known of Smith, and had no difficulty in
+compressing it into a single sentence. Stanton leaned back in his chair
+and the lids of the flinty eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
+
+"There's a lot more to it than that," he said incisively at the end of
+the reflective pause. Then he added a curt order: "Make it your job to
+find out."
+
+Lanterby moved uneasily in his insecure seat, but before he could speak,
+his employer went on again, changing the topic abruptly, but still
+keeping within the faultfinding boundaries.
+
+"What sort of a screw has gone loose in your deal with the railroad
+men? I thought you told me you had it fixed with the yard crews so that
+Williams's material would have a chance to season a while in the
+Brewster yards before it was delivered. They got two cars of cement and
+one of steel the day before yesterday, and the delivery was made within
+three hours after the stuff came in from the East."
+
+Again Lanterby tried to explain.
+
+"Dougherty, the yardmaster, took the bank roll I slipped him, all right
+enough, and promised to help out. But he's scared of Maxwell. He told me
+this mornin' that Colonel Baldwin has been kickin' like blazes to
+Maxwell about the delays."
+
+"Maxwell is a thick-headed ass!" exploded the faultfinder. "I've done
+everything on earth except to tell him outright in so many words that
+his entire railroad outfit, from President Brewster down, is lined up on
+the other side of the fight. But go on with your dickering. Jerk
+Dougherty into line and tell him that nothing is going to happen to him
+if he doesn't welsh on us. Hint to him that we can pull a longer string
+than Dick Maxwell can, if it comes to a show-down. Now go out and find
+Shaw. I want him, and I want him right now."
+
+The hard-faced man who looked as if he might be a broken-down gambler
+unjointed his leg-hold upon the tilted chair and went out; and a few
+minutes later another of Stanton's pay-roll men drifted in. He was a
+young fellow with sleepy eyes and cigarette stains on his fingers, and
+he would have passed readily for a railroad clerk out of a job, which
+was what he really was.
+
+"Well?" snapped Stanton when the incomer had taken the chair lately
+vacated by Lanterby.
+
+"I shadowed the colonel, as you told me to," said the young man. "He
+went up to Red Butte to see if he couldn't rope in some of the
+old-timers on his ditch project. He was trying to sell some treasury
+stock. His one-horse company is about out of money. Mickle, a clerk in
+Kinzie's bank, tells me that the ditch company's balance is drawn down
+to a few thousand dollars, with no more coming in."
+
+"Did the colonel succeed in making a raise in Red Butte?"
+
+"Nary," said the spy nonchalantly. "Drake, the banker up there, was his
+one best bet; but I got a man I know to give Drake a pointer, and he
+curled up like a hedgehog when you poke it with a sharp stick."
+
+"That's better. The colonel came back yesterday, didn't he?"
+
+"Yesterday afternoon. His wife and daughter met him at the
+railroad-station with the automobile, and told him something or other
+that made him hire old man Shuey to drive the women out home while he
+took the roadster and went up to the dam."
+
+"You went along?" queried Stanton.
+
+"As soon as I could find somebody to drive me; yes. That wasn't right
+away, though; and when I got there I had to leave my buzz-wagon back in
+the hills a piece and walk into camp. When I inquired around I found
+that the colonel was shut up in Williams's office with a fellow named
+Smith. They were finishing up whatever they'd been talking about when I
+got a place to listen in; but I heard enough to make me suspect that
+something new had broken loose. Just as they were getting ready to quit,
+the colonel was saying: 'That settles it, Smith; you've got to come over
+into'--I didn't catch the name of the place--'and help us. Williams
+tells me you refused him, but you can't refuse me.' There was more of
+it, but they had opened the door and I had to skin out. A little later
+they drove off together in the colonel's car, coming on through town to
+go out to the ranch, I suppose, because Smith didn't show up any more
+at the camp."
+
+Again the gentleman with the sharp jaw took time for narrow-eyed
+reflection.
+
+"You'll have to switch over from the colonel to this fellow Smith for
+the present, Shaw," he decided, at length. "Lanterby is supposed to be
+on that part of the job, but he's altogether too coarse-handed. I want
+to know who Smith is, and where he hails from, and how he comes to be
+butting in. Lanterby said at first, and says yet, that he is just a
+common hobo tumbling in from the outside. It's pretty evident that
+Lanterby has another guess coming. You look him up and do it quick."
+
+The young man glanced up with a faint warming of avarice in his sleepy
+eyes. "It'll most likely run into money--for expenses," he suggested.
+
+"For graft, you mean," snapped Stanton. Then he had it out with this
+second subordinate in crisp English. "I'm onto you with both feet, Shaw;
+every crook and turn of you. More than that, I know why you were fired
+out of Maxwell's office; you've got sticky fingers. That's all right
+with me up to a certain point, but beyond that point you get off.
+Understand?"
+
+Shaw made no answer in direct terms, but if his employer had been
+watching the heavy-lidded eyes he might have seen in them the shadow of
+a thing much more dangerous than plain dishonesty: a passing shadow of
+the fear that makes for treachery when the sharp need for
+self-protection arises.
+
+"I'll try to find out about the hobo," he said, with fair enough
+lip-loyalty, and after he had rolled a fresh cigarette he went away to
+begin the mining operations which might promise to unearth Smith's
+record.
+
+It was ten o'clock when Shaw left the real-estate office in the Hophra
+House block. Half an hour earlier Smith had come to town with the
+colonel in the roadster, and the two had shut themselves up in the
+colonel's private room in the Timanyoni Ditch Company's town office in
+the Barker Building, which was two squares down the street from the
+Hophra House. Summoned promptly, Martin, the bookkeeper, had brought in
+his statements and balance-sheets, and the new officer, who was as yet
+without a title, had struck out his plan of campaign.
+
+"'Amortization' is the word, Colonel," was Smith's prompt verdict after
+he had gone over Martin's summaries. "The best way to get at it now is
+to wipe the slate clean and begin over again."
+
+The ranchman president was chuckling soberly.
+
+"Once more you'll have to show me, John," he said. "We folks out here in
+the hills are not up in all the Wall Street crinkles."
+
+"You don't know the word? It means to scrap the old machinery to make
+room for the new," Smith explained. "In modern business it is the
+process of extinguishing a corporation: closing it up and burying it in
+another and bigger one, usually. That is what we must do with Timanyoni
+Ditch."
+
+"I'm getting you, a little at a time," said the colonel, taking his
+first lesson in high finance as a duck takes to the water. Then he
+added: "It won't take much of a lick to kill off the old company, in the
+shape it's got into now. How will you work it?"
+
+Smith had the plan at his fingers' ends. With the daring of all the
+perils had come a fresh access of fighting fitness that made him feel as
+if he could cope with anything.
+
+"We must close up the company's affairs and then reorganize promptly
+and, with just as little noise as may be, form another company--which we
+will call Timanyoni High Line--and let it take over the old outfit,
+stock, liabilities, and assets entire. You say your present capital
+stock is one hundred thousand dollars; is it all paid in?"
+
+"Every dollar of it except a little for a few shares of treasury stock
+that we've been holding for emergencies. As I told you last night, I
+went up to Red Butte and tried to sell that treasury stock to Drake, the
+banker; but he wouldn't bite."
+
+"Which was mighty lucky for us," Smith put in. "It would have queered us
+beautifully if he had, and the story had got out that the president of
+Timanyoni Ditch had sold a block of treasury stock at thirty-nine."
+
+"Well, he didn't take it," said the colonel. "He was so blame' chilly
+that I like to froze to death before I could get out of the bank."
+
+"All right; then we'll go on. This new company that I am speaking of
+will be capitalized at, say, an even half million. To the present
+holders of Timanyoni Ditch we'll give the new stock for the old, share
+for share, with a bonus of twenty-five shares of the new stock for every
+twenty-five shares of the old surrendered and exchanged. This will be
+practically giving the present shareholders two for one. Will that
+satisfy them?"
+
+This time Colonel Dexter Baldwin's smile was grim.
+
+"You're just juggling now, John, and you know it. Out here on the woolly
+edge of things a dollar is just a plain iron dollar, and you can't make
+it two merely by calling it so."
+
+"Never you mind about that," cut in the new financier. "The first rule
+of investment is that a dollar is worth just what it will earn in
+dividends; no more, and equally no less. You know, and I know, that if
+we can pull this thing through there is a barrel of money in it for all
+concerned. But we'll skip that part of it and stick to the details. At
+two to one for the amortization of the old company we shall still have
+something like three hundred thousand dollars treasury stock upon which
+to realize for the new capital needed, and that will be amply sufficient
+to complete the dam and the ditches and to provide a fighting fund. Now
+then, tell me this: how near can we come to placing that treasury stock
+right here in Timanyoni Park? In other words, can the money be had here
+at any price?"
+
+"You mean that you don't want to go East to raise it?"
+
+"I mean that we haven't time. More than that, it's up to us to keep this
+thing in the family, so to speak; and the moment we go into other
+markets, we are getting over into the enemy's country. I'm not saying
+that the money couldn't be raised in New York; but if we should go
+there, the trust would have an underhold on us, right from the start."
+
+"I see," said the colonel, who was indeed seeing many things that his
+simple-hearted philosophy had never dreamed of; and then he answered the
+direct question. "There is plenty of money right here in the Timanyonis;
+not all of it in Brewster, perhaps, but in the country among the Gloria
+and Little Butte mine owners, smelter men, and the better class of
+ranchmen. Take Dick Maxwell, the railroad superintendent--he's a miner
+on the side, you know--he could put ten or twenty thousand more into it
+without turning a hair; and so could some of the others."
+
+Smith nodded. He was getting his second wind now, and the race promised
+to be a keen joy.
+
+"But they would have to be 'shown,' you think?" he suggested. "All
+right; we'll proceed to show them. Now we can come down to present
+necessities. We've got to keep the work going--and speed it up to the
+limit: we ought to double Williams's force at once--put on a night shift
+to work by electric light. I took the liberty of telephoning Williams
+from Hillcrest this morning while you were reading your newspaper. I
+told him to wire advertisements for more labor to the newspapers in
+Denver, offering wages high enough to make the thing look attractive."
+
+The colonel blinked twice and swallowed hard.
+
+"Say, John," he said, leaning across the table-desk; "you've sure got
+your nerve with you. Do you know what our present bank balance happens
+to be?"
+
+"No; I was just coming to that," said the reorganizer, smiling easily.
+"How much is it?"
+
+"It is under five thousand dollars, and a good part of that is owing to
+the cement people!"
+
+"Never mind; don't get nervous," was the reassuring rejoinder. "We are
+going to make it bigger in a few minutes, I hope. Who is your banker
+here?"
+
+"Dave Kinzie, of the Brewster City National."
+
+"Tell me a little something about Mr. Kinzie before we go down to see
+him; just brief him for me as a man, I mean."
+
+The colonel was shaking his head slowly.
+
+"He's what you might call a twenty-ton optimist, Dave is; solid, a
+little slow and sure, but the biggest boomer in the West, if you can
+get him started--believes in the resources of the country and all that.
+But you can't borrow money from him without security, if that's what
+you're aiming to do."
+
+"Can't we?" smiled the young man who knew banks and bankers. "Let's go
+and see. You never know until you try, Colonel; and even then you're not
+always dead certain. Take me around and introduce me to this Mr. David
+Kinzie--and, hold on; it may be as well to give me a handle of some sort
+before we begin to talk money with other people. What are you going to
+call me in this new scheme of things?"
+
+The big Missourian's laugh was a hearty guffaw.
+
+"Gosh all Friday! the way it's starting out you're the whole works,
+Smith! Just name your own name, and we'll cinch it for you."
+
+"I suppose you've already got a secretary and treasurer?"
+
+"We had up to a few days ago, before Buck Gardner sold out his stock to
+Crawford Stanton."
+
+"Haven't you had a board meeting since?"
+
+"Yes; but only to accept Gardner's resignation. We didn't elect anybody
+else--nobody wanted the place; every last man of 'em shied."
+
+"Naturally; not seeing any immediate prospects of having anything to
+treasure," laughed Smith. "But that will do. You may introduce me to
+Kinzie as your acting financial secretary, if you like. Now one more
+question: what is Kinzie's attitude toward Timanyoni Ditch?"
+
+"At first it was all kinds of friendly; he is a stockholder in a small
+way, and he's heart and soul for anything that promises to build up the
+country, as I told you. But after a while he began to cool down a
+little, and now--well, I don't know; I hate to think it of Dave, but I'm
+afraid he's leaning the other way, toward these Eastern fellows. Little
+things he has let fall, and this last deal in which he tried to cover
+Stanton's tracks in the stock-buying from Gardner and Bolling; they all
+point that way."
+
+"That is natural, too," said Smith, whose point of view was always
+unobscured in any battle of business. "The big company would be a better
+customer for the bank than your little one could ever hope to be. I
+guess that's all for the present. If you're ready, we'll go down and
+face the music. Take me to the Brewster City National and introduce me
+to Mr. Kinzie; then you can stand by and watch the wheels go round."
+
+"By Janders!" said the colonel with an open smile; "I believe you'd just
+as soon tackle a banker as to eat your dinner; and I'd about as soon
+take a horsewhipping. Come on; I'll steer you up against Dave, but I'm
+telling you right now that the steering is about all you can count on
+from me."
+
+It was while they were crossing the street together and turning down
+toward the Alameda Avenue corner where the Brewster City National Bank
+windows looked over into the windows of the Hophra House block opposite,
+that Mr. Crawford Stanton had his third morning caller, a thick-set
+barrel-bodied man with little pig-like eyes, closely cropped hair, a
+bristling mustache, and a wooden leg of the home-made sort--a peg with a
+hollowed bowl for the bent knee and a slat-like extension to go up the
+outside of the leg to be stapled to a leathern belt. Across one of the
+swarthy cheeks there was a broad scar that looked, at first sight, like
+a dash of blue paint. It was a knife slash got in the battle with
+Mexican Ruiz in which the thick-set man had lost his leg. After the
+Mexican had brought him down with a bullet, he had added his mark as he
+had said he would; laying the big man's cheek open and rubbing the
+powder from a chewed cartridge into the wound. Afterward, the men of the
+camps called the cripple "Pegleg" or "Blue Pete" indifferently, though
+not to his face. For though the fat face was always relaxed in a
+good-natured smile, the crippled saloon-keeper was of those who kill
+with the knife; and since he could not pursue, he was fain to cajole the
+prey within reach.
+
+Stanton looked up from his desk when the pad-and-click of the cripple's
+step came in from the street.
+
+"Hello, Simms," he said, in curt greeting. "Want to see me?"
+
+"Uh-huh; for a minute or so. Busy?"
+
+"Never too busy to talk business. Sit down."
+
+Simms threw the brim of his soft hat up with a backhanded stroke and
+shook his head. "It ain't worth while; and I gotta get back to camp. I
+blew in to tell y'u there's a fella out there that needs th' sand-bag."
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"Fella name' Smith. He's showin' 'em how to cut too many
+corners--pace-settin', he calls it. First thing they know, they'll get
+the concrete up to where the high water won't bu'st it out."
+
+Stanton's laugh was impatient.
+
+"Don't make any mistake of that sort, Simms," he said. "_We_ don't want
+the dam destroyed; we'd work just as hard as they would to prevent that.
+All we want is to have other people think it's likely to go out--think
+it hard enough to keep them from putting up any more money. Let that go.
+Is there any more fresh talk--among the men?" Stanton prided himself a
+little upon the underground wire-pulling which had resulted in putting
+Simms on the ground as the keeper of the construction-camp canteen. It
+was a fairly original way of keeping a listening ear open for the camp
+gossip.
+
+"Little," said the cripple briefly. "This here blink-blank fella Smith's
+been tellin' Williams that I ort to be run off th' reservation; says th'
+booze puts the brake on for speed."
+
+"So it does," agreed Stanton musingly. "But I guess you can stay a while
+longer. What do the men say about Smith?"
+
+"Whole heap o' things. The best guess is that he's a jail-break' from
+somewheres back in the States. He ain't no common 'bo; that's a dead
+cinch. Gatrow, the quarry foreman, puts it up that he done something he
+had to run for."
+
+"Get him drunk and find out," suggested Stanton shortly.
+
+"Not him," said the round-faced villain, with the ingratiating smile
+wrinkling at the corners of the fat-embedded eyes. "He's the
+take-a-drink-or-let-it-alone kind."
+
+"Well, keep your eye on him and your ears open. I have a notion that
+he's been sent here--by some outfit that means to buck us. If he hasn't
+any backing----"
+
+The interruption was the hurried incoming of the young man with sleepy
+eyes and the cigarette stains on his fingers, and for once in a way he
+was stirred out of his customary attitude of cynical indifference.
+
+"Smith and Colonel Baldwin are over yonder in Kinzie's private office,"
+he reported hastily. "Before they shut the door I heard Baldwin
+introducing Smith as the new acting financial secretary of the Timanyoni
+Ditch Company!"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+When Greek Meets Greek
+
+
+Smith allowed himself ten brief seconds for a swift eye-measuring of the
+square-shouldered, stockily built man with a gray face and stubbly
+mustache sitting in the chair of authority at the Brewster City National
+before he chose his line of attack.
+
+"We are not going to cut very deeply into your time this morning, Mr.
+Kinzie," he began when the eye-appraisal had given him his cue. "You
+know the history of Timanyoni Ditch up to the present, and you have no
+doubt had your own misgivings about the wisdom of its financing on such
+a small scale, and as a purely local enterprise. Others have had the
+same misgivings, and--well, to cut out the details, there is to be a
+complete reorganization of the company on a new basis, and we are here
+to offer to take your personal allotment of the stock off your hands at
+par for cash. Colonel Baldwin has stipulated that his friends in the
+original deal must be protected, and----"
+
+"Here, here--hold on," interrupted the bank president; "you're hitting
+it up a little bit too fast for me, Mr. Smith. Before we get down to any
+talk of buying and selling, suppose you tell me something about yourself
+and your new company. Who are you? and whereabouts do you hold forth
+when you are at home?"
+
+Smith laughed easily. "If we were trying to borrow money of you, we
+might have to go into preliminaries and particulars, Mr. Kinzie. As it
+is, I'm sure you are not going to press for the answers to these very
+natural questions of yours. Further than that, we shall have to ask you
+to hold anything that may be said here in strict confidence--as between
+a banker and his customer. We are not alone in the fight for the
+water-rights on the other side of the river, as you know, and until we
+are safely fortified we shall have to be prudently cautious. But that is
+another matter. What we want to know now is this: will you let us
+protect you by taking your Timanyoni Ditch stock at par? That's the
+principal question at issue just now."
+
+Kinzie met the issue fairly. "I don't know you yet, Mr. Smith; but I do
+know Colonel Baldwin, here, and I guess I'll take a chance on things as
+they stand. I'll keep my stock."
+
+The new secretary's smile was rather patronizing than grateful.
+
+"As you please, Mr. Kinzie, of course," he said smoothly. "But I'm going
+to tell you frankly that you'll keep it at your own risk. I am not sure
+what plan will be adopted, but I assume it will be amortization and a
+retirement of the stock of the original company. All that we need to
+enable us to bring this about is the voting control of the old stock,
+and we already have that, as you know."
+
+The banker pursed his lips until the stubbly gray mustache stood out
+stiffly. Then he cut straight to the heart of the matter.
+
+"You mean that there will be a majority pool of the old stock, and that
+the pool will ignore those stockholders who don't come in?"
+
+"Something like that," said Smith pleasantly. And then: "We're going to
+be generously liberal, Mr. Kinzie; we are giving Colonel Baldwin's
+friends a fair chance to come in out of the wet. Of course, if they
+refuse to come in--if they prefer to stay out----"
+
+Kinzie was smiling sourly.
+
+"You'll have to take care of your own banker, won't you, Mr. Smith?" he
+asked. "Why don't you loosen up and tell me a little more? What have
+you fellows got up your sleeve, anyway?"
+
+At this, the new financial manager slacked off on the hawser of secrecy
+a little--just a little.
+
+"Mr. Kinzie, we've got the biggest thing, and the surest, that ever came
+to Timanyoni Park; not in futures, mind you, but in facts already as
+good as accomplished. If it were necessary--as it isn't--I could go to
+New York to-day and put a million dollars behind our reorganization plan
+in twenty-four hours. You'd say so, yourself, if I were at liberty to
+explain. But again we're dodging and wasting your time and ours. Think
+the matter over--about your stock--and let me know before noon. It's
+rather cruel to hurry you so, but time is precious with us and----"
+
+"You sit right down there, young man, and put a little of this precious
+time of yours against mine," said Kinzie, pointing authoritatively at
+the chair which Smith had just vacated. "You mustn't go off at
+half-cock, that way. You'll need a bank here to do business with, won't
+you?"
+
+Smith did not sit down. Instead, he smiled genially and fired his final
+shot.
+
+"No, Mr. Kinzie; we shan't need a local bank--not as a matter of
+absolute necessity. In fact, on some accounts, I don't know but that it
+would be better for us not to have one."
+
+"Sit down," insisted the bank president; and this time he would take no
+denial. Then he turned abruptly upon Baldwin, who had been playing his
+part of the silent listener letter-perfect.
+
+"Baldwin, we are old friends, and I'd trust you to the limit--on any
+proposition that doesn't ask for more than straight-from-the-shoulder
+honesty. How much is this young friend of ours talking through his hat?"
+
+"Not any, whatever, Dave. He's got the goods." Baldwin was wise enough
+to limit himself carefully as to quantity in his reply.
+
+"It's straight, is it? No gold-brick business?"
+
+"So straight that if we can't pay twenty per cent on what money we put
+in, I'll throw up my three thousand acres over yonder on Little Creek
+and go back to cow-punching."
+
+Again the banker made a comical bristle brush of his cropped mustache.
+
+"I want your business, Dexter; I've got to have it. But I'm going to be
+plain with you. You two are asking me to believe that you've gone
+outside and dug up a new bunch of backers. That may be all right, but
+Timanyoni Ditch has struck a pretty big bone that maybe your new
+backers know about--and maybe they don't. You've had a lot of bad luck,
+so far; getting your land titles cleared, and all that; and you're going
+to have more. I've----"
+
+It was Smith's turn again and he cut in smartly.
+
+"That is precisely what I was driving at. Our banker can't run with the
+hare and hunt with the hounds. You'll excuse me if I say that you
+haven't been altogether fair with Timanyoni Ditch, or with Colonel
+Baldwin, Mr. Kinzie. A friendly banker doesn't help sell out his
+customer. You know that, as well as I do. Still, you did it."
+
+Kinzie threw up his hands and tried to defend himself. "It was a
+straight business transaction, Mr. Smith. As long as we're in the
+banking business, we buy and sell for anybody who comes along."
+
+"No, we don't, Mr. Kinzie; we protect our customers first. In the
+present instance you thought your customer was a dead one, anyway, so it
+wouldn't make much difference if you should throw another shovelful of
+dirt or so onto the coffin. Wasn't that the way of it?"
+
+The president was fairly pushed to the ropes and he showed it.
+
+"Answer me one question, both of you," he snapped. "Are you big enough
+to fight for your own hand against Stanton's crowd?"
+
+"You'll see; and the sight is going to cost you something," said Smith,
+and the blandest oil could have been no smoother than his tone.
+
+"Is that right, Dexter?"
+
+"That's the way it looks to me, Dave," said the ranchman capitalist,
+who, whatever might be his limitations in the field of high finance, was
+not lacking the nerve to fight unquestioning in any partner's quarrel.
+
+The president of the Brewster City National turned back to Smith.
+
+"What do you want, Mr. Smith?" he asked, not too cordially.
+
+"Nothing that you'd give us, I guess; a little business loyalty, for one
+thing----"
+
+"And a checking balance for immediate necessities for another?"
+suggested the banker.
+
+With all his trained astuteness--trained in Kinzie's own school, at
+that--Smith could not be sure that the gray-faced old Westerner was not
+setting a final trap for him, after all. But he took the risk, saying,
+with a decent show of indifference: "Of course, it would be more
+convenient here than in Denver or Chicago. But there is no hurry about
+that part of it."
+
+The president took a slip of paper from a pigeonhole and wrote rapidly
+upon it. Once more his optimism was locking horns with prudent caution.
+It was the optimism, however, that was driving the pen. Baldwin's word
+was worth something, and it might be disastrous to let these two get
+away without anchoring them solidly to the Brewster City National.
+
+"Sign this, you two," he said. "I don't know even the name of your new
+outfit yet, but I'll take a chance on one piece of two-name paper,
+anyhow."
+
+Smith took up the slip and glanced at it. It was an accommodation note
+for twenty thousand dollars. With the money fairly in his hands, he
+paused to drive the nail of independence squarely home before he would
+sign.
+
+"We don't want this at all, Mr. Kinzie, unless the bank's good-will
+comes with it," he said with becoming gravity.
+
+"I'll stand with you," was the brusque rejoinder. "But it's only fair to
+you both to say that you've got the biggest kind of a combination to
+buck you--a national utilities corporation with the strongest sort of
+political backing."
+
+"I doubt if you can tell us anything that we don't already know," said
+Smith coolly, as he put his name on the note; and when Baldwin had
+signed: "Let this go to the credit of Timanyoni Ditch, if you please,
+Mr. Kinzie, and we'll transfer it later. It's quite possible that we
+shan't need it, but we are willing to help out a little on your discount
+profits, anyway. Further along, when things shape themselves up a bit
+more definitely, you shall know all there is to know, and we'll give you
+just as good a chance to make money as you'll give us."
+
+When they were safely out of the bank and half a square away from it,
+Dexter Baldwin pushed his hat back and mopped his forehead. "They say a
+man can't sweat at this altitude," he remarked. "I'm here to tell you,
+Smith, that I've lost ten pounds in the last ten minutes. Where in the
+name of the jumping Jehoshaphat did you get your nerve, boy? You stand
+to lose an even hundred-and-fifty-dollar bill on this deal; don't you
+know that?"
+
+"How so?" asked the plunger.
+
+"I'd have bet you that much against the old campaign hat you're wearing
+that you couldn't 'touch' Dave Kinzie for twenty dollars--let alone
+twenty thousand--in a month of Sundays! You made him believe we'd got
+outside backing from somewhere."
+
+"I didn't say anything like that, did I?"
+
+"No; but you opened the door and he walked in."
+
+"That's all right: I'm not responsible for Mr. Kinzie's imagination. We
+were obliged to have a little advertising capital; we couldn't turn a
+wheel without it. Now that we have it, we'll get busy. We've got to
+furnish a new suite of offices, install a bigger office force,
+incorporate Timanyoni High Line, and open its stock subscription books,
+all practically while the band plays. Time is the one thing we can't
+waste. Put me in touch with a good business lawyer and I'll start the
+legal machinery. Then you can get into your car and go around and
+interview your crowd, man by man. I want to know exactly where we stand
+with the old stockholders before we make any move in public. Can you do
+that?"
+
+Baldwin lifted his hat and shoved his fingers through his hair.
+
+"I reckon I can; there are only sixty or seventy of 'em. And Bob
+Stillings is your lawyer. Come around the corner and I'll introduce
+you."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+The Rocket and the Stick
+
+
+For a full fortnight after the preliminary visit to the Brewster City
+National Bank, Smith was easily the busiest man in Timanyoni County.
+Establishing himself in the Hophra House, and discarding the working
+khaki only because he was shrewd enough to dress the new part
+becomingly, he flung himself into what Colonel Baldwin called the
+"miracle-working" campaign with a zest that knew no flagging moment.
+
+Within the fourteen-day period new town offices were occupied on the
+second floor of the Brewster City National Building; Stillings, most
+efficient of corporation counsels, had secured the new charter; and the
+stock-books of Timanyoni High Line had been opened, with the Brewster
+City National named as the company's depository and official fiduciary
+agent.
+
+At the dam the building activities had been generously doubled. An
+electric-light plant had been installed, and Williams was working day
+and night shifts both in the quarries and on the forms. Past this, the
+new financial manager, himself broadening rapidly as his field
+broadened, was branching out in other directions. After a brief
+conference with a few of his principal stockholders he had instructed
+Stillings to include the words "Power and Light" in the cataloguing of
+the new company's possible and probable charter activities, and by the
+end of the fortnight the foundations of a power-house were going in
+below the dam, and negotiations were already on foot with the Brewster
+city council looking toward the sale of electric current to the city for
+lighting and other purposes.
+
+Notwithstanding all the demands made upon him as the chief energizer in
+the working field, Smith had made the planting of his financial anchor
+securely to windward his first care. Furnished with a selected list by
+Colonel Baldwin, he had made a thorough canvas of possible investors,
+and by the time the new stock was printed and ready for delivery through
+Kinzie's bank, an iron-clad pool of the majority of the original
+Timanyoni Ditch stock had been organized, and Smith had sold to Maxwell,
+Starbuck, and other local capitalists a sufficient amount of the new
+treasury stock to give him a fighting chance; this, with a promise of
+more if it should be needed.
+
+The stock-selling campaign was a triumph, and though he did not
+recognize it as such, it marked the longest step yet taken in the march
+of the metamorphosis. As the cashier in Dunham's bank Smith had been
+merely a high-grade clerk. There had been no occasion for the
+development of the precious quality of initiative, and he had hardly
+known the meaning of the word. But now there seemed to be no limit to
+the new powers of accomplishment. Men met him upon his own ground, and a
+lilting sense of triumph gave him renewed daring when he found that he
+could actually inspire them with some portion of his own confidence and
+enthusiasm.
+
+But in all this there had been no miracle, one would say; nothing but
+enterprise and shrewd business acumen and lightning-like speed in
+bringing things to pass. If there were a miracle, it lay in this: that
+not to Maxwell or to any of the new investors had Smith revealed the
+full dimensions of the prize for which Timanyoni High Line was entering
+the race. Colonel Baldwin and one William Starbuck, Maxwell's
+brother-in-law, by courtesy, and his partner in the Little Alice mine,
+alone knew the wheel within the wheel; how the great Eastern utility
+corporation represented by Stanton had spent a million or more in the
+acquisition of the Escalante Grant, which would be practically worthless
+as agricultural land without the water which could be obtained only by
+means of the Timanyoni dam and canal system.
+
+With all these strenuous stirrings in the business field, it may say
+itself that Smith found little time for social indulgences during the
+crowded fortnight. Day after day the colonel begged him to take a night
+off at the ranch, and it was even more difficult to refuse the proffered
+hospitality at the week-end. But Smith did refuse it.
+
+With the new life and the larger ambition had come a sturdy resolve to
+hold himself aloof from entanglements of every sort. That Corona Baldwin
+was going to prove an entanglement he was wise enough to foresee from
+the moment in which he had identified her with the vitalizing young
+woman whose glove he had carried off. In fact, she was already
+associated in his thoughts with every step in the business battle. Was
+he not taking a very temerarious risk of discovery and arrest merely for
+the sake of proving to her that her "hopeless case" of the lawn-party
+could confute her mocking little theories about men and types without
+half trying?
+
+It was not until after Miss Corona--driving to town with her father, as
+she frequently did--had thrice visited the new offices that Smith began
+to congratulate himself, rather bitterly, to be sure, upon his wisdom in
+staying away from Hillcrest. For one thing, he was learning that Corona
+Baldwin was an exceedingly charming young woman of many moods and
+tenses, and that in some of the moods, and in practically all of the
+tenses, she was able to make him see rose-colored. When she was not with
+him, he had no difficulty in assuring himself that the rose-colored
+point of view was entirely out of the question for a man in daily peril
+of meeting the sheriff. But when she was present, calm sanity had a way
+of losing its grip, and the rose-colored possibilities reasserted
+themselves with intoxicating accompaniments.
+
+Miss Corona's fourth visit to the handsome suite of offices over the
+Brewster City National chanced to fall upon a Saturday. Her father,
+president of the new company, as he had been of the old, had a private
+office of his own, but Miss Corona soon drifted out to the railed-off
+end of the larger room, where the financial secretary had his desk.
+
+"Colonel-daddy tells me that you are coming out to Hillcrest for the
+week-end," was the way in which she interrupted the financial
+secretary's brow-knittings over a new material contract. "I have just
+wagered him a nice fat little round iron dollar of my allowance that you
+won't. How about it?"
+
+Smith looked up with his best-natured grin.
+
+"You win," he said shortly.
+
+"Thank you," she laughed. "In a minute or so I'll go back to the
+president's office and collect." Then: "One dinner, lodging, and
+breakfast of us was about all you could stand, wasn't it? I thought
+maybe it would be that way."
+
+"What made you think so?"
+
+"You should never ask a woman why; it's a frightfully unsafe thing to
+do."
+
+"I know," he mocked. "There have been whole books written about the lack
+of logic on your side of the sex fence."
+
+She had seated herself in the chair reserved for inquiring investors.
+There was a little interval of glove-smoothing silence, and then, like a
+flash out of a clear sky, she smiled across the desk-end at him and
+said:
+
+"Will you forgive me if I ask you a perfectly ridiculous question?"
+
+"Certainly. Other people ask them every day."
+
+"Is--is your name really and truly John Smith?"
+
+"Why should you doubt it?"
+
+It was just here that Smith was given to see another one of Miss
+Corona's many moods--or tenses--and it was a new one to him. She was
+visibly embarrassed.
+
+"I--I don't want to tell you," she stammered.
+
+"All right; you needn't."
+
+"If you're going to take it that easy, I _will_ tell you," she retorted.
+"Mr. Williams thought your name was an _alias_; and I'm not sure that he
+doesn't still think so."
+
+"The Smiths never have to have _aliases_. It's like John Doe or Richard
+Roe, you know."
+
+"Haven't you any middle name?"
+
+"I have a middle initial. It is 'M.'" He was looking her fairly in the
+eyes as he said it, and the light in the new offices was excellent.
+Thanks to her horseback riding, Miss Corona's small oval face had a
+touch of healthy outdoor tan; but under the tan there came, for just a
+flitting instant, a flush of deeper color, and at the back of the gray
+eyes there was something that Smith had never seen there before.
+
+"It's--it's just an initial?" she queried.
+
+"Yes; it's just an initial, and I don't use it ordinarily. I'm not
+ashamed of the plain 'John.'"
+
+"I don't know why you should be," she commented, half absently, he
+thought. And then: "How many 'John M. Smiths' do you suppose there are
+in the United States?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; a million or so, I guess."
+
+"I should think you would be rather glad of that," she told him. But
+when he tried to make her say why he should be glad, she talked
+pointedly of other things and presently went back to her father's
+office.
+
+It was not until after she had gone out with her father, and he had made
+her wager good by steadfastly refusing to spend the week-end at the
+ranch, that Smith began to put two and two together, erroneously, as it
+happened, though he could not know this. Mrs. Baldwin's home town in his
+native State was the little place that her daughter had visited and
+where the daughter had had a lawn-party given in her honor. Was it not
+more than probable that the colonel's wife was still keeping up some
+sort of a correspondence with her home people and that through this, or
+some mention in a local paper, Corona had got hold of the devastating
+story of one J. Montague Smith?
+
+There were fine little headings of perspiration standing on the
+fugitive's forehead when the small sum in addition had progressed thus
+far. But if he had only known it, there was no need, as yet, for the
+sweat of apprehension. Like some other young women, Miss Baldwin
+suffered from spasmodic attacks of the diary-keeping malady; she had
+been keeping one at the time of her return from school, and the
+lawn-party in the little town in the Middle West had its due entry.
+
+In a moment of idle curiosity on the Saturday forenoon, she had looked
+into the year-old diary to find the forgotten name of the man of whom
+Smith was still persistently reminding her. It was there in all its
+glory: "J. Montague Smith." Could it be possible?--but, no; John Smith,
+her father's John Smith, had come to the construction camp as a hobo,
+and that was not possible, not even thinkable, of the man she had met.
+None the less, it was a second attack of the idle curiosity that had
+moved her to go to town with her father on the Saturday afternoon of
+questionings.
+
+After the other members of the office force had taken their departure,
+Smith still sat at his desk striving to bring himself back with some
+degree of clear-headedness to the pressing demands of his job. Just as
+he was about to give it up and go across to the Hophra House for his
+dinner, William Starbuck drifted in to open the railing gate and to come
+and plant himself in the chair of privilege at Smith's desk-end.
+
+"Well, son; you've got the animals stirred up good and plenty, at last,"
+he said, when he had found the "makings" and was deftly rolling a
+cigarette--his one overlapping habit reaching back to his range-riding
+youth. "Dick Maxwell got a wire to-day from his kiddie's grandpaw--and
+my own respected daddy-in-law--Mr. Hiram Fairbairn; you know him--the
+lumber king."
+
+"I'm listening," said Smith.
+
+"Dick's wire was an order; instructions from headquarters to keep hands
+off of your new company and to work strictly in cahoots--'harmony' was
+the word he used--with Crawford Stanton. How does that fit you?"
+
+The financial secretary's smile was the self-congratulatory
+face-wrinkling of the quarry foreman who has seen his tackle hitch hold
+to land the big stone safely at the top of the pit.
+
+"What is Maxwell going to do about it?" he asked.
+
+"Dick is all wool and a yard wide; and what he signs his name to is what
+he is going to stand by. You won't lose him, but the wire shows us just
+about where we're aiming to put our leg into the gopher-hole and break
+it, doesn't it?"
+
+"I'm not borrowing any trouble. Mr. Fairbairn and his colleagues are
+just a few minutes too late, Starbuck. We've got our footing--inside of
+the corral."
+
+The ex-cow-puncher, who was now well up on the middle rounds of
+fortune's ladder, shook his head doubtfully.
+
+"Don't you make any brash breaks, John. Mr. Hiram Fairbairn and his
+crowd can swing twenty millions to your one little old dollar and a
+half, and they're not going to leave any of the pebbles unturned when it
+comes to saving their investment in the Escalante. I don't care
+specially for my own ante--Stella and I will manage to get a bite to
+eat, anyway. But for your own sake and Colonel Dexter's, you don't want
+to let the grass grow under your feet; not any whatsoever. You go ahead
+and get that dam finished, _pronto_, if you have to put a thousand men
+on it and work 'em Sundays as well as nights. That's all; I just thought
+I'd drop in and tell you."
+
+Smith went to his rooms in the hotel a few minutes later to change for
+dinner. Having been restocking his wardrobe to better fit his new state
+and standing as the financial head of Timanyoni High Line, he found the
+linen drawer in his dressing-case overflowing. Opening another, he began
+to arrange the overflow methodically. The empty drawer was lined with a
+newspaper, and he took the paper out to fold it afresh. In the act he
+saw that it was a copy of the _Chicago Tribune_ some weeks old. As he
+was replacing it in the drawer bottom, a single head-line on the
+upturned page sprang at him like a thing living and venomous. He bent
+lower and read the underrunning paragraph with a dull rage mounting to
+his eyes and serving for the moment to make the gray of the printed
+lines turn red.
+
+     LAWRENCEVILLE, May 19.--The grand jury has found a true bill
+     against Montague Smith, the absconding cashier of the
+     Lawrenceville Bank and Trust, charged with embezzling the
+     bank's funds. The crime would have been merely a breach of
+     trust and not actionable but for the fact that Smith, by owning
+     stock in the bankrupt Westfall industries lately taken over by
+     the Richlander Company, had so made himself amenable to the
+     law. Smith disappeared on the night of the 14th and is still at
+     large. He is also wanted on another criminal count. It will be
+     remembered that he brutally assaulted President Dunham on the
+     night of his disappearance. The reward of $1,000 for his
+     apprehension and arrest has been increased to $2,000 by the
+     bank directors.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The Narrow World
+
+
+At the fresh newspaper reminder that his sudden bound upward from the
+laboring ranks to the executive headship of the irrigation project had
+merely made him a more conspicuous target for the man-hunters, Smith
+scanted himself of sleep and redoubled his efforts to put the new
+company on a sound and permanent footing. In the nature of things he
+felt that his own shrift must necessarily be short. Though his own
+immediate public was comparatively small, the more or less dramatic
+_coup_ in Timanyoni High Line had advertised him thoroughly. He was
+rapidly coming to be the best-known man in Brewster, and he cherished no
+illusions about lost identities, or the ability to lose them, in a land
+where time and space have been wired and railroaded pretty well out of
+existence.
+
+Moreover, Dunham's bank was a member of a protective association, and
+Smith knew how wide a net could be spread and drawn when any absconding
+employee was really wanted. The doubling of the reward gave notice that
+Dunham was vindictively in earnest, and in that event it would be only a
+question of time until some one of the hired man-hunters would hit upon
+the successful clew.
+
+It was needful that he should work while the day was his in which to
+work; and he did work. There was still much to be done. Williams was
+having a threat of labor troubles at the dam, and Stillings had
+unearthed another possible flaw in the land titles dating back to the
+promotion of a certain railroad which had never gotten far beyond the
+paper stage and the acquiring of some of its rights of way.
+
+Smith flung himself masterfully at the new difficulties as they arose,
+and earned his meed of praise from the men for whom he overcame them.
+But under the surface current of the hurrying business tide a bitter
+undertow was beginning to set in. In every characterizing change it is
+inevitable that there should be some loss in the scrapping of the old to
+make way for the new. Smith saw himself in two aspects. In one he stood
+as a man among men, with a promise of winning honors and wealth; with
+the still more ecstatic promise of being able, perhaps, to win the love
+of the vivifying young woman who had once touched the spring of
+sentiment in him--and was touching it again. In the other he was a
+fugitive and an outlaw, waiting only for some spreader of the net to
+come and tap him on the shoulder.
+
+He took his first decided backward step on the night when he went into a
+hardware store and bought a pistol. The free, fair-fighting spirit which
+had sent him barehanded against the three claim-jumpers was gone and in
+its place there was a fell determination, undefined as yet, but keying
+itself to the barbaric pitch. With the weapon in his pocket he could
+look back over the transforming interspaces with a steadier eye. Truly,
+he had come far since that night in the Lawrenceville Bank when a single
+fierce gust of passion had plucked him away from all the familiar
+landmarks.
+
+And as for Corona Baldwin, there were days in which he set his jaw and
+told himself that nothing, even if it were the shedding of blood, should
+stand in the way of winning her. It was his right as a man; he had done
+nothing to make himself the outlaw that the Lawrenceville indictment
+declared him to be; therefore he would fight for his chance--slay for
+it, if need be. But there were other days when the saner thought
+prevailed and he saw the pit of selfishness into which the new
+barbarisms were plunging him. The Baldwins were his friends, and they
+were accepting him in the full light of the inference that he was a man
+under a cloud. Could he take a further advantage of their generosity by
+involving them still more intimately in his own particular entanglement?
+He assured himself that he couldn't and wouldn't; that though he might,
+indeed, commit a murder when the pinch came, he was still man enough to
+stay away from Hillcrest.
+
+He was holding this latter view grimly on an evening when he had worked
+himself haggard over the draft of the city ordinance which was to
+authorize the contract with the High Line Company for lights and power.
+It had been a day of nagging distractions. A rumor had been set
+afoot--by Stanton, as Smith made no doubt--hinting that the new dam
+would be unsafe when it should be completed; that its breaking, with the
+reservoir behind it, would carry death and destruction to the lowlands
+and even to the city. Timid stockholders, seeing colossal damage suits
+in the bare possibility, had taken the alarm, and Smith had spent the
+greater part of the day in trying to calm their fears. For this cause,
+and some others, he was on the ragged edge when Baldwin dropped in on
+his way home from the dam and protested.
+
+"Look here, John; you're overdoing this thing world without end! It's
+six o'clock, man!--quitting-time. Another week of this grinding and
+you'll be hunting a nice, quiet cot in the railroad hospital, and then
+where'll we be? You break it off short, right now, and go home with me
+and get your dinner and a good night's rest. No, by Jupiter, I'm not
+going to let you off, this trip. Get your coat and hat and come along,
+or I'll rope you down and hog-tie you."
+
+For once in a way, Smith found that there was no fight left in him, and
+he yielded, telling himself that another acceptance of the Baldwin
+hospitality, more or less, could make no difference. But no sooner was
+the colonel's gray roadster headed for the bridge across the Timanyoni
+than the exhilarating reaction set in. In a twinkling the business
+cares, and the deeper worries as well, fled away, and in their place
+heart-hunger was loosed. If Corona would give him this one evening, rest
+him, revive him, share with him some small portion of her marvellous
+vitality....
+
+He did not overrate the stimulative effect of her presence; of the mere
+fact of propinquity. When the roadster drew up at the portico of the
+transplanted Missouri plantation mansion she was waiting on the steps.
+It was dinner-time, and she had on an evening gown of some shimmering,
+leafy stuff that made her look more like a wood-nymph than he had ever
+supposed any mere mortal woman could look. When she stood on tiptoes for
+her father's kiss, Smith knew the name of his malady, however much he
+may have blinked it before; knew its name, and knew that it would have
+to be reckoned with, whatever fresh involvements might be lying in wait
+for him behind the curtain of the days to come.
+
+After dinner, a meal at which he ate little and was well content to
+satisfy the hunger of his soul by the road of the eye, Smith went out to
+the portico to smoke. The most gorgeous of mountain sunsets was painting
+itself upon the sky over the western Timanyonis, but he had no eyes for
+natural grandeurs, and no ears for any sound save one--the footstep he
+was listening for. It came at length, and he tried to look as tired as
+he had been when the colonel made him close his desk and leave the
+office; tried and apparently succeeded.
+
+"You poor, broken-down Samson, carrying all the brazen gates of the
+money-Philistines on your shoulders! You had to come to us at last,
+didn't you? Let me be your Delilah and fix that chair so that it will be
+really comfortable." She said it only half mockingly, and he forgave the
+sarcasm when she arranged some of the hammock pillows in the easiest of
+the porch chairs and made him bury himself luxuriously in them.
+
+Still holding the idea, brought over from that afternoon of the name
+questioning, that she had in some way discovered his true identity,
+Smith was watching narrowly for danger-signals when he thanked her and
+said:
+
+"You say it just as it is. I had to come. But you could never be
+anybody's Delilah, could you? She was a betrayer, if you recollect."
+
+He made the suggestion purposely, but it was wholly ignored, and there
+was no guile in the slate-gray eyes.
+
+"You mean that you didn't want to come?"
+
+"No; not that. I have wanted to come every time your father has asked
+me. But there are reasons--good reasons--why I shouldn't be here."
+
+If she knew any of the reasons she made no sign. She was sitting in the
+hammock and touching one slippered toe to the flagstones for the
+swinging push. From Smith's point of view she had for a background the
+gorgeous sunset, but he could not see the more distant glories.
+
+"We owe you much, and we are going to owe you more," she said. "You
+mustn't think that we don't appreciate you at your full value.
+Colonel-daddy thinks you are the most wonderful somebody that ever
+lived, and so do a lot of the others."
+
+"And you?" he couldn't resist saying.
+
+"I'm just plain ashamed--for the way I treated you when you were here
+before. I've been eating humble-pie ever since."
+
+Smith breathed freer. Nobody but a most consummate actress could have
+simulated her frank sincerity. He had jumped too quickly to the small
+sum-in-addition conclusion. She did _not_ know the story of the
+absconding bank cashier.
+
+"I don't know why you should feel that way," he said, eager, now, to run
+where he had before been afraid to walk.
+
+"_I_ do. And I believe you wanted to shame me. I believe you gave up
+your place at the dam and took hold with daddy more to show me what an
+inconsequent little idiot I was than for any other reason. Didn't you,
+really?"
+
+He laughed in quiet ecstasy at this newest and most adorable of the
+moods.
+
+"Honest confession is good for the soul: I did," he boasted. "Now beat
+that for frankness, if you can."
+
+"I can't," she admitted, laughing back at him. "But now you've
+accomplished your purpose, I hope you are not going to give up. That
+would be a little hard on Colonel-daddy."
+
+"Oh, no; I'm not going to give up--until I have to."
+
+"Does that mean more than it says?"
+
+"Yes, I'm afraid it does."
+
+She was silent for the length of time that it took the flaming crimson
+in the western sky to fade to salmon.
+
+"I know I haven't earned the right to ask you any of the whys," she said
+at the end of the little pause.
+
+"Women like you--only there are not any more of them, I think--don't
+have to earn things. The last time you were in the office you said
+enough to let me know that you and your father and Williams--all of you,
+in fact--suspect that I am out here under a cloud of some sort. It is
+true."
+
+"And that is why you say you won't give up until you have to?"
+
+"That is the reason; yes."
+
+There was another little interval of silence and then she said: "I
+suppose you couldn't tell me--or anybody--could you?"
+
+"I can tell you enough so that you will understand why I may not be
+permitted to go on and finish what I have begun in Timanyoni High Line.
+When I left home I thought I was a murderer."
+
+He would not look at her to see how she was taking it, but he could not
+help hearing her little gasp.
+
+"_Oh!_" she breathed; and then: "You say you 'thought.' Wasn't it so?"
+
+"It happened not to be. The man didn't die. I suppose I might say that I
+didn't try to kill him; but that would hardly be true. At the moment, I
+didn't care. Have you ever felt that way?--you know what I mean, just
+utterly blind and reckless as to consequences?"
+
+"I have a horrible temper, if that covers it."
+
+"It's something like that," he conceded; "only, up to the moment when it
+happened I hadn't known that I had any temper. Perhaps I might say that
+the provocation was big enough, though the law won't say so."
+
+The pink flush had faded out of the high western horizon and the stars
+were coming out one at a time. The colonel had come up from the ranch
+bunk-house where the men slept, and was smoking his long-stemmed
+corn-cob pipe on the lawn under the spreading cottonwoods. Peace was the
+key-note of the perfect summer night, and even for the man under the
+shadow of the law there was a quiet breathing space.
+
+"I don't believe you could ever kill a man in cold blood," said the
+young woman in the hammock. "I'm sure you know that, yourself, and it
+ought to be a comfort to you."
+
+"It might have been once, but it isn't any more."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I suppose it is because I left a good many things behind me when I ran
+away--besides the man I thought was dead. In that other life I never
+knew what it meant to fight for the things I wanted; perhaps it was
+because I never wanted anything very badly, or possibly it was because
+the things I did want came too easily."
+
+"They are not coming so easily now?"
+
+"No; but I'm going to have them at any cost. You will know what I mean
+when I say that nothing, not even human life, seems so sacred to me as
+it used to."
+
+"Have you ever talked with daddy about all these things?"
+
+"No. You don't know men very well; they don't talk about such things to
+one another. The average man tells some woman, if he can be lucky enough
+to find one who will listen."
+
+"You haven't told me all of it," she said, after another hesitant pause.
+"You have carefully left the woman out of it. Was she pretty?"
+
+Smith buried his laugh so deep that not a flicker of it came to the
+surface.
+
+"Is that the open inference always?--that a man tries to kill another
+because there is a woman in it?"
+
+"I merely asked you if she was pretty."
+
+"There was a woman," he answered doggedly; "though she had nothing to do
+with the trouble. I was going to call on her the night I--the night the
+thing happened. I hope she isn't still waiting for me to ring the
+door-bell."
+
+"You haven't told her where you are?"
+
+"No; but she's not losing any sleep about that. She isn't that kind.
+Indeed, I'm not sure that she wouldn't turn the letter over to the
+sheriff, if I should write her. Let's clear this up before we go any
+further. It was generally understood, in the home town, you know, that
+we were to be married some time, though nothing definite had ever been
+said by either of us. There wasn't any sentiment, you understand; I was
+idiotic enough at the time to believe that there wasn't any such thing
+as sentiment. It has cost me about as much to give her up as it has cost
+her to give me up--and that is a little less than nothing."
+
+Again the silence came between. The colonel was knocking his pipe bowl
+against a tree trunk and an interruption was threatening. When the low
+voice came again from the hammock it was troubled.
+
+"You are disappointing me, now. You are taking it very lightly, and
+apparently you neither know nor care very much how the woman may be
+taking it. Perhaps there wasn't any sentiment on your part."
+
+Smith was laughing quietly. "If you could only know Verda Richlander,"
+he said. "Imagine the most beautiful thing you can think of, and then
+take the heart out of it, and--but, hold on, I can do better than that,"
+and he drew out his watch and handed it to her with the back case
+opened.
+
+She took the watch and stopped the hammock swing to let the light from
+the nearest window fall upon the photograph.
+
+"She is very beautiful; magnificently beautiful," she said, returning
+the watch. And an instant later: "I don't see how you could say what you
+did about the sentiment. If I were a man----"
+
+The colonel had mounted the steps and was coming toward them. The young
+woman slipped from the hammock and stood up.
+
+"Don't go," said Smith, feeling as if he were losing an opportunity and
+leaving much unsaid that ought to be said. But the answer was a quiet
+"good night" and she was gone.
+
+Smith went back to town with the colonel the next morning physically
+rested, to be sure, but in a frame of mind bordering again upon the
+sardonic. In the cold light of the following day, after-dinner
+confidences, even with the best-beloved, have a way of showing up all
+their puerilities and inadequacies. Two things, and two alone, stood out
+clearly: one was that he was most unmistakably in love with Corona
+Baldwin, and the other was that he had shown her the weakest side of
+himself by appealing like a callow boy to her sympathies.
+
+Hence there was another high resolve not to go to Hillcrest again until
+he could go as a free man; a resolve which, it is perhaps needless to
+say, was broken thereafter as often as the colonel asked him to go. Why,
+in the last resort, Smith should have finally chosen another confidant
+in the person of William Starbuck, the reformed cow-puncher, he scarcely
+knew. But it was to Starbuck that he appealed for advice when the
+sentimental situation had grown fairly desperate.
+
+"I've told you enough so that you can understand the vise-nip of it,
+Billy," he said to Starbuck one night when he had dragged the mine owner
+up to the bath-room suite in the Hophra House, and had told him just a
+little, enough to merely hint at his condition. "You see how it stacks
+up. I'm in a fair way to come out of this the biggest scoundrel
+alive--the piker who takes advantage of the innocence of a good girl.
+I'm not the man she thinks I am. I am standing over a volcano pit every
+minute of the day. If it blows up, I'm gone, obliterated, wiped out."
+
+"Is it aiming to blow up?" asked Starbuck sagely.
+
+"I don't know any more about that than you do. It is the kind that
+usually does blow up sooner or later. I've prepared for it as well as I
+can. What Colonel Baldwin and the rest of you needed was a financial
+manager, and Timanyoni High Line has its fighting chance--which was
+more than Timanyoni Ditch had when I took hold. If I should drop out
+now, you and Maxwell and the colonel and Kinzie could go on and make the
+fight; but that doesn't help out in this other matter."
+
+Starbuck smoked in silence for a long minute or two before he said: "Is
+there another woman in it, John?"
+
+"Yes; but not in the way you mean. It never came to anything more than a
+decently frank friendship, though the whole town had it put up that it
+was all settled and we were going to be married."
+
+"Huh! I wonder if that's what _she'd_ say? You say it never came to
+anything more than a friendship: maybe that's all right from your side
+of the fence. But how about the girl?"
+
+The harassed one's smile was grimly reminiscent.
+
+"If you knew her you wouldn't ask, Billy. She is the modern, up-to-date
+young woman in all that the term implies. When she marries she will give
+little and ask little, outside of the ordinary amenities and
+conventionalities."
+
+"That's what you say; and maybe it's what you think. But when you have
+to figure a woman into it, you never can tell, John. Are you keeping in
+touch with this other girl?"
+
+Smith shook his head.
+
+"No; I shall probably never see her or hear from her again. Not that it
+matters a penny's worth to either of us. And your guess was wrong if you
+thought that things past are having any effect on things present. Corona
+Baldwin stands in a class by herself."
+
+"She's a mighty fine little girl, John," said Starbuck slowly. "Any one
+of a dozen fellows I could name would give all their old shoes to swap
+chances with you."
+
+"That isn't exactly the kind of advice I'm needing," was the sober
+rejoinder.
+
+"No; but it was the kind you were wanting, when you tolled me off up
+here," laughed the ex-cow-puncher. "I know the symptoms. Had 'em myself
+for about two years so bad that I could wake up in the middle of the
+night and taste 'em. Go in and win. Maybe the great big stumbling-block
+you're worrying about wouldn't mean anything at all to an open-minded
+young woman like Corona; most likely it wouldn't."
+
+"If she could know the whole truth--and believe it," said Smith
+musingly.
+
+"You tell her the truth, and she'll take care of the believing part of
+it, all right. You needn't lose any sleep about that."
+
+Smith drew a long breath and removed his pipe to say: "I haven't the
+nerve, Billy, and that's the plain fact. I have already told her a
+little of it. She knows that I----"
+
+Starbuck broke in with a laugh. "Yes; it's a shouting pity about your
+nerve! You've been putting up such a blooming scary fight in this
+irrigation business that we all know you haven't any nerve. If I had
+your job in that, I'd be going around here toting two guns and wondering
+if I couldn't make room in the holster for another."
+
+Smith shook his head.
+
+"I was safe enough so long as Stanton thought I was the resident manager
+and promoter for a new bunch of big money in the background. But he has
+had me shadowed and tracked until now I guess he is pretty well
+convinced that I actually had the audacity to play a lone hand; and a
+bluffing hand, at that. That makes a difference, of course. Two days
+after I had climbed into the saddle here, he sent a couple of his
+strikers after me. I don't know just what their orders were, but they
+seemed to want a fight--and they got it. It was in Blue Pete's doggery,
+up at the camp."
+
+"Guns?" queried Starbuck.
+
+"Theirs; not mine, because I didn't have any. I managed to get the
+shooting-irons away from them before we had mixed very far."
+
+"You're just about the biggest, long-eared, stiff-backed, stubborn wild
+ass of the wallows that was ever let loose in a half-reformed
+gun-country!" grumbled the ex-cow-man. "You're fixing to get yourself
+all killed up, Smith. Haven't you sense enough to see that these
+rustlers will rub you out in two twitches of a dead lamb's tail if
+they've made up their minds that you are the High Line main guy and the
+only one?"
+
+"Of course," said the wild ass easily. "If they could lay me up for a
+month or two----"
+
+"Lay up, nothing!" retorted Starbuck. "Lay you down, about six feet
+underground, is what I mean!"
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed the one whose fears ran in a far different channel
+from any that could be dug by mere corporation violence. "This is
+America, in the twentieth century. We don't kill our business
+competitors nowadays."
+
+"Don't we?" snorted Starbuck. "That will be all right, too. We'll
+suppose, just for the sake of argument, that my respected and
+respectable daddy-in-law, or whatever other silk-hatted old money-bags
+happens to be paying Crawford Stanton's salary _and_ commission,
+wouldn't send out an order to have you killed off. Maybe Stanton,
+himself, wouldn't stand for it if you'd put it that barefaced. But
+daddy-in-law, and Stanton, and all the others, hire blacklegs and
+sharpers and gunmen and thugs. And every once in a while somebody takes
+a wink for a nod--and _bang!_ goes a gun."
+
+"Well, what's the answer?" said Smith.
+
+"Tote an arsenal, yourself, and be ready to shoot first and ask
+questions afterward. That's the only way you can live peaceably with
+such men as Jake Boogerfield and Lanterby and Pete Simms."
+
+Smith got out of his chair and took a turn up and down the length of the
+room. When he came back to stand before Starbuck, he said: "I did that,
+Billy. I've been carrying a gun for a week and more; not for these ditch
+pirates, but for somebody else. The other night, when I was out at
+Hillcrest, Corona happened to see it. I'm not going to tell you what she
+said, but when I came back to town the next morning, I chucked the gun
+into a desk drawer. And I hope I'm going to be man enough not to wear it
+again."
+
+Starbuck dropped the subject abruptly and looked at his watch.
+
+"You liked to have done it, pulling me off up here," he remarked. "I'm
+due to be at the train to meet Mrs. Billy, and I've got just about three
+minutes. So long."
+
+Smith changed his street clothes leisurely after Starbuck had gone, and
+made ready to go down to the cafe dinner, turning over in his mind,
+meanwhile, the problem whose solution he had tried to extract from his
+late visitor. The workable answer was still as far off and as
+unattainable as ever when he went down-stairs and stopped at the desk to
+toss his room-key to the clerk.
+
+The hotel register was lying open on the counter, and from force of
+habit he ran his eye down the list of late arrivals. At the end of the
+list, in sprawling characters upon which the ink was yet fresh, he read
+his sentence, and for the first time in his life knew the meaning of
+panic fear. The newest entry was:
+
+"Josiah Richlander and daughter, Chicago."
+
+Smith was not misled by the place-name. There was only one "Josiah
+Richlander" in the world for him, and he knew that the Lawrenceville
+magnate, in registering from Chicago, was only following the example of
+those who, for good reasons or no reason, use the name of their latest
+stopping-place for a registry address.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+A Reprieve
+
+
+For the length of time it took him to read Josiah Richlander's signature
+on the Hophra House register and to grasp the full meaning of the
+Lawrenceville magnate's presence in Brewster, Smith's blood ran cold and
+there was a momentary attack of shocked consternation, comparable to
+nothing that any past experience had to offer. It had been a foregone
+conclusion from the very outset that, sooner or later, some one who knew
+him would drift in from the world beyond the mountains; but in all his
+imaginings he had never dreamed of the Richlander possibility. Verda, as
+he knew, had been twice to Europe--and, like many of her kind, had never
+been west of the Mississippi in her native land. Why, then, had she----
+
+But there was no time to waste in curious speculations as to the whys
+and wherefores. Present safety was the prime consideration. With Josiah
+Richlander and his daughter in Brewster, and guests under the same roof
+with him, discovery, identification, disgrace were knocking at the door.
+Smith had a return of the panicky chill when he realized how utterly
+impossible it would be for a man with his business activities to hide,
+even temporarily, not in the hotel, to be sure, but anywhere in a town
+of the Brewster dimensions. And the peril held no saving element of
+uncertainty. He could harbor no doubt as to what Josiah Richlander would
+do if discovery came. For so long a time as should be consumed in
+telegraphing between Brewster and Lawrenceville, Smith thought he might
+venture to call himself a free man. But that was the limit.
+
+It was the dregs of the J. Montague subconsciousness yet remaining in
+him that counselled flight, basing the prompting upon a bit of
+panic-engendered reasoning. Miss Verda and her father could hardly be
+anything more than transient visitors in Brewster. Possibly he might be
+able to keep out of their way for the needful day or so. To resolve in
+such an urgency was to act. One minute later he had hailed a passing
+auto-cab at the hotel entrance, and the four miles between the city and
+Colonel Baldwin's ranch had been tossed to the rear before he
+remembered that he had expressly declined a dinner invitation for that
+same evening at Hillcrest, the declination basing itself upon business
+and having been made by word of mouth to Mrs. Baldwin in person when she
+had called at the office with her daughter just before the luncheon
+hour.
+
+Happily, the small social offense went unremarked, or at least
+unrebuked. Smith found his welcome at the ranch that of a man who has
+the privilege of dropping in unannounced. The colonel was jocosely
+hospitable, as he always was; Mrs. Baldwin was graciously lenient--was
+good enough, indeed, to thank the eleventh-hour guest for reconsidering
+at the last moment; and Corona----
+
+Notwithstanding all that had come to pass; notwithstanding, also, that
+his footing in the Baldwin household had come to be that of a family
+friend, Smith could never be quite sure of the bewitchingly winsome
+young woman who called her father "Colonel-daddy." Her pose, if it were
+a pose, was the attitude of the entirely unspoiled child of nature and
+the wide horizons. When he was with her she made him think of all the
+words expressive of transparency and absolute and utter unconcealment.
+Yet there were moments when he fancied he could get passing glimpses of
+a subtler personality at the back of the wide-open, frankly questioning
+eyes; a wise little soul lying in wait behind its defenses; prudent,
+all-knowing, deceived neither by its own prepossessions or prejudices,
+nor by any of the masqueradings of other souls.
+
+Smith, especially in this later incarnation which had so radically
+changed him, believed as little in the psychic as any hardheaded young
+business iconoclast of an agnostic century could. But on this particular
+evening when he was smoking his after-dinner pipe on the flagstoned
+porch with Corona for his companion, there were phenomena apparently
+unexplainable on any purely material hypothesis.
+
+"I am sure I have much less than half of the curiosity that women are
+said to have, but, really, I _do_ want to know what dreadful thing has
+happened to you since we met you in the High Line offices this
+morning--mamma and I," was the way in which one of the phenomena was
+made to occur; and Smith started so nervously that he dropped his pipe.
+
+"You can be the most unexpected person, when you try," he laughed, but
+the laugh scarcely rang true. "What makes you think that anything has
+happened?"
+
+"I don't think--I _know_," the small seeress went on with calm
+assurance. "You've been telling us in all sorts of dumb ways that you've
+had an upsetting shock of some kind; and I don't believe it's another
+lawsuit. Am I right, so far?"
+
+"I believe you are a witch, and it's a mighty good thing you didn't live
+in the Salem period," he rejoined. "They would have hanged you to a dead
+moral certainty."
+
+"Then there was something?" she queried; adding, jubilantly: "I knew
+it!"
+
+"Go on," said the one to whom it had happened; "go on and tell me the
+rest of it."
+
+"Oh, that isn't fair; even a professional clairvoyant has to be told the
+color of her eyes and hair."
+
+"Wha-what!" the ejaculation was fairly jarred out of him and for the
+moment he fancied he could feel a cool breeze blowing up the back of his
+neck.
+
+The clairvoyant who did not claim to be a professional was laughing
+softly.
+
+"You told me once that a woman was adorable in the exact degree in which
+she could afford to be visibly transparent; yes, you said 'afford,' and
+I've been holding it against you. Now I'm going to pay you back. You
+are the transparent one, this time. You have as good as admitted that
+the 'happening' thing isn't a man; 'wha-what' always means that, you
+know; so it must be a woman. Is it the Miss Richlander you were telling
+me about?"
+
+There are times when any mere man may be shocked into telling the simple
+truth, and Smith had come face to face with one of them. "It is," he
+said.
+
+"She is in Brewster?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When did she come?"
+
+"This evening."
+
+"And you ran away? That was horribly unkind, don't you think--after she
+had come so far?"
+
+"Hold on," he broke in. "Don't let's go so fast. I didn't ask her to
+come. And, besides, she didn't come to see me."
+
+"Did she tell you that?"
+
+"I have taken precious good care that she shouldn't have the chance. I
+saw her name--and her father's--on the hotel register; and just about
+that time I remembered that I could probably get a bite to eat out
+here."
+
+"You are queer! All men are a little queer, I think--always excepting
+Colonel-daddy. Don't you want to see her?"
+
+"Indeed, I don't!"
+
+"Not even for old times' sake?"
+
+"No; not even for old times' sake. I've given you the wrong impression
+completely, if you think there is any obligation on my part. It never
+got beyond the watch-case picture stage, as I have told you. It might
+have drifted on to the other things in the course of time, simply
+because neither of us might have known any better than to let it drift.
+But that's all a back number, now."
+
+"Just the same, her coming shocked you."
+
+"It certainly did," he confessed soberly; and then: "Have you forgotten
+what I told you about the circumstances under which I left home?"
+
+"_Oh!_" she murmured, and as once before there was a little gasp to go
+with the word. Then: "She wouldn't--she wouldn't----"
+
+"No," he answered; "she wouldn't; but her father would."
+
+"So her father wanted her to marry the other man, did he? What was he
+like--the other man? I don't believe you've ever told me anything about
+him."
+
+Smith's laugh was an easing of strains.
+
+"Now your 'control' is playing tricks on you. There were a dozen other
+men, more or less."
+
+"And her picture was in the watch-case of each?"
+
+"You've pumped me dry," he returned, the sardonic humor reasserting
+itself. "I haven't her watch-case list; I never had it. But I guess it's
+within bounds to suppose that she got the little pictures from the
+photographer by the half-dozen, at least. Young women in my part of the
+world don't think much of the watch-case habit; I mean they don't regard
+it seriously."
+
+A motor-car was coming up the driveway and Smith was not altogether
+sorry when he saw Stillings, the lawyer, climb out of it to mount the
+steps. It was high time that an interruption of some sort was breaking
+in, and when the colonel appeared and brought Stillings with him to the
+lounging end of the porch, a business conference began which gave Miss
+Corona an excuse to disappear, and which accounted easily for the
+remainder of the evening.
+
+Borrowing a horse from the Hillcrest corral the following morning, Smith
+returned to Brewster by way of the dam, making the long detour count for
+as much as possible in the matter of sheer time-killing. It was a little
+before noon when he reached town by the roundabout route, and after
+putting the horse up at the livery-stable in which Colonel Baldwin was a
+half owner, he went to the hotel to reconnoitre. The room-clerk who gave
+him his key gave him also the information he craved.
+
+"Mr. Richlander? Oh, yes; he left early this morning by the stage. He is
+interested in some gold properties up in the range beyond Topaz. Fine
+old gentleman. Do you know him, Mr. Smith?"
+
+"The name seemed familiar when I saw it on the register last evening,"
+was Smith's evasion; "but it is not such a very uncommon name. He didn't
+say when he was coming back?"
+
+"No."
+
+Smith took a fresh hold upon life and liberty. While the world is
+perilously narrow in some respects, it is comfortably broad in others,
+and a danger once safely averted is a danger lessened. Snatching a hasty
+luncheon in the grill-room, the fighting manager of Timanyoni High Line
+hurried across to the private suite in the Kinzie Building offices into
+which he had lately moved and once more plunged into the business
+battle.
+
+Notwithstanding a new trouble which Stillings had wished to talk over
+with his president and the financial manager the night before--the
+claim set up by the dead-and-gone paper railroad to a right of way
+across the Timanyoni at the dam--the battle was progressing favorably.
+Williams was accomplishing the incredible in the matter of speed, and
+the dam was now nearly ready to withstand the high-water stresses when
+they should come. The power-house was rising rapidly, and the machinery
+was on the way from the East. Altogether things were looking more
+hopeful than they had at any period since the hasty reorganization.
+Smith attacked the multifarious details of his many-sided job with
+returning energy. If he could make shift to hold on for a few days or
+weeks longer....
+
+He set his teeth upon a desperate determination to hold on at any cost;
+at all costs. If Josiah Richlander should come back to Brewster--but
+Smith would not allow himself to think of this. At the worst, the period
+of peril could not be long. Smith knew his man, and was well assured
+that it would take something more alluring than a gold-mine to keep the
+Lawrenceville millionaire away from his business at home for any
+considerable length of time. With the comforting conclusion for a
+stimulus, the afternoon of hard work passed quickly and there was only a
+single small incident to break the busy monotonies. While Smith was
+dictating the final batch of letters to the second stenographer a young
+man with sleepy eyes and yellow creosote stains on his fingers came in
+to ask for a job. Smith put him off until the correspondence was
+finished and then gave him a hearing.
+
+"What kind of work are you looking for?" was the brisk query.
+
+"Shorthand work, if I can get it," said the man out of a job.
+
+"How rapid are you?"
+
+"I have been a court reporter."
+
+Smith was needing another stenographer and he looked the applicant over
+appraisingly. The appraisal was not entirely satisfactory. There was a
+certain shifty furtiveness in the half-opened eyes, and the rather weak
+chin hinted at a possible lack of the discreetness which is the prime
+requisite in a confidential clerk.
+
+"Any business experience?"
+
+"Yes; I've done some railroad work."
+
+"Here in Brewster?"
+
+Shaw lied smoothly. "No; in Omaha."
+
+"Any recommendations?"
+
+The young man produced a handful of "To Whom it May Concern" letters.
+They were all on business letter-heads, and were apparently genuine,
+though none of them were local. Smith ran them over hastily and he had
+no means of knowing that they had been carefully prepared by Crawford
+Stanton at no little cost in ingenuity and painstaking. How careful the
+preparation had been was revealed in the applicant's ready suggestion.
+
+"You can write or wire to any of these gentlemen," he said; "only, if
+there is a job open, I'd be glad to go to work on trial."
+
+The business training of the present makes for quick decisions. Smith
+snapped a rubber band around the letters and shot them into a pigeonhole
+of his desk.
+
+"We'll give you a chance to show what you can do," he told the man out
+of work. "If you measure up to the requirements, the job will be
+permanent. You may come in to-morrow morning and report to Mr. Miller,
+the chief clerk."
+
+The young man nodded his thanks and went out, leaving just as the first
+stenographer was bringing in his allotment of letters for the
+signatures. Having other things to think of, Smith forgot the
+sleepy-eyed young fellow instantly. But it is safe to assume that he
+would not have dismissed the incident so readily if he had known that
+Shaw had been waiting in the anteroom during the better part of the
+dictating interval, and that on the departing applicant's cuffs were
+microscopic short-hand notes of a number of the more important letters.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+"Sweet Fortune's Minion"
+
+
+It was late dinner-time when Smith closed the big roll-top desk in the
+new private suite in the Kinzie Building offices and went across the
+street to the hotel. A little farther along, as he was coming down from
+his rooms to go to dinner, he saw Starbuck in the lobby talking to
+Williams; but since they did not see him, he passed on without stopping.
+
+The great dining-room of the Hophra House was on the ground floor; a
+stucco-pillared immensity with scenic mural decorations after Bierstadt
+and a ceiling over which fat cupids and the classical nude in goddesses
+rioted in the soft radiance of the shaded electrics. The room was well
+filled, but the head waiter found Smith a small table in the shelter of
+one of the pillars and brought him an evening paper.
+
+Smith gave his dinner order and began to glance through the paper. The
+subdued chatter and clamor of the big room dinned pleasantly in his
+ears, and the disturbing thought of peril imminent was losing its
+keenest cutting edge when suddenly the solid earth yawned and the
+heavens fell. Half absently he realized that the head waiter was seating
+some one at the place opposite his own; then the faint odor of violets,
+instantly reminiscent, came to his nostrils. He knew instinctively, and
+before he could put the newspaper aside, what had happened. Hence the
+shock, when he found himself face to face with Verda Richlander, was not
+so completely paralyzing as it might have been. She was looking across
+at him with a lazy smile in the glorious brown eyes, and the surprise
+was quite evidently no surprise for her.
+
+"I told the waiter to bring me over here," she explained; and then,
+quite pleasantly: "It is an exceedingly little world, isn't it,
+Montague?"
+
+He nodded gloomily.
+
+"Much too little for a man to hide in," he agreed; adding: "But I think
+I have known that, all along; known, at least, that it would be only a
+question of time."
+
+The waiter had come to take Miss Richlander's dinner order, and the talk
+paused. After the man had gone she began again.
+
+"Why did you run away?" she asked.
+
+Smith shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
+
+"What else was there for me to do. Besides, I believed, at the time,
+that I had killed Dunham. I could have sworn he was dead when I left
+him."
+
+She was toying idly with the salad-fork. "Sometimes I am almost sorry
+that he wasn't," she offered.
+
+"Which is merely another way of saying that you were unforgiving enough
+to wish to see me hanged?" he suggested, with a sour smile.
+
+"It wasn't altogether that; no." There was a pause and then she went on:
+"I suppose you know what has been happening since you ran away--what has
+been done in Lawrenceville, I mean?"
+
+"I know that I have been indicted by the grand jury and that there is a
+reward out for me. It's two thousand dollars, isn't it?"
+
+She let the exact figure of the reward go unconfirmed.
+
+"And still you are going about in public as if all the hue and cry meant
+nothing to you? The beard is an improvement--it makes you look older and
+more determined--but it doesn't disguise you. I should have known you
+anywhere, and other people will."
+
+Again his shoulders went up.
+
+"What's the use?" he said. "I couldn't dig deep enough nor fly high
+enough to dodge everybody. You have found me, and if you hadn't,
+somebody else would have. It would have been the same any time and
+anywhere."
+
+"You knew we were here?" she inquired.
+
+He made the sign of assent.
+
+"And yet you didn't think it worth while to take your meals somewhere
+else?"
+
+He made a virtue of necessity. "I should certainly have taken the small
+precaution you suggest if the clerk hadn't told me that your father had
+gone up to the Gloria district. I took it for granted that you had gone
+with him."
+
+The lazy smile came again in the brown eyes, and it irritated him.
+
+"I am going to believe that you wouldn't have tried to hide from me,"
+she said slowly. "You'll give my conceit that much to live on, won't
+you?"
+
+"You mean that I ought to have been willing to trust you? Perhaps I was.
+But I could hardly think of you as apart from your father. I knew very
+well what he would do."
+
+"I was intending to go on up to the mines with him," she said evenly.
+"But last evening, while I was waiting for him to finish his talk with
+some mining men, I was standing in the mezzanine, looking down into the
+lobby. I saw you go to the desk and leave your key; I was sure I
+couldn't be mistaken; so I told father that I had changed my mind about
+going out to the mines and he seemed greatly relieved. He had been
+trying to persuade me that I would be much more comfortable if I should
+wait for him here."
+
+It was no stirring of belated sentiment that made Smith say: "You--you
+cared enough to wish to see me?"
+
+"Naturally," she replied. "Some people forget easily: others don't. I
+suppose I am one of the others."
+
+Smith remembered the proverb about a woman scorned and saw a menace more
+to be feared than all the terrors of the law lurking in the even-toned
+rejoinder. It was with some foolish idea of thrusting the menace aside
+at any cost that he said: "You have only to send a ten-word telegram to
+Sheriff Macauley, you know. I'm not sure that it isn't your duty to do
+so."
+
+"Why should I telegraph Barton Macauley?" she asked placidly. "I'm not
+one of his deputies."
+
+"But you believe me guilty, don't you?"
+
+The handsome shoulders twitched in the barest hint of indifference. "As
+I have said, I am not in Bart Macauley's employ--nor in Mr. Watrous
+Dunham's. Neither am I the judge and jury to put you in the prisoner's
+box and try you. I suppose you knew what you were doing, and why you did
+it. But I do think you might have written me a line, Montague. That
+would have been the least you could have done."
+
+The serving of the salad course broke in just here, and for some time
+afterward the talk was not resumed. Miss Richlander was apparently
+enjoying her dinner. Smith was not enjoying his, but he ate as a
+troubled man often will; mechanically and as a matter of routine. It was
+not until the dessert had been served that the young woman took up the
+thread of the conversation precisely as if it had never been dropped.
+
+"I think you know that you have no reason to be afraid of me, Montague;
+but I can't say as much for father. He will be back in a few days, and
+when he comes it will be prudent for you to vanish. That is a future,
+however."
+
+Smith's laugh was brittle.
+
+"We'll leave it a future, if you like. 'Sufficient unto the day is the
+evil thereof.'"
+
+"Oh; so you class me as an evil, do you?"
+
+"No; you know I didn't mean that; I merely mean that it's no use
+crossing the bridges before we come to them. I've been living from day
+to day so long now, that I am becoming hardened to it."
+
+Again there was a pause, and again it was Miss Richlander who broke it.
+
+"You don't want to go back to Lawrenceville?" she suggested.
+
+"Hardly--in the circumstances."
+
+"What will you do?--go away from Brewster and stay until father has
+finished buying his mine?"
+
+"No; I can't very well go away--for business reasons."
+
+The slow smile was dimpling again at the corners of the perfect mouth.
+
+"You are going to need a little help, Montague--my help--aren't you? It
+occurs to me that you can well afford to show me some little friendly
+attention while I am Robinson-Crusoed here waiting for father to come
+back."
+
+"Let me understand," he broke in, frowning across the table at her. "You
+are willing to ignore what has happened--to that extent? You are not
+forgetting that in the eyes of the law I am a criminal?"
+
+She made a faint little gesture of impatience.
+
+"Why do you persist in dragging that in? I am not supposed to know
+anything about your business affairs, with Watrous Dunham or anybody
+else. Besides, no one knows me here, and no one cares. Besides, again, I
+am a stranger in a strange city and we are--or we used to be--old
+friends."
+
+Her half-cynical tone made him frown again, thoughtfully, this time.
+
+"Women are curious creatures," he commented. "I used to think I knew a
+little something about them, but I guess it was a mistake. What do you
+want me to do?"
+
+"Oh, anything you like; anything that will keep me from being bored to
+death."
+
+Smith laid his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.
+
+"There is a play of some kind on at the opera-house, I believe," he
+said, rising and going around to draw her chair aside. "If you'd care to
+go, I'll see if I can't hold somebody up for a couple of seats."
+
+"That is more like it. I used to be afraid that you hadn't a drop of
+sporting blood in you, Montague, and I am glad to learn, even at this
+late day, that I was mistaken. Take me up-stairs, and we'll go to the
+play."
+
+They left the dining-room together, and there was more than one pair of
+eyes to follow them in frank admiration. "What a strikingly handsome
+couple," said a bejewelled lady who sat at the table nearest the door;
+and her companion, a gentleman with restless eyes and thin lips and a
+rather wicked jaw, said: "Yes; I don't know the woman, but the man is
+Colonel Baldwin's new financier; the fellow who calls himself 'John
+Smith.'"
+
+The bediamonded lady smiled dryly. "You say that as if you had a mortal
+quarrel with his name, Crawford. If I were the girl, _I_ shouldn't find
+fault with the name. You say you don't know her?"
+
+Stanton had pushed his chair back and was rising. "Take your time with
+the ice-cream, and I'll join you later up-stairs. I'm going to find out
+who the girl is, since you want to know."
+
+On the progress through the lobby to the elevators there were others to
+make remarks upon the handsome pair; among them the ex-cowboy mine owner
+whose name was still "Billy" Starbuck to everybody in the Timanyoni
+region.
+
+"Say! wouldn't that jar you, now?" he muttered to himself. And again:
+"This John Smith fellow sure does need a guardian--and for just this
+one time I reckon I might as well butt in and be it. If he's fixing to
+shake that little Corona girl he's sure going to earn what's coming to
+him. That's my ante."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Broken Threads
+
+
+Mr. Crawford Stanton's attempt to find out who Smith's dinner companion
+was began with a casual question shot at the hotel clerk; with that, and
+a glance at the register. From the clerk he learned Miss Richlander's
+name and the circumstances under which she had become a waiting
+transient in the hotel. From the register he got nothing but the
+magnate's name and the misleading address, "Chicago."
+
+"Is Mr. Richlander a Chicago man?" he asked of the clerk.
+
+"No. He merely registered from his last stop--as a good many people do.
+His home town is Lawrenceville."
+
+"Which Lawrenceville is that?" Stanton inquired; but the clerk shook his
+head.
+
+"You may search me, Mr. Stanton. I didn't ask. It's in Indiana, isn't
+it? You might find out from Miss Richlander."
+
+Stanton became thoughtful for a moment and then crossed the lobby to his
+business office, which had an entrance from the hotel ground floor.
+Behind the closed door, which he took the precaution to lock, he turned
+on the light and opened a large atlas. A glance at the town listings
+revealed some half-dozen Lawrencevilles, in as many different States,
+one State offering two, for good measure. That ended the search for the
+moment, and a little later he went up-stairs to rejoin the resplendent
+lady, who was taking her after-dinner ease in the most comfortable
+lounging-chair the mezzanine parlors afforded.
+
+"No good," he reported. "The girl's name is Richlander, and she--or her
+father--comes from one of half a dozen 'Lawrencevilles'--you can take
+your choice among 'em."
+
+"Money?" queried the comfortable one.
+
+"Buying mines in the Topaz," said the husband mechanically. He was not
+thinking specially of Mr. Josiah Richlander's possible or probable
+rating with the commercial agencies; he was wondering how well Miss
+Richlander knew John Smith, and in what manner she could be persuaded to
+tell what she might know. While he was turning it over in his mind the
+two in question, Smith and the young woman, passed through the lobby on
+their way to the theatre. Stanton, watching them narrowly from the
+vantage-point afforded by the galleried mezzanine, drew his own
+conclusions. By all the little signs they were not merely chance
+acquaintances or even casual friends. Their relations were closer--and
+of longer standing.
+
+Stanton puzzled over his problem a long time, long after Mrs. Stanton
+had forsaken the easy chair and had disappeared from the scene. His
+Eastern employers were growing irascibly impatient, and the letters and
+telegrams were beginning to have an abrasive quality disagreeably
+irritating to a hard-working field captain. Who was this fellow Smith,
+and what was his backing? they were beginning to ask; and with the
+asking there were intimations that if Mr. Crawford Stanton were finding
+his task too difficult, there was always an alternative.
+
+As a business man Stanton was usually able to keep irritating
+personalities at a proper distance. But the Timanyoni-Escalante war was
+beginning to get on his nerves. At first, it had presented itself as the
+simplest of business campaigns. A great land grab had been carried
+through, and there was an ample water-supply to transform the arid
+desert into ranch acres with enormous increases in values. A farmers'
+ditch company, loosely organized and administered, was the sole
+obstacle in the way, and upon his arrival in Brewster, Stanton had set
+blithely about removing it.
+
+Just when all was going well, when the farmers were almost in sight of
+their finish, and the actual stock absorption had fairly begun, the new
+factor had broken in; a young man capable and daring to a degree that
+was amazing, even in the direct and courageous West. Where and how Smith
+would strike, Stanton never knew until after the blow had been sent
+home. Secrecy, the most difficult requirement in any business campaign,
+had been so strictly maintained that up to the present evening of
+cogitations in the Hophra House mezzanine, Stanton was still unable to
+tell his New York and Washington employers positively whether Smith had
+money--Eastern money--behind him, or was engineering the big coup alone.
+Kinzie was steadfastly refusing to talk, and the sole significant fact,
+thus far, was that practically all of the new High Line stock had been
+taken up by local purchasers.
+
+Stanton was still wrestling with his problem when the "handsome couple"
+returned from the play. The trust field captain saw them as they crossed
+the lobby to the elevator and again marked the little evidences of
+familiarity. "That settles it," he mused, with an outthrust of the
+pugnacious jaw. "She knows more about Smith than anybody else in this
+neck of woods--_and she's got it to tell_!"
+
+Stanton began his inquisition for better information the following day,
+with the bejewelled lady for his ally. Miss Richlander was alone and
+unfriended in the hotel--and also a little bored. Hence she was easy of
+approach; so easy that by luncheon time the sham promoter's wife was
+able to introduce her husband. Stanton lost no moment investigative. For
+the inquiring purpose, Smith was made to figure as a business
+acquaintance, and Stanton was generous in his praises of the young man's
+astounding financial ability.
+
+"He's simply a wonder, Miss Richlander!" he confided over the
+luncheon-table. "Coming here a few weeks ago, absolutely unknown, he has
+already become a prominent man of affairs in Brewster. And so discreetly
+reticent! To this good day nobody knows where he comes from, or anything
+about him."
+
+"No?" said Miss Verda. "How singular!" But she did not volunteer to
+supply any of the missing biographical facts.
+
+"Absolutely nothing," Stanton went on smoothly. "And, of course, his
+silence about himself has been grossly misinterpreted. I have even heard
+it said that he is an escaped convict."
+
+"How perfectly absurd!" was the smiling comment.
+
+"Isn't it? But you know how people will talk. They are saying now that
+his name isn't Smith; that he has merely taken the commonest name in the
+category as an _alias_."
+
+"I can contradict that, anyway," Miss Richlander offered. "His name is
+really and truly John Smith."
+
+"You have known him a long time, haven't you?" inquired the lady with
+the headlight diamonds.
+
+"Oh, yes; for quite a long time, indeed."
+
+"That was back in New York State?" Stanton slipped in.
+
+"In the East, yes. He comes of an excellent family. His father's people
+were well-to-do farmers, and one of his great-uncles on his mother's
+side was on the supreme bench in our State; he was chief justice during
+the later years of his life."
+
+"What State did you say?" queried Stanton craftily. But Miss Verda was
+far too wide-awake to let him surprise her.
+
+"Our home State, of course. I don't believe any member of Mr. Smith's
+immediate family on either side has ever moved out of it."
+
+Stanton gave it up for the time being, and was convinced upon two
+points. Miss Richlander's reticence could have but one meaning: for some
+good reason, Smith would not, or dare not, give any home references.
+That was one point, and the second was that Miss Richlander knew, and
+knew that others wanted to know--and refused to tell. Stanton weighed
+the probabilities thoughtfully in the privacy of his office. There were
+two hypotheses: Smith might have business reasons for the secrecy--he
+might have backers who wished to remain completely unknown in their
+fight against the big land trust; but if he had no backers the other
+hypothesis clinched itself instantly--he was in hiding; he had done
+something from which he had run away.
+
+It was not until after office hours that Stanton was able to reduce his
+equation to its simplest terms, and it was Shaw, dropping in to make his
+report after his first day's work as clerk and stenographer in the High
+Line headquarters, who cleared the air of at least one fog bank of
+doubts.
+
+"I've been through the records and the stock-books," said the spy, when,
+in obedience to orders, he had locked the office door. "Smith is playing
+a lone hand. He flimflammed Kinzie for his first chunk of money, and
+after that it was easy. Every dollar invested in High Line has been dug
+up right here in the Timanyoni. Here's the list of stockholders."
+
+Stanton ran his eye down the string of names and swore when he saw
+Maxwell's subscription of $25,000. "Damn it!" he rasped; "and he's
+Fairbairn's own son-in-law!"
+
+"So is Starbuck, for that matter; and he's in for twenty thousand," said
+Shaw. "And, by the way, Billy is a man who will bear watching. He's
+hand-in-glove with Smith, and he's onto all of our little crooks and
+turns. I heard him telling Smith to-day that he owed it to the company
+to carry a gun."
+
+Stanton's smile showed his teeth.
+
+"I wish he would; carry one and kill somebody with it. Then we'd know
+what to do with him."
+
+The spy was rolling a cigarette and his half-closed eyes had a murderous
+glint in them.
+
+"Me, for instance?" he inquired cynically.
+
+"Anybody," said Stanton absently. He was going over the list of
+stockholders again and had scarcely heard what Shaw had said.
+
+"That brings us down to business, Mr. Stanton," said the ex-railroad
+clerk slowly. "I'm not getting money enough out of this to cover the
+risk--my risk."
+
+The man at the desk looked up quickly.
+
+"What's that you say? By heavens, Shaw, have I got to send you over the
+road before you'll come to your senses? I've spoken once, and I'll do it
+just this one time more: you sing small if you want to keep out of
+jail!"
+
+Shaw had lighted his cigarette and was edging toward the door.
+
+"Not this trip, Mr. Stanton," he said coolly. "If you've got me, I've
+got you. I can find two men who will go into court and swear that you
+paid Pete Simms money to have Smith sandbagged, that day out at Simms's
+place at the dam! I may have to go to jail, as you say; but I'll bet you
+five to one that you'll beat me to it!" And with that he snapped the
+catch on the locked door and went away.
+
+Some three hours after this rather hostile clash with the least
+trustworthy, but by far the most able, of his henchmen, Crawford Stanton
+left his wife chatting comfortably with Miss Richlander in the hotel
+parlors and went reluctantly to keep an appointment which he had been
+dreading ever since the early afternoon hour when a wire had come from
+Copah directing him to meet the "Nevada Flyer" upon its arrival at
+Brewster. The public knew the name signed to the telegram as that of a
+millionaire statesman; but Stanton knew it best as the name of a hard
+and not over-scrupulous master.
+
+The train was whistling for the station when Stanton descended from his
+cab and hurried down the long platform. He assumed that the great
+personage would be travelling in a private car which would be coupled to
+the rear end of the "Flyer," and his guess was confirmed. A
+white-jacketed porter was waiting to admit him to the presence when the
+train came to a stand, and as he climbed into the vestibule of the
+luxurious private car, Stanton got what comfort he could out of the
+thought that the interview would necessarily be limited by the ten
+minutes' engine-changing stop of the fast train.
+
+The presence chamber was the open compartment of the palace on wheels,
+and it held a single occupant when Stanton entered; a big-bodied man
+with bibulous eyes and a massive square-angled head and face, a face in
+which the cartoonists emphasized the heavy drooping mustache and the
+ever-present black cigar growing out of it.
+
+"Hello, Crawford," the great man grunted, making no move to lift his
+huge body out of the padded lounging-chair. "You got my wire?"
+
+"Yes," returned the promoter, limiting himself to the one word.
+
+"What's the matter with you here on this land deal? Why don't you get
+action?"
+
+Stanton tried to explain as fully as might be, holding in view the
+necessity for haste. The big man in the easy chair was frowning heavily
+when the explanation was finished.
+
+"And you say this one man has blocked the game? Why the devil don't you
+get rid of him--buy him, or run him off, or something?"
+
+"I don't believe he can be bought."
+
+"Well, then, chase him out. We can't afford to be hung up this way
+indefinitely by every little amateur that happens to come along and sit
+in the game. Get action and do something. From what you say, this fellow
+is probably some piker who has left his country for his country's good.
+Get the detectives after him and run him down."
+
+"That will take time, and time is what we haven't got."
+
+The big man pulled himself up in his chair and glared savagely at the
+protester.
+
+"Stanton, you make me tired--very tired! You know what we have at stake
+in this deal, and thus far you're the only man in it who hasn't made
+good. You've had all the help you've asked for, and all the money you
+wanted to spend. If you've lost your grip, say so plainly, and get down
+and out. We don't want any 'has-been' on this job. If you are at the end
+of your resources----"
+
+The conductor's shout of "All aboard!" dominated the clamor of the
+station noises, and the air-brakes were singing as the engineer of the
+changed locomotives tested the connections. Stanton saw his chance to
+duck and took it.
+
+"I have been trying to stop short of anything that might make talk," he
+said. "This town might easily be made too hot to hold us, and----"
+
+"You're speaking for yourself, now," rapped out the tyrant. "What the
+devil do we care for the temperature of Brewster? I've only one word for
+you, Crawford: _you get busy and give us results_. Skip out, now, or
+you'll get carried by. And, say; let me have a wire at Los Angeles, not
+later than Thursday. Get that?"
+
+Stanton got it: also, he escaped, making a flying leap from the moving
+train. At the cab rank he found the motor-cab which he had hired for the
+drive down from the hotel. Climbing in, he gave a brittle order to the
+chauffeur. Simultaneously a man wearing the softest of Stetsons lounged
+away from his post of observation under a near-by electric pole and ran
+across the railroad plaza to unhitch and mount a wiry little cow-pony.
+Once in the saddle, however, the mounted man did not hurry his horse.
+Having overheard Stanton's order-giving, there was no need to keep the
+motor-cab in sight as it sputtered through the streets and out upon the
+backgrounding mesa, its ill-smelling course ending at a lonely
+road-house in the mesa hills on the Topaz trail.
+
+When the hired vehicle came to a stand in front of the lighted bar-room
+of the road-house, Stanton gave a waiting order to the driver and went
+in. Of the dog-faced barkeeper he asked an abrupt question, and at the
+man's jerk of a thumb toward the rear, the promoter passed on and
+entered the private room at the back.
+
+The private room had but one occupant--the man Lanterby, who was sitting
+behind a round card-table and vainly endeavoring to make one of the pair
+of empty whiskey-glasses spin in a complete circuit about a black
+bottle standing on the table.
+
+Stanton pulled up a chair and sat down, and Lanterby poured libations
+for two from the black bottle. The promoter, ordinarily as abstemious as
+a Trappist, drained his portion at a gulp.
+
+"Well?" he snapped, pushing the bottle aside. "What did you find out?"
+
+"I reckon it can be done, if it has to be," was the low-toned reply.
+
+"Done and well covered up?"
+
+"Yep. It'll be charged up to the high water--maybe."
+
+"Is the river still rising?"
+
+"A little bit higher every night now. That's the way it comes up. The
+snow on the mountain melts in the day and the run-off comes in the
+night."
+
+"You can handle it by yourself, can't you?"
+
+"Me and Boogerfield can."
+
+"All right. Get everything ready and wait for the word from me. You
+didn't let Pegleg in on it, did you?"
+
+"I had to. We'd have to work from his joint."
+
+"That was a bad move. Simms would sell you out if anybody wanted to buy.
+He'd sell his best friend," frowned Stanton.
+
+Lanterby showed the whites of his eyes and a set of broken teeth in a
+wolfish grin.
+
+"Pete can't run fast enough to sell me out," he boasted. "I'll have
+somethin' in my clothes that'll run faster than he can, with that wooden
+leg o' his."
+
+Stanton nodded and poured himself another drink--a larger one than the
+first; and then thought better of it and spilled the liquor on the
+floor.
+
+"That will do for the dynamite part of it. It's a last resort, of
+course. We don't want to have to rebuild the dam, and I have one more
+string that I want to pull first. This man Smith: I've got a pointer on
+him, at last. Is Boogerfield still feeling sore about the man-handling
+Smith gave him?"
+
+"You bet your life he is."
+
+"Good. Keep him stirred up along that line." Stanton got up and looked
+thirstily at the bottle, but let it alone. "That's all for to-night.
+Stay out of sight as much as you can, and go easy on the whiskey. I may
+not come here again. If I don't, I'll send you one of two words.
+'Williams' will mean that you're to strike for the dam. 'Jake' will mean
+that you are to get Boogerfield fighting drunk and send him after Smith.
+Whichever way it comes out, you'll find the money where I've said it
+will be, and you and Boogerfield had better fade away--and take Pegleg
+with you, if you can."
+
+The hired car was still waiting when Stanton went out through the
+bar-room and gave the driver his return orders. And, because the night
+was dark, neither of the two at the car saw the man in the soft Stetson
+straighten himself up from his crouching place under the back-room
+window and vanish silently in the gloom.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+A Night of Fiascos
+
+
+Smith had seen nothing of Miss Richlander during the day of the Stanton
+plottings, partly because there was a forenoon meeting of the High Line
+stockholders called for the purpose of electing him secretary and
+treasurer in fact of the company, and partly because the major portion
+of the afternoon was spent in conference with Williams at the dam.
+
+The work of construction had now reached its most critical stage, and
+Williams was driving it strenuously. Each twenty-four hours, with the
+recurring night rise from the melting snows, the torrenting river
+reached a higher water-mark, and three times in as many weeks the
+engineer had changed from a quick-setting cement to a still quicker,
+time-saving and a swift piling-up of the great dike wall being now the
+prime necessities.
+
+Returning from the dam site quite late in the evening, Smith spent a
+hard-working hour or more at his desk in the Kinzie Building offices;
+and it was here that Starbuck found him.
+
+"What?" said the new secretary, looking up from his work when Starbuck's
+wiry figure loomed in the doorway, "I thought you were once more a
+family man, and had cut out the night prowling."
+
+Starbuck jack-knifed himself comfortably in a chair.
+
+"I was. But the little girl's run away again; gone with her
+sister--Maxwell's wife, you know--to Denver to get her teeth fixed; and
+I'm foot-loose. Been butting in a little on your game, this evening,
+just to be doing. How's tricks with you, now?"
+
+"We're strictly in the fight," declared Smith enthusiastically. "We
+closed the deal to-day for the last half-mile of the main ditch right of
+way, which puts us up on the mesa slope above the Escalante Grant. If
+they knock us out now, they'll have to do it with dynamite."
+
+"Yes," said the ex-cow-man, thoughtfully; "with dynamite." Then: "How is
+Williams getting along?"
+
+"Fine! The water is crawling up on him a little every night, but with no
+accidents, he'll be able to hold the flood rise when it comes. The only
+thing that worries me now is the time limit."
+
+"The time limit?" echoed Starbuck. "What's that?"
+
+"It's the handicap we inherit from the original company. Certain State
+rights to the water were conveyed in the old charter, on condition that
+the project should be completed, or at least be far enough along to turn
+water into the ditches, by a given date. This time limit, which carries
+over from Timanyoni Ditch to Timanyoni High Line, expires next week.
+We're petitioning for an extension, but if we don't get it we shall
+still be able to back the water up so that it will flow into the lower
+level of ditches by next Thursday; that is, barring accidents."
+
+"Yes; with no accidents," mused Starbuck. "Can't get shut of the 'if,'
+no way nor shape, can we? So that's why the Stanton people have been
+fighting so wolfishly for delay, is it? Wanted to make the High Line
+lose its charter? John, this is a wicked, wicked world, and I can
+sympathize with the little kiddie who said he was going out in the
+garden to eat worms." Then he switched abruptly. "Where did you corral
+all those good looks you took to the opera-house last night, John?"
+
+Smith's laugh was strictly perfunctory.
+
+"That was Miss Verda Richlander, an old friend of mine from back home.
+She is out here with her father, and the father has gone up into the
+Topaz country to buy him a gold brick."
+
+"Not in the Topaz," Starbuck struck in loyally. "We don't make the
+bricks up there--not the phony kind. But let that go and tell me
+something else. A while back, when you were giving me a little song and
+dance about the colonel's daughter, you mentioned another woman--though
+not by name, if you happen to recollect. I was just wondering if this
+Miss Rich-people, or whatever her name is, might be the other one."
+
+Again the new secretary laughed--this time without embarrassment.
+"You've called the turn, Billy. She is the other one."
+
+"H'm; chasing you up?"
+
+"Oh, no; it was just one of the near-miracles. She didn't know I was
+here, and I had no hint that she was coming."
+
+"I didn't know," commented the reformed cowboy. "Sometimes when you
+think it's a cold trail, it's a warm one; and then again when you think
+it's warm, it fools you."
+
+"Oh, pshaw!" scoffed the trail-maker, "you make me weary, Billy. We are
+merely good friends. No longer ago than last night I had the strongest
+possible proof of Miss Richlander's friendship."
+
+"Did, eh? All right; it's your roast; not mine. But I'm going to pull
+one chestnut out of the fire for you, even if I do get my fingers
+burned. This Miss Rich-folks has had only one day here in Brewster, but
+she's used it in getting mighty chummy with the Stantons. Did you know
+that?"
+
+"What!" ejaculated Smith.
+
+"Jesso," smiled Starbuck. "She had her luncheon with 'em to-day, and for
+an hour or so this evening the three of 'em sat together up in the
+Hophra inside-veranda parlor. Does that figure as news to you?"
+
+"It does," said Smith simply; and he added: "I don't understand it."
+
+"Funny," remarked the ex-cow-man. "It didn't ball me up for more than a
+minute or two. Stanton fixed it some way--because he needed to. Tell me
+something, John; could this Miss Rich-garden help Stanton out in any of
+his little schemes, if she took a notion?"
+
+Smith turned away and stared at the blackened square of outer darkness
+lying beyond the office window.
+
+"She could, Billy--but she won't," he answered.
+
+"You can dig up your last dollar and bet on that, can you?"
+
+"Yes, I think I can."
+
+"H'm; that's just what I was most afraid of."
+
+"Don't be an ass, Billy."
+
+"I'm trying mighty hard not to be, John, but sometimes the ears will
+grow on the best of us--in spite of the devil. What I mean is this: when
+a woman thinks enough of a man to keep his secrets, she's mighty likely
+to think too much of him to keep those same secrets from spreading
+themselves on the bill-boards when the pinch comes."
+
+"I'm no good at conundrums," said Smith. "Put it in plain words."
+
+"So I will," snapped Starbuck, half morosely. "Two nights ago, when you
+were telling me about this Miss Rich-acres, you said there was nothing
+to it, and I said you never could tell, when there was a woman in it. I
+saw you two when you came out of the Hophra dining-room together last
+night, and I saw the look in that girl's eyes. Do you know what I said
+to myself right then, John? I said: 'Oh, you little girl out at the
+Hillcrest ranch--good-by, you!'"
+
+Smith's grin was half antagonistic. "You _are_ an ass, Billy," he
+asserted. "I never was in love with Verda Richlander, nor she with me."
+
+"Speak for yourself and let it hang there, John. You can't speak for the
+woman--no man ever can. What I'm hoping now is that she doesn't know
+anything about you that Stanton could make use of."
+
+Again the High Line's new secretary turned to stare at the black
+backgrounded window.
+
+"You mean that she might hear of--of Miss Corona?" he suggested.
+
+"You've roped it down, at last," said the friendly enemy. "Stanton'll
+tell her--he'll tell her anything and everything that might make her
+turn loose any little bit of information she may have about you. As I
+said a minute ago, I'm hoping she hasn't got anything on you, John."
+
+Smith was still facing the window when he replied. "I'm sorry to have to
+disappoint you, Starbuck. What Miss Richlander could do to me, if she
+chooses, would be good and plenty."
+
+The ex-cowboy mine owner drew a long breath and felt for his
+tobacco-sack and rice-paper.
+
+"All of which opens up more talk trails," he said thoughtfully. "Since
+you wouldn't try to take care of yourself, and since your neck happens
+to be the most valuable asset Timanyoni High Line has, just at present,
+I've been butting in, as I told you. Listen to my tale of woe, if you
+haven't anything better to do. Besides the Miss Rich-ranches episode
+there are a couple of others. Want to hear about 'em?"
+
+Smith nodded.
+
+"All right. A little while past dinner this evening, Stanton had a hurry
+call to meet the 'Nevada Flyer.' Tailed onto the train there was a
+private luxury car, and in the private car sat a gentleman whose face
+you've seen plenty of times in the political cartoons, usually with
+cuss-words under it. He is one of Stanton's bosses; and Stanton was in
+for a wigging--and got it. I couldn't hear, but I could see--through the
+car window. He had Stanton standing on one foot before the train pulled
+out and let Crawford make his get-away. You guess, and I'll guess, and
+we'll both say it was about this Escalante snap which is aiming to be
+known as the Escalante fizzle. Ain't it the truth?"
+
+Again Smith nodded, and said: "Go on."
+
+"After Number Five had gone, Stanton broke for his auto-cab, looking
+like he could bite a nail in two. I happened to hear the order he gave
+the shover, and I had my cayuse hitched over at Bob Sharkey's joint.
+Naturally, I ambled along after Crawford, and while I didn't beat him
+to it, I got there soon enough. It was out at Jeff Barton's road-house
+on the Topaz trail, and Stanton was shut up in the back room with a sort
+of tin-horn 'bad man' named Lanterby."
+
+"You listened?" said Smith, still without eagerness.
+
+"Right you are. And they fooled me. Two schemes were on tap; one
+pointing at Williams and the dam, and the other at you. These were both
+'last resorts'; Stanton said he had one more string to pull first. If
+that broke--well, I've said it half a dozen times already, John: you'll
+either have to hire a body-guard or go heeled. I'm telling you right
+here and now, that bunch is going to get you, even if it costs money!"
+
+"You say Stanton said he had one more string to pull: he didn't give it
+a name, did he?"
+
+"No, but I've got a notion of my own," was the ready answer. "He's
+trying to get next to you through the women, with this Miss Rich-pasture
+for his can-opener. But when everything else fails, he is to send a
+password to Lanterby, one of two passwords. 'Williams' means dynamite
+and the dam: 'Jake' means the removal from the map of a fellow named
+Smith. Nice prospect, isn't it?"
+
+Smith was jabbing his paper-knife absently into the desk-blotter. "And
+yet we go on calling this a civilized country!" he said meditatively.
+Then with a sudden change of front: "I'm in this fight to stay until I
+win out or die out, Billy; you know that. As I have said, Miss Verda can
+kill me off if she chooses to; but she won't choose to. Now let's get to
+work. It's pretty late to rout a justice of the peace out of bed to
+issue a warrant for us, but we'll do it. Then we'll go after Lanterby
+and make him turn state's evidence. Come on; let's get busy."
+
+But Starbuck, reaching softly for a chair-righting handhold upon Smith's
+desk, made no reply. Instead, he snapped his lithe body out of the chair
+and launched it in a sudden tiger-spring at the door. To Smith's
+astonishment the door, which should have been latched, came in at
+Starbuck's wrenching jerk of the knob, bringing with it, hatless, and
+with the breath startled out of him, the new stenographer, Shaw.
+
+"There's your state's evidence," said Starbuck grimly, pushing the
+half-dazed door-listener into a chair. "Just put the auger a couple of
+inches into this fellow and see what you can find."
+
+Measured by any standard of human discomfort, Richard Shaw had an
+exceedingly bad quarter of an hour to worry through when Smith and
+Starbuck applied the thumbscrews and sought by every means known to
+modern inquisitorial methods to force a confession out of him.
+
+Caring nothing for loyalty to the man who was paying him, Shaw had,
+nevertheless, a highly developed anxiety for his own welfare; and
+knowing the dangerous ground upon which he stood, he evaded and shuffled
+and prevaricated under the charges and questionings until it became
+apparent to both of his inquisitors that nothing short of bribery or
+physical torture would get the truth out of him. Smith was not willing
+to offer the bribe, and since the literal thumbscrews were out of the
+question, Shaw was locked into one of the vacant rooms across the
+corridor until his captors could determine what was to be done with him.
+
+"That is one time when I fired and missed the whole side of the barn,"
+Starbuck admitted, when Shaw had been remanded to the makeshift cell
+across the hall. "I know that fellow is on Stanton's pay-roll; and it's
+reasonably certain that he got his job with you so that he could keep
+cases on you. But we can't prove anything that we say, so long as he
+refuses to talk."
+
+"No," Smith agreed. "I can discharge him, and that's about all that can
+be done with him. We can't even tax him with listening. You heard what
+he said--that he saw the light up here from the street, and came up to
+see if I didn't need him."
+
+"He is a pretty smooth article," said Starbuck reflectively. "He used to
+be a clerk in Maxwell's railroad office, and he was mixed up in some
+kind of crookedness, I don't remember just what."
+
+Smith caught quickly at the suggestion.
+
+"Wait a minute, Billy," he broke in; and then: "There's no doubt in your
+mind that he's a spy?"
+
+"Sure, he is," was the prompt rejoinder.
+
+"I was just thinking--he has heard what was said here to-night--which is
+enough to give Stanton a pretty good chance to outfigure us again."
+
+"Right you are."
+
+"In which case it would be little short of idiotic in us to turn him
+loose. We've got to hold him, proof or no proof. Where would we be apt
+to catch Maxwell at this time of night?"
+
+"At home and in bed, I reckon."
+
+"Call him up on the 'phone and state the case briefly. Tell him if he
+has any nip on Shaw that would warrant us in turning him over to the
+sheriff, we'd like to know it."
+
+"You're getting the range now," laughed the ex-cow-man, and instead of
+using the desk set, he went to shut himself into the sound-proof
+telephone-closet.
+
+When he emerged a few minutes later he was grinning exultantly. "That
+was sure a smooth one of yours, John. Dick gave me the facts. Shaw's a
+thief; but he has a sick sister on his hands--or said he had--and the
+railroad didn't prosecute. Dick says for us to jug him to-night and
+to-morrow morning he'll swear out the necessary papers."
+
+"Good. We'll do that first; and then we'll go after this fellow
+Lanterby. I want to get Stanton where I can pinch him, Billy; no,
+there's nothing personal about it; but when a great corporation like the
+Escalante Land Company gets down to plain anarchy and dynamiting, it's
+time to make somebody sweat for it. Let's go and get Shaw."
+
+Together they went across the corridor, and Smith unlocked the door of
+the disused room. The light switch was on the door-jamb and Starbuck
+found and pressed the button. The single incandescent bulb hanging from
+the ceiling sprang alive--and showed the two men at the door an empty
+room and an open window. The bird had flown.
+
+Starbuck was grinning again when he went to look out of the window. The
+roof of the adjoining building was only a few feet below the sill level,
+and there was a convenient fire-escape ladder leading to the ground.
+
+"It's us for that road-house out on the Topaz trail before the news gets
+around to Stanton and Lanterby," he said definitely; and they lost no
+time in securing an auto for the dash.
+
+But that, too, proved to be a fiasco. When they reached Barton's
+all-night place on the hill road, the bar was still open and a card game
+was running in an up-stairs room. Starbuck did the necessary
+cross-questioning of the dog-faced bartender.
+
+"You know me, Pug, and what I can do to you if I have to. We want Hank
+Lanterby. Pitch out and show us where."
+
+The barkeeper threw up one hand as if he were warding off a blow.
+
+"You c'd have him in a holy minute, for all o' me, Billy; you sure
+could," he protested. "But he's gone."
+
+"On the level?" snapped Starbuck.
+
+"That's straight; I wouldn't lie to you, Billy. Telephone call came from
+town a little spell ago, and I got Hank outa bed t' answer it. He
+borra'd Barton's mare an' faded inside of a pair o' minutes."
+
+"Which way?" demanded the questioner.
+
+"T' the hills; leastways he ain't headin' f'r town when he breaks from
+here."
+
+Starbuck turned to Smith with a wry smile.
+
+"Shaw beat us to it and he scores on us," he said. "We may as well hike
+back, 'phone Williams to keep his eye on things up at the dam, and go to
+bed. There'll be nothing more doing to-night."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+A Chance to Hedge
+
+
+With all things moving favorably for Timanyoni High Line up to the night
+of fiascos, the battle for the great water-right seemed to take a sudden
+slant against the local promoters, after the failure to cripple Stanton
+by the attempt to suppress two of his subordinates. Early the next day
+there were panicky rumors in the air, all pointing to a possible
+eleventh-hour failure of the local enterprise, and none of them
+traceable to any definite starting-point.
+
+One of the stories was to the effect that the Timanyoni dam had faulty
+foundations and that the haste in building had added to its insecurity.
+By noon bets were freely offered in the pool-rooms that the dam would
+never stand its first filling; and on the heels of this came clamorous
+court petitions from ranch owners below the dam site, setting forth the
+flood dangers to which they were exposed and praying for an injunction
+to stop the work.
+
+That this was a new move on Stanton's part, neither Smith nor Stillings
+questioned for a moment; but they had no sooner got the nervous ranchmen
+pacified by giving an indemnity bond for any damage that might be done,
+before it became evident that the rumors were having another and still
+more serious effect. It was a little past one o'clock when Kinzie sent
+up-stairs for Smith, and Smith wondered why, with the telephone at his
+elbow, the banker had sent the summons by the janitor.
+
+When the newly elected secretary had himself shot down the elevator, he
+was moved to wonder again at the number of people who were waiting to
+see the president. The anteroom was crowded with them; and when the
+janitor led him around through the working room of the bank to come at
+the inside door to Kinzie's room, Smith thought the detour was made
+merely to dodge the waiting throng.
+
+There was a crude surprise lying in wait for Smith when the door of the
+president's room swung open to admit him. Sitting at ease on Kinzie's
+big leather-covered lounge, with a huge book of engraving samples on his
+knees, was a round-bodied man with a face like a good-natured full
+moon. Instantly he tossed the book aside and sprang up.
+
+"Why, Montague!" he burst out, "if this doesn't beat the band! Is it
+really you, or only your remarkably healthy-looking ghost? By George!
+but I'm glad to see you!"
+
+Smith shook hands with Debritt, and if the salesman's hearty greeting
+was not returned in kind, the lack was due more to the turmoil of
+emotions he had stirred up than to any studied coolness on the part of
+the trapped fugitive. Fortunately, the salesman had finished showing
+Kinzie his samples and was ready to go, so there was no time for any
+awkward revelations.
+
+"I'm at the Hophra, for just a little while, Montague, and you must look
+me up," was Debritt's parting admonition; and Smith was searching the
+salesman's eyes keenly for the accusation which ought to be in them;
+searching and failing to find it.
+
+"Yes; I'll look you up, of course, Boswell. I'm at the Hophra, myself,"
+he returned mechanically; and the next moment he was alone with Kinzie.
+
+"You sent for me?" he said to the banker; and Kinzie pointed to a
+chair.
+
+"Yes; sit down and tell me what has broken loose. I've been trying to
+get Baldwin or Williams on the wire--they're both at the dam, I
+understand--but the 'phone seems to be out of service. What has gone
+wrong with you people?"
+
+Smith spread his hands. "We were never in better shape to win out than
+we are at this moment, Mr. Kinzie. This little flurry about newer and
+bigger damage suits to be brought by the valley truck-gardeners doesn't
+amount to anything."
+
+"I know all about that," said the president, with a touch of impatience.
+"But there is a screw loose somewhere. How about that time limit in your
+charter? Are you going to get water into the ditches within your charter
+restrictions?"
+
+"We shall clear the law, all right, within the limit," was the prompt
+reply. But the banker was still unsatisfied.
+
+"Did you notice that roomful of people out there waiting to see me?" he
+asked. "They are High Line investors, a good many of them, and they are
+waiting for a chance to ask me if they hadn't better get rid of their
+stock for whatever it will bring. That's why I sent for you. I want to
+know what's happened. And this time, Mr. Smith, I want the truth."
+
+Smith accepted the implied challenge promptly, though in his heart he
+knew that a net of some kind was drawing around him.
+
+"Meaning that I haven't been telling you the truth, heretofore?" he
+asked hardily.
+
+"Meaning just that," responded the banker.
+
+"Name the time and place, if you please."
+
+"It was the first time you came here--with Baldwin."
+
+"No," said Smith. "I gave you nothing but straight facts at that time,
+Mr. Kinzie. It was your own deductions that were at fault. You jumped to
+the conclusion that I was here as the representative of Eastern capital,
+and I neither denied nor affirmed. But that is neither here nor there.
+We have made good in the financing, and, incidentally, we've helped the
+bank. You have no kick coming."
+
+Kinzie wheeled in his chair and pointed an accusing finger at Smith.
+
+"Mr. Smith, before we do any more business together, I want to know who
+you are and where you come from. If you can't answer a few plain
+questions I shall draw my own inferences."
+
+Smith leaped up and towered over the thick-set elderly man in the
+pivot-chair.
+
+"Mr. Kinzie, do you want me to tell you what you are? You're a
+trimmer--a fence-climber! Do you suppose I don't know what has
+happened? Stanton has started this new scare, and he has been here with
+you! You've thought it all over, and now you want to welsh and go over
+to what you think is going to be the winning side! Do it, if you feel
+like it--and I'll transfer our account to the little Savings concern
+up-town!"
+
+There was fire in his eye and hot wrath in his tone; and once more
+Kinzie found his conclusions warping.
+
+"Oh, don't fly off the handle so brashly, young man," he protested.
+"You've been in the banking business, yourself--you needn't deny it--and
+you know what a banker's first care should be. Sit down again and let's
+thresh this thing out. I don't want to have to drop you."
+
+Being fairly at bay, with Debritt in town and Josiah Richlander due to
+come back to Brewster at any moment, Smith put his back to the wall and
+ignored the chair.
+
+"You are at liberty to do anything you see fit, so far as I am
+concerned," he rapped out, "and whatever you do, I'll try to hand it
+back to you, with interest."
+
+"That is good strong talk," retorted the banker, "but it doesn't tell me
+who you are, or why you are so evidently anxious to forget your past,
+Mr. Smith. I'm not asking much, if you'll stop to consider. And you'll
+give me credit for being fair and aboveboard with you. I might have held
+that engraving salesman and questioned him; he knows you--knows your
+other name."
+
+Smith put the entire matter aside with an impatient gesture. "Leave my
+past record out of it, if you please, Mr. Kinzie. At the present moment
+I am the financial head of Timanyoni High Line. What I want to know is
+this: do you continue to stand with us? or do you insist upon the
+privilege of seesawing every time Stanton turns up with a fresh scare?
+Let me have it, yes or no; and then I shall know what to do."
+
+The gray-haired man in the big chair took time to think about it,
+pursing his lips and making a quick-set hedge of his cropped mustache.
+In the end he capitulated.
+
+"I don't want to break with you--or with Dexter Baldwin," he said, at
+length. "But I'm going to talk straight to you. Your little local crowd
+of ranchmen and mining men will never be allowed to hold that dam and
+your ditch right of way; never in this world, Smith."
+
+"If you are our friend, you'll tell us why," Smith came back smartly.
+
+"Because you have got too big a crowd to fight; a crowd that can spend
+millions to your hundreds. I didn't know until to-day who was behind
+Stanton, though I had made my own guess. You mustn't be foolish, and you
+mustn't pull Dexter Baldwin in over his head--which is what you are
+doing now."
+
+Smith thrust his hands into his pockets and looked away.
+
+"What do you advise, Mr. Kinzie?" he asked.
+
+"Just this. At the present moment you seem to have a strangle-hold on
+the New York people that it will take a good bit of money to break.
+They'll break it, never fear. A Scotch terrier may be the bravest little
+dog that ever barked, but he can't fight a mastiff with any hope of
+saving his life. But there is still a chance for a compromise. Turn this
+muddle of yours over to me and let me make terms with the New Yorkers.
+I'll come as near to getting par for you as I can."
+
+Smith, still with his hands in his pockets, took a turn across the room.
+It was a sharp temptation. No one knew better than he what it would mean
+to be involved in a long fight, with huge capital on one side and only
+justice and a modest bank balance on the other. To continue would be to
+leave Colonel Baldwin and Maxwell and Starbuck and their local following
+a legacy of strife and shrewd battlings. He knew that Kinzie's offer was
+made in good faith. It was most probably based on a tentative proposal
+from Stanton, who, in turn, spoke for the great syndicate. By letting go
+he might get the local investors out whole, or possibly with some small
+profit.
+
+Against the acceptance of this alternative every fibre of the new-found
+manhood in him rose up in stubborn protest. Had it indeed come to a pass
+at which mere money could dominate and dictate, rob, steal, oppress, and
+ride roughshod over all opposition? Smith asked himself the question,
+and figured the big Missouri colonel's magnificent anger if it should be
+asked of him. That thought and another--the thought of what Corona would
+say and think if he should surrender--turned the scale.
+
+"No, Mr. Kinzie; we'll not compromise while I have anything to say about
+it; we'll fight it to a finish," he said abruptly; and with that he went
+out through the crowded anteroom and so back to his desk in the
+up-stairs offices.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Two Women
+
+
+For one day and yet another after the minatory interview with David
+Kinzie, Smith fought mechanically, developing the machine-like
+doggedness of the soldier who sees the battle going irresistibly against
+him and still smites on in sheer desperation.
+
+As if the night of fiascos had been the turning-point, he saw the
+carefully built reorganization structure, reared by his own efforts upon
+the foundation laid by Colonel Baldwin and his ranchmen associates,
+falling to pieces. In spite of all he could do, the panic of
+stock-selling continued; the city council, alarmed by the persistent
+story of the unsafety of the dam, was threatening to cancel the lighting
+contract with Timanyoni High Line; and Kinzie, though he was doing
+nothing openly, had caused the word about the proposed compromise with
+the Escalante people to be passed far and wide among the Timanyoni
+stockholders, together with the intimation that disaster could be
+averted now only by prompt action and the swift effacement of their
+rule-or-ruin secretary and treasurer.
+
+"They're after you, John," was the way the colonel put it at the close
+of the second day of back-slippings. "They say you're fiddlin' while
+Rome's a-burnin'. Maybe you know what they mean by that; I don't."
+
+Smith did know. During the two days of stress, Miss Verda had been very
+exacting. There had been another night at the theatre and much
+time-killing after meals in the parlors of the Hophra House. Worse
+still, there had been a daylight auto trip about town and up to the dam.
+The victim was writhing miserably under the price-paying, but there
+seemed to be no help for it. With Kinzie and Stanton working together,
+with Debritt gone only as far as Red Butte and promising to return, and
+with Josiah Richlander still within easy reach at the Topaz mines, he
+stood in hourly peril of the explosion, and a single written line from
+Verda to her father would light the match. Smith could find no word
+bitter enough to fitly characterize the depths into which he had sunk.
+It was the newest phase of the metamorphosis. Since the night of Verda
+Richlander's arrival in Brewster, he had not seen Corona; he was
+telling himself that he had forfeited the right to see her. Out of the
+chaotic wreck of things but one driving motive had survived, and it had
+grown to the stature of an obsession: the determination to wring victory
+out of defeat for Timanyoni High Line; to fall, if he must fall,
+fighting to the last gasp and with his face to the enemy.
+
+"I know," he said, replying, after the reflective pause, to the charge
+passed on by Colonel Dexter. "There is a friend of mine here from the
+East, and I have been obliged to show her some attention, so they say I
+am neglecting my job. They are also talking it around that I am your
+Jonah, and saying that your only hope is to pitch me overboard."
+
+"That's Dave Kinzie," growled the Missourian. "He seems to have it in
+for you, some way. He was trying to tell me this afternoon that I ought
+not to take you out to the ranch any more until you loosen up and tell
+us where you came from. I told him to go and soak his addled old head in
+a bucket of water!"
+
+"Nevertheless, he was right," Smith returned gloomily. Then: "I am about
+at the end of my rope, Colonel--the rope I warned you about when you
+brought me here and put me into the saddle; and I'm trying desperately
+to hang on until my job's done. When it is done, when Timanyoni High
+Line can stand fairly on its own feet and fight its own battles, I'm
+gone."
+
+"Oh, no, you're not," denied the ranchman-president in generous protest.
+"I don't know--you've never told us--what sort of a kettle of hot water
+you've got into, but you have made a few solid friends here in the
+Timanyoni, John, and they are going to stand by you. And--just to show
+Dave Kinzie that nobody cares a whoop for what he says--you come on out
+home with me to-night and get away from this muddle for a few minutes.
+It'll do you a heap of good; you know it always does."
+
+Smith shook his head reluctantly but firmly.
+
+"Never again, Colonel. It can only be a matter of a few days now, and
+I'm not going to pull you, and your wife and daughter, into the
+limelight if I can help it."
+
+Colonel Dexter got out of his chair and walked to the office window.
+When he came back it was to say: "Are they sure-enough chasing you,
+John?--for something that you have done? Is that what you're trying to
+tell me?"
+
+"That is it--and they are nearly here. Now you know at least one of the
+reasons why I can't go with you to-night."
+
+"I'll be shot if I do!" stormed the generous one. "I promised the Missus
+I'd bring you."
+
+"You must make my excuses to her; and to Corona you may say that I am
+once more carrying a gun. She will understand."
+
+"Which means, I take it, that you've been telling Corry more than you've
+told the rest of us. That brings on more talk, John. I haven't said a
+word before, have I?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, I'm going to say it now: I've got only just one daughter in the
+wide, wide world, John."
+
+Smith stood up and put his hands behind him, facing the older man
+squarely.
+
+"Colonel, I'd give ten years of my life, this minute, if I might go with
+you to Hillcrest this evening and tell Corona what I have been wanting
+to tell her ever since I have come to know what her love might make of
+me. The fact that I can't do it is the bitterest thing I have ever had
+to face, or can ever be made to face."
+
+Colonel Baldwin fell back into his swing-chair and thrust his hands into
+his pockets.
+
+"It beats the Dutch how things tangle themselves up for us poor mortals
+every little so-while," he commented, after a frowning pause. And then:
+"You haven't said anything like that to Corry, have you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That was white, anyway. And now I suppose the other woman--this Miss
+Rich-some-thing-or-other over at the hotel--has come and dug you up and
+got you on the end of her trail-rope. That's the way it goes when a man
+mixes and mingles too much. You never can tell--"
+
+"Hold on," Smith interposed. "Whatever else I may be, I'm not that kind
+of a scoundrel. I don't owe Miss Richlander anything that I can't pay
+without doing injustice to the woman I love. But in another way I am a
+scoundrel, Colonel. For the past two days I have been contemptible
+enough to play upon a woman's vanity merely for the sake of keeping her
+from talking too much."
+
+The grizzled old ranchman shook his head sorrowfully.
+
+"I didn't think that of you, John; I sure didn't. Why, that's what you
+might call a low-down, tin-horn sort of a game."
+
+"It is just that, and I know it as well as you do. But it's the price I
+have to pay for my few days of grace. Miss Richlander knows the
+Stantons; they've made it their business to get acquainted with her.
+One word from her to Crawford Stanton, and a wire from him to my home
+town in the Middle West would settle me."
+
+The older man straightened himself in his chair, and his steel-gray eyes
+blazed suddenly.
+
+"Break away from 'em, John!" he urged. "Break it off short, and let 'em
+all do their damnedest! Away along at the first, Williams and I both
+said you wasn't a crooked crook, and I'm believing it yet. When it comes
+to the show-down, we'll all fight for you, and they'll have to bring a
+derrick along if they want to snatch you out of the Timanyoni. You go
+over yonder to the Hophra House and tell that young woman that the
+bridle's off, and she can talk all she wants to!"
+
+"No," said Smith shortly. "I know what I am doing, and I shall go on as
+I have begun. It's the only way. Matters are desperate enough with us
+now, and if I should drop out----"
+
+The telephone-bell was ringing, and Baldwin twisted his chair to bring
+himself within reach of the desk set. The message was a brief one and at
+its finish the ranchman-president was frowning heavily.
+
+"By Jupiter! it does seem as if the bad luck all comes in a bunch!" he
+protested. "Williams was rushing things just a little too fast, and
+they've lost a whole section of the dam by stripping the forms before
+the concrete was set. That puts us back another twenty-four hours, at
+least. Don't that beat the mischief?"
+
+Smith reached for his hat. "It's six o'clock," he said; "and Williams's
+form-strippers have furnished one more reason why I shouldn't keep Miss
+Richlander waiting for her dinner." And with that he cut the talk short
+and went his way.
+
+Brewster being only a one-night stand on the long playing circuit
+between Denver and the Pacific coast, there was an open date at the
+opera-house, and with a blank evening before her, the Olympian beauty,
+making the _tete-a-tete_ dinner count for what it would, tightened her
+hold upon the one man available, demanding excitement. Nothing else
+offering, she suggested an evening auto drive, and Smith dutifully
+telephoned Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, and borrowed a
+runabout.
+
+Being left to his own choice of routes after the start was made, he
+headed the machine up the river road, and the drive paused at the dam.
+Craving a new sensation, Miss Richlander had it in full measure when the
+machine had been braked to a stop at the construction camp. Williams,
+hoarse from much shouting and haggard-eyed for want of sleep, was
+driving his men fiercely in a fight against time. The night rise in the
+river had already set in, and the slumped section of concrete had left a
+broad gap through which the water threatened to pour, endangering not
+only the power-house directly beneath it, but also the main structure of
+the dam itself.
+
+The stagings were black with men hurrying back and forth under the glare
+of the electrics, and the concrete gangs were laboring frantically to
+clear the wreck made by the crumbling mass, to the end that the
+carpenters might bulkhead the gap with timbers and planks to hold back
+the rising flood. The mixers had stopped temporarily, but the machinery
+was held in readiness to go into action the moment the debris should be
+removed and the new forms locked into place. Every now and then one of
+Williams's assistants, a red-headed young fellow with a voice like a
+fog-horn, took readings of the climbing river level from a gauge in the
+slack water, calling out the figures in a singsong chant: "Nineteen
+_six_! Nineteen six and a _quarter_! Nineteen six and a _half_!"
+
+"Get a move, you fellows there on the stage!" yelled Williams. "She's
+coming up faster than usual to-night! Double pay if you get that
+bulkhead in before the tide wets your feet!"
+
+Smith felt as if he ought to get out of the car and help, but there was
+nothing he could do. Miss Richlander had been silent for the better part
+of the drive from town, but now she began to talk.
+
+"So this is what you left Lawrenceville for, is it, Montague?" she said,
+knitting her perfect brows at the hubbub and strife. "If I were not
+here, I believe you would be down there, struggling with the rest of
+them."
+
+"I certainly should," he answered briefly, adding: "not that I should be
+of much use."
+
+"There are a good many easier ways of making money," she offered,
+including the entire industrial strife in the implied detraction.
+
+"This is a man's way, asking for all--and the best--there is in a man,"
+he asserted. "You can't understand, of course; you have eaten the bread
+of profits and discount and interest all your life. But here is
+something really creative. The world will be the richer for what is
+being done here; more mouths can be filled and more backs clothed. That
+is the true test of wealth, and the only test."
+
+"And you are willing to live in a raw wilderness for the sake of having
+a part in these crudities?"
+
+"I may say that I had no choice, at first; it was this or nothing. But I
+may also say that whatever the future may do to me, I shall always have
+it to remember that for a little time I was a man, and not a tailor's
+model."
+
+"Is that the way you are thinking now of your former life?" she gibed.
+
+"It is the truth. The man you knew in Lawrenceville cared more for the
+set of a coat, for the color of a tie, for conventional ease and the
+little luxuries, than he did for his soul. And nobody thought enough of
+him to kick him alive and show him that he was strangling the only part
+of him that was at all worth saving."
+
+"If your point of view appeals to me, as perhaps it does--as possibly it
+would to any woman who can appreciate masculinity in a man, even though
+it be of the crudest--the life that is giving it to you certainly does
+not," she replied, with a little lip-curling of scorn. Then: "You
+couldn't bring your wife to such a place as Brewster, Montague."
+
+He had no answer for this, and none was needed. Williams had caught
+sight of the auto, and he came up, wiping his face with a red
+handkerchief.
+
+"I thought it must be you," he said to Smith. "Thank the Lord, we're
+going to escape, this one more time! The bulkhead's in, and we'll be
+dumping concrete in another fifteen minutes. But it was a narrow
+squeak--an awful narrow squeak!"
+
+Smith turned to his companion, saw permission in her eyes, and
+introduced Williams. Somewhat to Smith's surprise, Miss Verda evinced a
+suddenly awakened interest in the engineer and in his work, making him
+tell the story of the near-disaster. While he was telling it, the roar
+of another auto rose above the clamor on the stagings and Colonel
+Baldwin's gray roadster drew up beside the borrowed runabout. Smith gave
+one glance at the small, trimly coated figure in the mechanician's seat
+and ground his teeth in helpless fury.
+
+In what followed he had little part or lot. Miss Richlander wished to
+see the construction battle at shorter range, and Williams was opening
+the door of the runabout. The colonel was afoot and was helping his
+daughter to alight. Smith swore a silent oath to keep his place, and he
+did it; but Williams was already introducing Baldwin and Corona to Miss
+Richlander. There was a bit of commonplace talk, and then the quartet
+walked down the embankment and out upon the finished portion of the dam,
+Williams explaining the near-disaster as they went.
+
+Smith sat back behind the pilot-wheel of the runabout and waited. Not
+for a king's ransom would he have joined the group on the dam. He
+suspected shrewdly that Verda had already heard of Corona through the
+Stantons; that she was inwardly rejoicing at the new hold upon him which
+chance had flung in her way. At the end of Williams's fifteen minutes
+the rattle and grind of the mixers began. When the stream of concrete
+came pouring through the high-tilted spouts, Smith looked to see the
+colonel and Williams bringing the two women back to the camp level. What
+the light of the masthead arcs showed him was the figure of one of the
+women returning alone, while the two men and the other woman went on
+across the stagings to the farther river bank where the battery of
+mixers fed the swiftly moving lift.
+
+Smith did not get out to go and meet the returning figure; his courage
+was not of that quality. But he could not pretend to be either asleep or
+dead when Corona came up between the two cars and spoke to him.
+
+"You have nothing whatever to take back," she said, smiling up at him
+from her seat on the running-board of the roadster. "She is all you said
+she was--and more. She is gorgeously beautiful!"
+
+Smith flung his freshly lighted cigar away and climbed out to sit beside
+her.
+
+"What do you think of me?" he demanded bluntly.
+
+"What should I think? Didn't I scold you for running away from her that
+first evening? I am glad you thought better of it afterward."
+
+"I am not thinking better of it at all--in the way you mean."
+
+"But Miss Richlander is," was the quiet reply.
+
+"You have a right to say anything you please; and after it is all said,
+to say it again. I am not the man you have been taking me for; not in
+any respect. Your father knows now, and he will tell you."
+
+"Colonel-daddy has told me one thing--the thing you told him to tell me.
+And I am sorry--sorry and disappointed."
+
+He smiled morosely. "Billy Starbuck calls the Timanyoni a half-reformed
+gun-country, and from the very first he has been urging me to 'go
+heeled,' as he phrases it."
+
+"It isn't the mere carrying of a gun," she protested. "With most men
+that would be only a prudent precaution for the leader in a fight like
+this one you are making. But it means more than that to you; it means a
+complete change of attitude toward your kind. Tell me if I am wrong."
+
+"No; you are right. The time is coming when I shall be obliged to kill
+somebody. And I think I shall rather welcome it."
+
+"Now you have gone so far away that I can hardly see you," she said
+softly. "'Once in a blue moon,' you said, the impossible might happen.
+It _did_ happen in your case, didn't it?--giving you a chance to grow
+and expand and to break with all the old traditions, whatever they were.
+And the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose.
+You have all the abilities; you can reach out and take what other men
+have to beg for. Once you thought you would take only the best, and then
+you grew so fast that we could hardly keep you in sight. But now you are
+meaning to take the worst."
+
+"I don't understand," he said soberly.
+
+"You will understand some day," she asserted, matching his sober tone.
+"When that time comes, you will know that the only great men are those
+who love their fellow men; who are too big to be little; who can fight
+without hatred; who can die, if need be, that others may live."
+
+"My God!" said the man, and though he said it under his breath there
+was, pent up in the two words, the cry of a soul in travail; a soul to
+whom its own powers have suddenly been revealed, together with its lost
+opportunities and its crushing inability to rise to the heights
+supernal.
+
+"It came too soon--if I could only have had a little more time," he was
+saying; but at that, the colonel and Williams came up, bringing Miss
+Richlander, and the heart-mellowing moment was gone.
+
+Smith drove the borrowed runabout back to town in sober silence, and the
+glorious beauty in the seat beside him did not try to make him talk.
+Perhaps she, too, was busy with thoughts of her own. At all events, when
+Smith had helped her out of the car at the hotel entrance and had seen
+her as far as the elevator, she thanked him half absently and took his
+excuse, that he must return the runabout to Maxwell's garage, without
+laying any further commands upon him.
+
+Just as he was turning away, a bell-boy came across from the clerk's
+desk with a telegram for Miss Richlander. Smith had no excuse for
+lingering, but with the air thick with threats he made the tipping of
+the boy answer for a momentary stop-gap. Miss Verda tore the envelope
+open and read the enclosure with a fine-lined little frown coming and
+going between her eyes.
+
+"It's from Tucker Jibbey," she said, glancing up at Smith. "Some one has
+told him where we are, and he is following us. He says he'll be here on
+the evening train. Will you meet him and tell him I've gone to bed?"
+
+At the mention of Jibbey, the money-spoiled son of the man who stood
+next to Josiah Richlander in the credit ratings, and Lawrenceville's
+best imitation of a _flaneur_, Smith's first emotion was one of relief
+at the thought that Jibbey would at least divide time with him in the
+entertainment of the bored beauty; then he remembered that Jibbey had
+once considered him a rival, and that the sham "rounder's" presence in
+Brewster would constitute a menace more threatening than all the others
+put together.
+
+"I can't meet Tucker," he said bluntly. "You know very well I can't."
+
+"That's so," was the quiet reply. "Of course, you can't. What will you
+do when he comes?--run away?"
+
+"No; I can't do that, either. I shall keep out of his way, if I can. If
+he finds me and makes any bad breaks, he'll get what's coming to him. If
+he's worth anything to you, you'll put him on the stage in the morning
+and send him up into the mountains to join your father."
+
+"The idea!" she laughed. "He's not coming out here to see father. Poor
+Tucker! If he could only know what he is in for!" Then: "It is beginning
+to look as if you might have to go still deeper in debt to me, Montague.
+There is one more thing I'd like to do before I leave Brewster. If I'll
+promise to keep Tucker away from you, will you drive me out to the
+Baldwins' to-morrow afternoon? I want to see the colonel's fine horses,
+and he has invited me, you know."
+
+Smith's eyes darkened.
+
+"There is a limit, Verda, and you've reached it," he said quickly. "If
+the colonel invited you to Hillcrest, it was because you didn't leave
+him any chance not to. I resign in favor of Jibbey," and with that he
+handed her into the waiting elevator and said: "Good night."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+Tucker Jibbey
+
+
+Though it was a working man's bedtime when Smith put Miss Richlander
+into the elevator at the Hophra House and bade her good night, he knew
+that there would be no sleep for him until he had made sure of the
+arrival or non-arrival of the young man who, no less certainly than
+Josiah Richlander or Debritt, could slay him with a word. Returning the
+borrowed runabout to its garage, he went to the railroad station and
+learned that the "Flyer" from the East was over four hours late. With
+thirty minutes to spare, he walked the long train platform, chewing an
+extinct cigar and growing more and more desperate at each pacing turn.
+
+With time to weigh and measure the probabilities, he saw what would come
+to pass. Verda Richlander might keep her own counsel, or she might not;
+but in any event, Stanton would be quick to identify Jibbey as a
+follower of Verda's, and so, by implication, a man who would be
+acquainted with Verda's intimates. Smith recalled Jibbey's varied
+weaknesses. If Verda should get hold of him first, and was still
+generous enough to warn him against Stanton, the blow might be delayed.
+But if Stanton should be quick enough, and cunning enough to play upon
+Jibbey's thirst, the liquor-loosened tongue would tell all that it knew.
+
+In such a crisis the elemental need rises up to thrust all other
+promptings, ethical or merely prudent, into the background. Smith had
+been profoundly moved by Corona Baldwin's latest appeal to such
+survivals of truth and honor and fair-dealing as the strange
+metamorphosis and the culminating struggle against odds had left him.
+But in any new birth it is inevitable that the offspring of the man that
+was shall be at first--like all new-born beings--a pure savage, guided
+only by instinct. And of the instincts, that of self-preservation easily
+overtops all others.
+
+Smith saw how suddenly the pit of disaster would yawn for him upon
+Jibbey's arrival, and the compunctions stirred by Corona's plea for the
+higher ideals withdrew or were crushed in the turmoil. He had set his
+hand to the plough and he would not turn back. It was Jibbey's
+effacement in some way, or his own, he told himself, for he had long
+since determined that he would never be taken alive to be dragged back
+to face certain conviction in the Lawrenceville courts and a living
+death in the home State penitentiary.
+
+With this determination gripping him afresh, he glanced at his watch. In
+fifteen minutes more his fate would be decided. The station baggage and
+express handlers were beginning to trundle their loaded trucks out
+across the platform to be in readiness for the incoming train. There was
+still time enough, but none to spare. Smith passed through the station
+quickly and on the town side of the building took a cab. "Benkler's,"
+was his curt order to the driver; and three minutes later he was telling
+the night man at the garage that he had come back to borrow Maxwell's
+runabout again, and urging haste in the refilling of the tanks.
+
+The delayed "Flyer" was whistling in when Smith drove the runabout to
+the station, and he had barely time to back the machine into place in
+the cab rank and to hurry out to the platform before the train came
+clattering down over the yard switches. Since all the debarking
+passengers had to come through the archway exit from the track platform,
+Smith halted at a point from which he could pass them in review. The
+day-coach people came first, and after them a smaller contingent from
+the sleepers. At the tail of the straggling procession Smith saw his
+man, a thin-faced, hollow-eyed young fellow with an unlighted cigarette
+hanging from his loose lower lip. Smith marked all the little details:
+the rakish hat, the flaming-red tie, the russet-leather suitcase with
+its silver identification tag. Then he placed himself squarely in the
+young man's way.
+
+Jibbey's stare was only momentary. With a broad-mouthed grin he dropped
+the suitcase and thrust out a hand.
+
+"Well, well--Monty, old sport! So this is where you ducked to, is it? By
+Jove, it's no wonder Bart Macauley couldn't get a line on you! How are
+tricks, anyway?"
+
+Smith was carefully refusing to see the out-stretched hand. And it asked
+for a sudden tightening of the muscles of self-possession to keep him
+from looking over his shoulder to see if any of Stanton's shadow men
+were at hand.
+
+"Verda got your telegram, and she asked me to meet you," he rejoined
+crisply. "Also, to make her excuses for to-night: she has gone to bed."
+
+"So that's the way the cat's jumping, is it?" said the imitation black
+sheep, the grin twisting itself into a leer. "_She_ got a line on you,
+even if Macauley couldn't. By Gad! I guess I didn't get out here any too
+soon."
+
+Smith ignored the half-jealous pleasantry. "Bring your grip," he
+directed. "I have an auto here and we'll drive."
+
+Being a stranger in a strange city, Jibbey could not know that the hotel
+was only three squares distant. For the same cause he was entirely
+unsuspicious when Smith turned the car to the right out of the cab rank
+and took a street leading to the western suburb. But when the pavements
+had been left behind, together with all the town lights save an
+occasional arc-lamp at a crossing, and he was trying for the third time
+to hold a match to the hanging cigarette, enough ground had been covered
+to prompt a question.
+
+"Hell of a place to call itself a city, if anybody should ask you," he
+chattered. "Much of this to worry through?"
+
+Smith bent lower over the tiller-wheel, advancing the spark and opening
+the throttle for more gas.
+
+"A good bit of it. Didn't you know that Mr. Richlander is out in the
+hills, buying a mine?"
+
+Tucker Jibbey was rapid only in his attitude toward the world of
+decency; the rapidity did not extend to his mental processes. The suburb
+street had become a country road, the bridge over the torrenting Gloria
+had thundered under the flying wheels, and a great butte, black in its
+foresting from foot to summit, was rising slowly among the western stars
+before his small brain had grasped the relation of cause to effect.
+
+"Say, here, Monty--dammit all, you hold on! Verda isn't with Old
+Moneybags; she's staying at the hotel in town. I wired and found out
+before I left Denver. Where in Sam Hill are you taking me to?"
+
+Smith made no reply other than to open the cut-out and to put his foot
+on the accelerator. The small car leaped forward at racing speed and
+Jibbey clutched wildly at the wheel.
+
+"Stop her--stop her!" he shrilled. "Lemme get out!"
+
+Smith had one hand free and it went swiftly to his hip pocket. A second
+later Jibbey's shrilling protest died away in a gurgle of terror.
+
+"For--for God's sake, Monty--don't kill me!" he gasped, when he saw the
+free hand clutching a weapon and uplifted as if to strike. "Wh--what've
+I done to you?"
+
+"I'll tell you--a little later. Keep quiet and let this wheel alone, if
+you want to live long enough to find out where you're going. Quiet down,
+I say, or I'll beat your damned head off!--oh, you would, would you? All
+right--if you _will_ have it!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It lacked only a few minutes of midnight when Smith returned the
+borrowed runabout for the second time that night, sending it jerkily
+through the open door of Benkler's garage and swinging stiffly from
+behind the steering-wheel to thrust a bank-note into the hand of the
+waiting night man.
+
+"Wash the car down good, and be sure it's all right before Mr. Maxwell
+sends around in the morning," he commanded gruffly; and then: "Take your
+whisk and dust me off."
+
+The night man had seen the figure of his tip and was nothing loath.
+
+"Gosh!" he exclaimed, with large Western freedom; "you sure look as if
+you'd been drivin' a good ways, and tol'able hard. What's this on your
+sleeve? Say! it looks like blood!"
+
+"No; it's mud," was the short reply; and after the liberal tipper had
+gone, the garage man was left to wonder where, on the dust-dry roads in
+the Timanyoni, the borrower of Mr. Maxwell's car had found mud deep
+enough to splash him, and, further, why there was no trace of the mud on
+the dust-covered car itself.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+At Any Cost
+
+
+Brewster, drawing its business profit chiefly from the mines in the
+Topaz and upper Gloria districts, had been only moderately enthusiastic
+over the original irrigation project organized by Colonel Dexter Baldwin
+and the group of ranchmen who were to be directly benefited. But when
+the scope of the plan was enlarged to include a new source of power and
+light for the city, the scheme had become, in a broader sense, a public
+utility, and Brewster had promptly awakened to the importance of its
+success as a local enterprise.
+
+The inclusion of the hydro-electric privilege in the new charter had
+been a bit of far-sighted business craft on the part of the young man
+whose name was now in everybody's mouth. As he had pointed out to his
+new board of directors, there was an abundant excess of water, and a
+modest profit on the electric plant would pay the operating expenses of
+the entire system, including the irrigating up-keep and extension work.
+In addition to this, a reasonable contract price for electric current to
+be furnished to the city would give the project a _quasi_-public
+character, at least to the extent of enlisting public sympathy on the
+side of the company in the fight with the land trust.
+
+This piece of business foresight found itself amply justified as
+the race against time was narrowed down to days and hours. Though
+there was spiteful opposition offered by one of the two daily
+newspapers--currently charged with being subsidized by the land
+trust--public sentiment as a whole, led by the other newspaper, was
+strongly on the side of the local corporation. Baldwin, Maxwell,
+Starbuck, and a few more of the leading spirits in Timanyoni High Line
+had many friends, and Crawford Stanton found his task growing
+increasingly difficult as the climax drew near.
+
+But to a man with an iron jaw difficulties become merely incentives to
+greater effort. Being between the devil, in the person of an employer
+who knew no mercy, on the one hand, and the deep blue sea of failure on
+the other, the promoter left no expedient untried, and the one which was
+yielding the best results, thus far, was the steady undercurrent of
+detraction and calamitous rumor which he had contrived to set in motion.
+As we have seen, it was first whispered, and then openly asserted, that
+the dam was being built too hurriedly; that its foundations were
+insecure; that, sooner or later, it would be carried away in high water,
+and the city and the intervening country would be flood-swept and
+devastated.
+
+Beyond this, the detractive gossip attacked the _personnel_ of the new
+company. Baldwin was all right as a man, and he knew how to raise fine
+horses; but what did he, or any of his associates, know about building
+dams and installing hydro-electric plants? Williams, the chief engineer,
+was an ex-government man, and--government projects being anathema in the
+Timanyoni by reason of the restrictive rules and regulations of the
+Hophra Forest Reserve--everybody knew what that meant: out-of-date
+methods, red-tape detail, general inefficiency. And Smith, the young
+plunger who had dropped in from nobody knew where: what could be said of
+him more than that he had succeeded in temporarily hypnotizing an entire
+city? Who was he? and where had the colonel found him? Was his name
+really Smith, or was that only a convenient _alias_?
+
+Having set these queries afoot in Brewster, Stanton was unwearied in
+keeping them alive and pressing them home. And since such askings grow
+by what they feed upon, the questions soon began to lose the
+interrogatory form and to become assertions of fact. Banker Kinzie was
+quoted as saying, or at least as intimating, that he had lost faith, not
+only in the High Line scheme, but particularly in its secretary and
+treasurer; and to this bit of gossip was added another to the effect
+that Smith had grossly deceived the bank by claiming to be the
+representative of Eastern capital when he was nothing more than an
+adventurer trading upon the credulity and good nature of an entire
+community.
+
+To these calumniating charges it was admitted on all sides that Smith,
+himself, was giving some color of truth. To those who had opposed him he
+had shown no mercy, and there were plenty of defeated litigants, and
+some few dropped stockholders, among the obstructors to claim that the
+new High Line promoter was a bully and a browbeater; that a poor man
+stood no chance in a fight with the Timanyoni Company.
+
+On the sentimental side the charges were still graver--in the Western
+point of view. In its social aspect Brewster was still in the
+country-village stage, and Smith's goings and comings at Hillcrest had
+been quickly marked. From that to assuming the sentimental status, with
+the colonel's daughter in the title role, was a step that had already
+been taken by the society editress of the _Brewster Banner_ in a veiled
+hint of a forthcoming "announcement" in which "the charming daughter of
+one of our oldest and most respected families" and "a brilliant young
+business man from the East" were to figure as the parties in interest.
+Conceive, therefore, the shock that had been given to these kindlier
+gossips when Smith's visits to the Baldwin ranch ceased abruptly between
+two days, and the "brilliant young business man" was seen everywhere and
+always in the company of the beautiful stranger who was stopping at the
+Hophra House. In its palmier day the Timanyoni had hanged a man for
+less.
+
+On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smith
+gave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the business
+field. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a man
+suddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial,
+not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the short
+space of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities which
+he had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing and
+refinancing of the irrigation project.
+
+"We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, at
+last," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for the
+bejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra cafe. "Kinzie is about
+to throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam is
+getting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that you
+can't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up to
+his office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smith
+abused him first and then threw him out bodily--hurt him pretty
+savagely, they say."
+
+The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise.
+
+"Bad temper?" she queried.
+
+"Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take your
+choice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with Miss
+Richlander overnight?--or has he?"
+
+The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were at
+luncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutes
+ago."
+
+Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But an
+invisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might have
+drawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrenceville
+magnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were not
+precisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times.
+
+"I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day,
+Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the little
+ranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from us
+and went back to you at the autos?"
+
+"No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say."
+
+"But it, or something else, has changed you--very much for the worse.
+Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch this
+afternoon?"
+
+"And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition?--never in this
+world!"
+
+"More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame of
+mind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever do
+you suppose has become of Tucker?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"If he had come in last night, and you had met him--as I asked you
+to--in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might think
+you had murdered him."
+
+It was doubtless by sheer accident that Smith, reaching at the moment
+for the salad-oil, overturned his water-glass. But the small accident by
+no means accounted for the sudden graying of his face under the
+Timanyoni wind tan--for that or for the shaking hands with which he
+seconded the waiter's anxious efforts to repair the damage. When they
+were alone again, the momentary trepidation had given place to a renewed
+hardness that lent a biting rasp to his voice.
+
+"Kinzie, the suspicious old banker that I've been telling you about, is
+determined to run me down," he said, changing the subject abruptly.
+"I've got it pretty straight that he is planning to send one of his
+clerks to the Topaz district to try and find your father."
+
+"In the hope that father will tell what he knows about you?"
+
+"Just that."
+
+"Does this Mr. Kinzie know where father is to be found?"
+
+"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."
+
+Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.
+
+"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making,
+if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell you
+that Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in trying
+to make me tell him where father has gone."
+
+"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assure
+you, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach your
+father--alive."
+
+"_Ooh!_" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the rounded
+shoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a much
+simpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie in
+some way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you do
+that?"
+
+"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"
+
+"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said the
+young woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, you
+know. Father left it with me--in case I should want to communicate with
+him."
+
+Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.
+
+"_You_ wouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of the
+ultimate right and wrong, would you? _You_ wouldn't say that the only
+great man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"
+
+Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.
+
+"Are you quoting the little ranch person?" she inquired. Then she
+answered his query: "The only great men worth speaking of are the men
+who win. For the lack of something better to do, I'm willing to help you
+win, Montague. Contrive in some way to have that clerk sent to me. It
+can come about quite casually if it is properly suggested. Most
+naturally, I am the one who would know where my father is to be found.
+And I have changed my mind about wanting to drive to the Baldwins'.
+We'll compromise on the play--if there _is_ a play."
+
+Two things came of this talk over the luncheon table. Smith went back to
+his office and shut himself up, without going near the Brewster City
+National. None the less, the expedient suggested by Verda Richlander
+must have found its means of communication in some way, since at two
+o'clock David Kinzie summoned the confidential clerk who had been
+directed to provide himself with a livery mount and gave him his
+instructions.
+
+"I'm turning this over to you, Hoback, because you know enough to keep a
+still tongue in your head. Mr. Stanton doesn't know where Mr. Richlander
+is, but Mr. Richlander's daughter does know. Go over to the hotel and
+introduce yourself as coming from me. Say to the daughter that it is
+necessary for us to communicate with her father on a matter of important
+business, and ask her if she can direct you. That's all; only don't
+mention Stanton in the matter. Come back and report after you've seen
+her."
+
+This was one of the results of the luncheon-table talk; and the other
+came a short half-hour further along, when the confidential clerk
+returned to make his report.
+
+"I don't know why Miss Richlander wouldn't tell Mr. Stanton," he said.
+"She was mighty nice to me; made me a pencil sketch of the Topaz country
+and marked the mines that her father is examining."
+
+"Good!" said David Kinzie, with his stubbly mustache at its most
+aggressive angle. "It's pretty late in the day, but you'd better make a
+start and get as far as you can before dark. When you find Mr.
+Richlander, handle him gently. Tell him who you are, and then ask him if
+he knows anything about a man named 'Montague,' or 'Montague Smith';
+ask him who he is, and where he comes from. If you get that far with
+him, he'll probably tell you the rest of it."
+
+Smith saw no more of Miss Richlander until eight o'clock in the evening,
+at which time he sent his card to her room and waited for her in the
+mezzanine parlors. When she came down to him, radiant in fine raiment,
+he seemed not to see the bedeckings or the beauty which they adorned.
+
+"There is a play, and I have the seats," he announced briefly.
+
+"_Merci!_" she flung back. "Small favors thankfully received, and larger
+ones in proportion; though it's hardly a favor, this time, because I
+have paid for it in advance. Mr. Kinzie's young man came to see me this
+afternoon."
+
+"What did you do?"
+
+"I gave him a tracing of my map, and he was so grateful that it made me
+want to tell him that it was all wrong; that he wouldn't find father in
+a month if he followed the directions."
+
+"But you didn't!"
+
+"No; I can play the game, when it seems worth while."
+
+Smith was frowning thoughtfully when he led her to the elevator alcove.
+
+"My way would have been the surer," he muttered, half to himself.
+
+"Barbarian!" she laughed; and then: "To think that you were once a
+'debutantes' darling'! Oh, yes; I know it was Carter Westfall who said
+it first, but it was true enough to name you instantly for all
+Lawrenceville."
+
+Smith made no comment, and Miss Richlander did not speak again until
+they were waiting in the women's lobby for the house porter to call a
+cab. Then, as if she had just remembered it:
+
+"Oh! I forgot to ask you: is the Eastern train in?"
+
+He nodded. "It was on time this evening--for a wonder."
+
+"And no Tucker yet! What in the world do you suppose could have happened
+to him, Montague?"
+
+The porter was announcing the theatre cab and Smith reserved his answer
+until the motor hackney was rolling jerkily away toward the opera-house.
+
+"Jibbey has probably got what was coming to him," he said grittingly. "I
+don't know whether you have ever remarked it or not, but the insect of
+the Jibbey breed usually finds somebody to come along and step on it,
+sooner or later."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+The Megalomaniac
+
+
+On a day which was only sixty-odd hours short of the expiration of the
+time limit fixed by the charter conditions under which the original
+Timanyoni Ditch Company had obtained its franchise, Bartley Williams,
+lean and sombre-eyed from the strain he had been under for many days and
+nights, saw the president's gray roadster ploughing its way through the
+mesa sand on the approach to the construction camp, and was glad.
+
+"I've been trying all the morning to squeeze out time to get into town,"
+he told Baldwin, when the roadster came to a stand in front of the shack
+commissary. "Where is Smith?"
+
+The colonel threw up his hand in a gesture expressive of complete
+detachment.
+
+"Don't ask me. John has gone plumb loco in these last two or three days.
+It's as much as your life's worth to ask him where he has been or where
+he is going or what he means to do next."
+
+"He hasn't stopped fighting?" said the engineer, half aghast at the bare
+possibility.
+
+"Oh, no; he's at it harder than ever--going it just a shaving too
+strong, is what I'd tell him, if he'd let me get near enough to shout at
+him. Last night, after the theatre, he went around to the _Herald_
+office, and the way they're talking it on the street, he was aiming to
+shoot up the whole newspaper joint if Mark Allen, the editor, wouldn't
+take back a bunch of the lies he's been publishing about the High Line.
+It wound up in a scrap of some sort. I don't know who got the worst of
+it, but John isn't crippled up any, to speak of, this morning--only in
+his temper."
+
+"Smith puzzles me more than a little," was Williams's comment. "It's
+just as you say; for the last few days he's been acting as if he had a
+grouch a mile long. Is it the old sore threatening to break out
+again?--the 'lame duck' business?"
+
+"I shouldn't wonder," said the colonel evasively. Loyal to the last, he
+was not quite ready to share with Williams the half-confidence in which
+Smith had admitted, by implication at least, that the waiting young
+woman at the Hophra House held his future between her thumb and finger.
+
+Williams shook his head. "I guess we'll have to stand for the grouch,
+if he'll only keep busy. He has the hot end of it, trying to stop the
+stampede among the stockholders, and hold up the money pinch, and keep
+Stanton from springing any new razzle on us. We couldn't very well get
+along without him, right now, Colonel. With all due respect to you and
+the members of the board, he is the fighting backbone of the whole
+outfit."
+
+"He is that," was Baldwin's ready admission. "He is just what we've been
+calling him from the first, Bartley--a three-ply, dyed-in-the-wool
+wonder in his specialty. Stanton hasn't been able to make a single move
+yet that Smith hasn't foreseen and discounted. He is fighting now like a
+man in the last ditch, and I believe he thinks he is in the last ditch.
+The one time lately when I have had anything like a straight talk with
+him, he hinted at that and gave me to understand that he'd be willing to
+quit and take his medicine if he could hold on until Timanyoni High Line
+wins out."
+
+"That will be only two days more," said the engineer, saying it as one
+who has been counting the days in keen anxiety. And then: "Stillings
+told me yesterday that we're not going to get an extension of the time
+limit from the State authorities."
+
+"No; that little fire went out, blink, just as Smith said it would.
+Stanton's backers have the political pull--in the State, as well as in
+Washington. They're going to hold us to the letter of the law."
+
+"Let 'em do it. We'll win out yet--if we don't run up against one or
+both of the only two things I'm afraid of now: high water, or the
+railroad call down."
+
+"The water is pushing you pretty hard?"
+
+"It's touch and go every night now. A warm rain in the mountains--well,
+I won't say that it would tear us up, because I don't believe it would,
+or could; but it would delay us, world without end."
+
+"And the railroad grab? Have you heard anything more about that?"
+
+"That is what I was trying to get to town for; to talk the railroad
+business over with you and Stillings and Smith. They've had a gang here
+this morning; a bunch of engineers, with a stranger, who gave his name
+as Hallowell, in charge. They claimed to be verifying the old survey,
+and Hallowell notified me formally that our dam stood squarely in their
+right of way for a bridge crossing of the river."
+
+"They didn't serve any papers on you, did they?" inquired the colonel
+anxiously.
+
+"No; the notice was verbal. But Hallowell wound up with a threat. He
+said, 'You've had due warning, legally and otherwise, Mr. Williams. This
+is our right of way, bought and paid for, as we can prove when the
+matter gets into the courts. You mustn't be surprised if we take
+whatever steps may be necessary to recover what belongs to us.'"
+
+"Force?" queried the Missourian, with a glint of the border-fighter's
+fire in his eyes.
+
+"Maybe. But we're ready for that. Did you know that Smith loaded half a
+dozen cases of Winchesters on a motor-truck yesterday, and had them sent
+out here?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"He did--and told me to say nothing about it. It seems that he ordered
+them some time ago from an arms agency in Denver. That fellow foresees
+everything, Colonel."
+
+Dexter Baldwin had climbed into his car and was making ready to turn it
+for the run back to town.
+
+"If I were you, Bartley, I believe I'd open up those gun boxes and pass
+the word among as many of the men as you think you can trust with rifles
+in their hands. I'll tell Smith--and Bob Stillings."
+
+Colonel Baldwin made half of his promise good, the half relating to the
+company's attorney, as soon as he reached Brewster. But the other half
+had to remain in abeyance. Smith was not in his office, and no one
+seemed to know where he had gone. The colonel shrewdly suspected that
+Miss Richlander was making another draft upon the secretary's time, and
+he said as much to Starbuck, later in the day, when the mine owner
+sauntered into the High Line headquarters and proceeded to roll the
+inevitable cigarette.
+
+"Not any, this time, Colonel," was Starbuck's rebuttal. "You've missed
+it by a whole row of apple-trees. Miss Rich-dollars is over at the
+hotel. I saw her at luncheon with the Stantons less than an hour ago."
+
+"You haven't seen Smith, have you?"
+
+"No; but I know where he is. He's out in the country, somewhere, taking
+the air in Dick Maxwell's runabout. I wanted to borrow the wagon myself,
+and Dick told me he had already lent it to Smith."
+
+"We're needing him," said the colonel shortly, and then he told Starbuck
+of the newest development in the paper-railroad scheme of obstruction.
+
+From that the talk drifted to a discussion of Kinzie's latest attitude.
+By this time there had been an alarming number of stock sales by small
+holders, all of them handled by the Brewster City National, and it was
+plainly evident that Kinzie had finally gone over to the enemy and was
+buying--as cheaply as possible--for some unnamed customer. This had been
+Stanton's earliest expedient; to "bear" the stock and to buy up the
+control; and he was apparently trying it again.
+
+"If they keep it up, they can wear us out by littles, and we'll break
+our necks finishing the dam and saving the franchise only to turn it
+over to them in the round-up," said the colonel dejectedly. "I've talked
+until I'm hoarse, but you can't talk marrow into an empty bone, Billy. I
+used to think we had a fairly good bunch of men in with us, but in these
+last few days I've been changing my mind at a fox-trot. These hedgers'll
+promise you anything on top of earth to your face, and then go straight
+back on you the minute you're out of sight."
+
+The remainder of the day, up to the time when the offices were closing
+and the colonel was making ready to go home, passed without incident. In
+Smith's continued absence, Starbuck had offered to go to the dam to
+stand a night-watch with Williams against a possible surprise by the
+right-of-way claimants; and Stillings, who had been petitioning for an
+injunction, came up to report progress just as Baldwin was locking his
+desk.
+
+"The judge has taken it under advisement, but that is as far as he would
+go to-day," said the lawyer. "It's simply a bald steal, of course, and
+unless they ring in crooked evidence on us, we can show it up in court.
+But that would mean more delay, and delay is the one thing we can't
+stand. I'm sworn to uphold the law, and I can't counsel armed
+resistance. Just the same, I hope Williams has his nerve with him."
+
+"He has; and I haven't lost mine, yet," snapped a voice at the door; and
+Smith came in, dust-covered and swarthy with the grime of the wind-swept
+grass-lands. Out of the pocket of his driving coat he drew a thick
+packet of papers and slapped it upon the drawn-down curtain of Baldwin's
+desk. "There you are," he went on gratingly. "Now you can tell Mr. David
+Kinzie to go straight to hell with his stock-pinching, and the more
+money he puts into it, the more somebody's going to lose!"
+
+"My Lord, John!--what have you done?" demanded Baldwin.
+
+"I've shown 'em what it means to go up against a winner!" was the
+half-triumphant, half-savage exultation. "I have put a crimp in that
+fence-climbing banker of yours that will last him for one while! I've
+secured thirty-day options, at par, on enough High Line stock to swing a
+clear majority if Kinzie should buy up every other share there is
+outstanding. It has taken me all day, and I've driven a thousand miles,
+but the thing is done."
+
+"But, John! If anything should happen, and we'd have to make good on
+those options.... The Lord have mercy! It would break the last man of
+us!"
+
+"We're not going to let things happen!" was the gritting rejoinder.
+"I've told you both a dozen times that I'm in this thing to win! You
+take care of those options, Stillings; they're worth a million dollars
+to somebody. Lock 'em up somewhere and then forget where they are. Now
+I'm going to hunt up Mr. Crawford Stanton--before I eat or sleep!"
+
+"Easy, John; hold up a minute!" the colonel broke in soothingly; and
+Stillings, more practical, closed the office door silently and put his
+back against it. "This is a pretty sudden country, but there is some
+sort of a limit, you know," the big Missourian went on. "What's your
+idea in going to Stanton?"
+
+"I mean to give him twelve hours in which to pack his trunk and get out
+of Brewster and the Timanyoni. If he hasn't disappeared by to-morrow
+morning----"
+
+Stillings was signalling in dumb show to Baldwin. He had quietly opened
+the door and was crooking his finger and making signs over his shoulder
+toward the corridor. Baldwin saw what was wanted, and immediately shot
+his desk cover open and turned on the lights.
+
+"That last lot of steel and cement vouchers was made out yesterday,
+John," he said, slipping the rubber band from a file of papers in the
+desk. "If you'll take time to sit down here and run 'em over, and put
+your name on 'em, I'll hold Martin long enough to let him get the checks
+in to-night's mail. Those fellows in St. Louis act as if they are
+terribly scared they won't get their money quick enough, and I've been
+holding the papers for you all day. I'll be back after a little."
+
+Smith dragged up the president's big swing-chair and planted himself in
+it, and an instant later he was lost to everything save the columns of
+figures on the vouchers. Stillings had let himself out, and when the
+colonel followed him, the lawyer cautiously closed the door of the
+private office, and edged Baldwin into the corridor.
+
+"We've mighty near got a madman to deal with in there, Colonel," he
+whispered, when the two were out of ear-shot. "I was watching his eyes
+when he said that about Stanton, and they fairly blazed. I meant to tell
+you more about that racket last night in the _Herald_ office; I heard
+the inside of it this afternoon from Murphey. Smith went in and held the
+whole outfit up with a gun, and Murphey says he beat Allen over the head
+with it. He's going to kill somebody, if we don't look out."
+
+Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
+
+"He's acting like a locoed thoroughbred that's gone outlaw," he said.
+"Do you reckon he's sure-enough crazy, Bob?"
+
+"Only in the murder nerve. This deal with the options shows that he's
+all to the good on the business side. That was the smoothest trick
+that's been turned in any stage of this dodging fight with the big
+fellows. It simply knocks Kinzie's rat-gnawing game dead. If there were
+only somebody who could calm Smith down a little and bring him to
+reason--somebody near enough to him to dig down under his shell and get
+at the real man that used to be there when he first took hold with
+us----"
+
+"A woman?" queried Baldwin, frowning disapproval in anticipation of what
+Stillings might be going to suggest.
+
+"A woman for choice, of course. I was thinking of this young woman over
+at the Hophra House; the one he has been running around with so much
+during the past few days. She is evidently an old flame of his, and
+anybody can see with half an eye that she has a pretty good grip on him.
+Suppose we go across the street and give her an invitation to come and
+do a little missionary work on Smith. She looks level-headed and
+sensible enough to take it the way it's meant."
+
+It is quite possible that the colonel's heart-felt relief at Stillings's
+suggestion of Miss Richlander instead of another woman went some little
+distance toward turning the scale for the transplanted Missourian.
+Stillings was a lawyer and had no scruples, but the colonel had them in
+just proportion to his Southern birth and breeding.
+
+"I don't like to drag a woman into it, any way or shape, Bob," he
+protested; and he would have gone on to say that he had good reason to
+believe that Miss Richlander's influence over Smith might not be at all
+of the meliorating sort, but Stillings cut him short.
+
+"There need be no 'dragging.' The young woman doubtless knows the
+business situation as well as we do--he has probably told her all about
+it--and if she cares half as much for Smith as she seems to, she'll be
+glad to chip in and help to cool him down. We can be perfectly plain and
+outspoken with her, I'm sure; she evidently knows Smith a whole lot
+better than we do. It's a chance, and we'd better try it. He's good for
+half an hour or so with those vouchers."
+
+Two minutes later, Colonel Dexter Baldwin, with Stillings at his elbow,
+was at the clerk's desk in the Hophra House sending a card up to Miss
+Richlander's rooms. Five minutes beyond that, the boy came back to say
+that Miss Richlander was out auto-driving with Mr. and Mrs. Stanton. The
+clerk, knowing Baldwin well, eyebrowed his regret and suggested a wait
+of a few minutes.
+
+"They'll certainly be in before long," he said. "Mrs. Stanton has never
+been known to miss the dinner hour since she came to us. She is as
+punctual as the clock."
+
+Baldwin, still ill at ease and reluctant, led the way to a pair of
+chairs in the writing alcove of the lobby; two chairs commanding a clear
+view of the street entrance. Sitting down to wait with what patience
+they could summon, neither of the two men saw a gray automobile, driven
+by a young woman, come to a stand before the entrance of the Kinzie
+Building on the opposite side of the street. And, missing this, they
+missed equally the sight of the young woman alighting from the machine
+and disappearing through the swinging doors opening into the bank
+building's elevator lobby.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+The Arrow to the Mark
+
+
+Smith, concentrating abstractedly, as his habit was, upon the work in
+hand, was still deep in the voucher-auditing when the office door was
+opened and a small shocked voice said: "Oh, _wooh_! how you startled me!
+I saw the light, and I supposed, of course, it was Colonel-daddy. Where
+is he?"
+
+Smith pushed the papers aside and looked up scowling.
+
+"Your father? He was here a minute ago, with Stillings. Isn't he out in
+the main office?"
+
+"No, there is no one there."
+
+"Martin is there," he said, contradicting her bluntly. And then: "Your
+father said he'd be back. You've come to take him home?"
+
+She nodded and came to sit in a chair at the desk-end, saying:
+
+"Don't let me interrupt you, please. I'll be quiet."
+
+"I don't mean to let anything interrupt me until I have finished what I
+have undertaken to do; I'm past all that, now."
+
+"So you told me two evenings ago," she reminded him gently, adding: "And
+I have heard about what you did last night."
+
+"About the newspaper fracas? You don't approve of anything like that, of
+course. Neither did I, once. But you were right in what you said the
+other evening out at the dam; there is no middle way. You know what the
+animal tamers tell us about the beasts. I've had my taste of blood.
+There are a good many men in this world who need killing. Crawford
+Stanton is one of them, and I'm not sure that Mr. David Kinzie isn't
+another."
+
+"I can't hear what you say when you talk like that," she objected,
+looking past him with the gray eyes veiled.
+
+"Do you want me to lie down and let them put the steam-roller over me?"
+he demanded irritably. "Is that your ideal of the perfect man?"
+
+"I didn't say any such thing as that, did I?"
+
+"Perhaps not, in so many words. But you meant it."
+
+"What I said, and what I meant, had nothing at all to do with Timanyoni
+High Line and its fight for life," she said calmly, recalling the
+wandering gaze and letting him see her eyes. "I was thinking altogether
+of one man's attitude toward his world."
+
+"That was night before last," he put in soberly. "I've gone a long way
+since night before last, Corona."
+
+"I know you have. Why doesn't daddy come back?"
+
+"He'll come soon enough. You're not afraid to be here alone with me, are
+you?"
+
+"No; but anybody might be afraid of the man you are going to be."
+
+His laugh was as mirthless as the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
+
+"You needn't put it in the future tense. I have already broken with
+whatever traditions there were left to break with. Last night I
+threatened to kill Allen, and, perhaps, I should have done it if he
+hadn't begged like a dog and dragged his wife and children into it."
+
+"I know," she acquiesced, and again she was looking past him.
+
+"And that isn't all. Yesterday, Kinzie set a trap for me and baited it
+with one of his clerks. For a little while it seemed as if the only way
+to spring the trap was for me to go after the clerk and put a bullet
+through him. It wasn't necessary, as it turned out, but if it had
+been----"
+
+"Oh, you couldn't!" she broke in quickly. "I can't believe that of you!"
+
+"You think I couldn't? Let me tell you of a thing that I have done.
+Night before last, in less than an hour after you sat and talked with me
+at the dam, Verda Richlander had a wire from a young fellow who wants to
+marry her. He had found out that she was here in Brewster, and the wire
+was to tell her that he was coming in that night on the delayed 'Flyer.'
+She asked me to meet him and tell him she had gone to bed. He is a
+miserable little wretch; a sort of sham reprobate; and she has never
+cared for him, except to keep him dangling with a lot of others. I told
+her I wouldn't meet him, and she knew very well that I couldn't meet
+him--and stay out of jail. Are you listening?"
+
+"I'm trying to."
+
+"It was the pinch, and I wasn't big enough--in your sense of the
+word--to meet it. I saw what would happen. If Tucker Jibbey came here,
+Stanton would pounce upon him at once; and Jibbey, with a drink or two
+under his belt, would tell all he knew. I fought it all out while I was
+waiting for the train. It was Jibbey's effacement, or the end of the
+world for me, and for Timanyoni High Line."
+
+Dexter Baldwin's daughter was not of those who shriek and faint at the
+apparition of horror. But the gray eyes were dilating and her breath was
+coming in little gasps when she said:
+
+"I _can't_ believe it! You are not going to tell me that you met this
+man as a friend, and then----"
+
+"No; it didn't quite come to a murder in cold blood, though I thought it
+might. I had Maxwell's runabout, and I got Jibbey into it. He thought I
+was going to drive him to the hotel. After we got out of town he grew
+suspicious, and there was a struggle in the auto. I--I had to beat him
+over the head to make him keep quiet; I thought for the moment that I
+had killed him, and I knew, then, just how far I had gone on the road
+I've been travelling ever since a certain night in the middle of last
+May. The proof was in the way I felt; I wasn't either sorry or
+horror-stricken; I was merely relieved to think that he wouldn't trouble
+me, or clutter up the world with his worthless presence any longer."
+
+"But that wasn't your real self!" she expostulated.
+
+"What was it, then?"
+
+"I don't know--I only know that it wasn't you. But tell me: did he die?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What have you done with him?"
+
+"Do you know the old abandoned Wire-Silver mine at Little Butte?"
+
+"I knew it before it was abandoned, yes."
+
+"I was out there one Sunday afternoon with Starbuck. The mine is
+bulkheaded and locked, but one of the keys on my ring fitted the lock,
+and Starbuck and I went in and stumbled around for a while in the dark
+tunnels. I took Jibbey there and locked him up. He's there now."
+
+"Alone in that horrible place--and without food?"
+
+"Alone, yes; but I went out yesterday and put a basket of food where he
+could get it."
+
+"What are you going to do with him?"
+
+"I am going to leave him there until after I have put Stanton and Kinzie
+and the other buccaneers safely out of business. When that is done, he
+can go; and I'll go, too."
+
+She had risen, and at the summing-up she turned from him and went aside
+to the one window to stand for a long minute gazing down into the
+electric-lighted street. When she came back her lips were pressed
+together and she was very pale.
+
+"When I was in school, our old psychology professor used to try to tell
+us about the underman; the brute that lies dormant inside of us and is
+kept down only by reason and the super-man. I never believed it was
+anything more than a fine-spun theory--until now. But now I know it is
+true."
+
+He spread his hands.
+
+"I can't help it, can I?"
+
+"The man that you are now can't help it; no. But the man that you could
+be--if he would only come back--" she stopped with a little
+uncontrollable shudder and sat down again, covering her face with her
+hands.
+
+"I'm going to turn Jibbey loose--after I'm through," he vouchsafed.
+
+She took her hands away and blazed up at him suddenly, with her face
+aflame.
+
+"Yes! after you are safe; after there is no longer any risk in it for
+you! That is worse than if you had killed him--worse for you, I mean.
+Oh, _can't_ you see? It's the very depth of cowardly infamy!"
+
+He smiled sourly. "You think I'm a coward? They've been calling me
+everything else but that in the past few days."
+
+"You _are_ a coward!" she flashed back. "You have proved it. You
+daren't go out to Little Butte to-night and get that man and bring him
+to Brewster while there is yet time for him to do whatever it is that
+you are afraid he will do!"
+
+Was it the quintessence of feminine subtlety, or only honest rage and
+indignation, that told her how to aim the armor-piercing arrow? God, who
+alone knows the secret workings of the woman heart and brain, can tell.
+But the arrow sped true and found its mark. Smith got up stiffly out of
+the big swing-chair and stood glooming down at her.
+
+"You think I did it for myself?--just to save my own worthless hide?
+I'll show you; show you all the things that you say are now impossible.
+Did you bring the gray roadster?"
+
+She nodded briefly.
+
+"Your father is coming back; I hear the elevator-bell. I am going to
+take the car, and I don't want to meet him. Will you say what is
+needful?"
+
+She nodded again, and he went out quickly. It was only a few steps down
+the corridor to the elevator landing, and the stair circled the caged
+elevator-shaft to the ground floor. Smith halted in the darkened corner
+of the stairway long enough to make sure that the colonel, with
+Stillings and a woman in an automobile coat and veil--a woman who
+figured for him in the passing glance as Corona's mother--got off at the
+office floor. Then he ran down to the street level, cranked the gray
+roadster and sprang in to send the car rocketing westward.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+A Little Leaven
+
+
+The final touch of sunset pink had long since faded from the high
+western sky-line, and the summer-night stars served only to make the
+darkness visible along the road which had once been the stage route down
+the Timanyoni River and across to the mining-camp of Red Butte. Smith,
+slackening speed for the first time in the swift valley-crossing flight,
+twisted the gray roadster sharply to the left out of the road, and eased
+it across the railroad track to send it lurching and bumping over the
+rotting ties of an old branch-line spur from which the steel had been
+removed, and which ran in a course roughly paralleling the
+eastward-facing front of a forested mountain.
+
+Four miles from the turn out of the main road, at a point on the spur
+right of way where a washed-out culvert made farther progress with the
+car impossible, he shut off the power and got down to continue his
+journey afoot. Following the line of the abandoned spur, he came, at the
+end of another mile, to the deserted shacks of the mining plant which
+the short branch railroad had been built to serve; a roofless
+power-house, empty ore platforms dry-rotting in disuse, windowless bunk
+shanties, and the long, low bulk of a log-built commissary. The mine
+workings were tunnel-driven in the mountainside, and a crooked ore track
+led out to them. Smith followed the ore track until he came to the
+bulkheaded entrance flanked by empty storage bins, and to the lock of a
+small door framed in the bulkheading he applied a key.
+
+It was pitch dark beyond the door, and the silence was like that of the
+grave. Smith had brought a candle on his food-carrying visit of the day
+before, and, groping in its hiding-place just outside of the door, he
+found and lighted it, holding it sheltered in his cupped hand as he
+stepped into the black void beyond the bulkhead. With the feeble flame
+making little more than a dim yellow nimbus in the gloom, he looked
+about him. There was no sign of occupancy save Jibbey's suitcase lying
+where it had been flung on the night of the assisted disappearance. But
+of the man himself there was no trace.
+
+Smith stumbled forward into the black depths and the chill of the place
+laid hold upon him and shook him like the premonitory shiver of an
+approaching ague. What if the darkness and solitude had been too much
+for Jibbey's untried fortitude and the poor wretch had crawled away into
+the dismal labyrinth to lose himself and die? The searcher stopped and
+listened. In some far-distant ramification of the mine he could hear the
+_drip, drip_, of underground water, but when he shouted there was no
+response save that made by the echoes moaning and whispering in the
+stoped-out caverns overhead.
+
+Shielding the flickering candle again, Smith went on, pausing at each
+branching side-cutting to throw the light into the pockets of darkness.
+Insensibly he quickened his pace until he was hastening blindly through
+a maze of tunnels and cross driftings, deeper and still deeper into the
+bowels of the great mountain. Coming suddenly at the last into the
+chamber of the dripping water, he found what he was searching for, and
+again the ague chill shook him. There were no apparent signs of life in
+the sodden, muck-begrimed figure lying in a crumpled heap among the
+water pools.
+
+"Jibbey!" he called: and then again, ignoring the unnerving,
+awe-inspiring echoes rustling like flying bats in the cavernous
+overspaces: "_Jibbey!_"
+
+The sodden heap bestirred itself slowly and became a man sitting up to
+blink helplessly at the light and supporting himself on one hand.
+
+"Is that you, Monty?" said a voice tremulous and broken; and then: "I
+can't see. The light blinds me. Have you come to fi-finish the job?"
+
+"I have come to take you out of this; to take you back with me to
+Brewster. Get up and come on."
+
+The victim of Smith's ruthlessness struggled stiffly to his feet. Never
+much more than a physical weakling, and with his natural strength wasted
+by a life of dissipation, the blow on the head with the pistol butt and
+the forty-eight hours of sharp hardship and privation had cut deeply
+into his scanty reserves.
+
+"Did--did Verda send you to do it?" he queried.
+
+"No; she doesn't know where you are. She thinks you stopped over
+somewhere on your way west. Come along, if you want to go back with me."
+
+Jibbey stumbled away a step or two and flattened himself against the
+cavern wall. His eyes were still staring and his lips were drawn back to
+show his teeth.
+
+"Hold on a minute," he jerked out. "You're not--not going to wipe it
+all out as easy as that. You've taken my gun away from me, but I've got
+my two hands yet. Stick that candle in a hole in the wall and look out
+for yourself. I'm telling you, right now, that one or the other of us is
+going to stay here--and stay dead!"
+
+"Don't be a fool!" Smith broke in. "I didn't come here to scrap with
+you."
+
+"You'd better--and you'd better make a job of it while you're about it!"
+shrieked the castaway, lost now to everything save the biting sense of
+his wrongs. "You've put it all over me--knocked my chances with Verda
+Richlander and shut me up here in this hell-hole to go mad-dog crazy! If
+you let me get out of here alive I'll pay you back, if it's the last
+thing I ever do on top of God's green earth! You'll go back to
+Lawrenceville with the bracelets on! You'll--" red rage could go no
+farther in mere words and he flung himself in feeble fierceness upon
+Smith, clutching and struggling and waking the grewsome echoes again
+with frantic, meaningless maledictions.
+
+Smith dropped the candle to defend himself, but he did not strike back;
+wrapping the madman in a pinioning grip, he held him helpless until the
+vengeful ecstasy had exhausted itself. When it was over, and Jibbey had
+been released, gasping and sobbing, to stagger back against the tunnel
+wall, Smith groped for the candle and found and relighted it.
+
+"Tucker," he said gently, "you are more of a man than I took you to
+be--a good bit more. And you needn't break your heart because you can't
+handle a fellow who is perfectly fit, and who weighs half as much again
+as you do. Now that you're giving me a chance to say it, I can tell you
+that Verda Richlander doesn't figure in this at all. I'm not going to
+marry her, and she didn't come out here in the expectation of finding
+me."
+
+"Then what does figure in it?" was the dry-lipped query.
+
+"It was merely a matter of self-preservation. There are men in Brewster
+who would pay high for the information you might give them about me."
+
+"You might have given me a hint and a chance, Monty. I'm not _all_ dog!"
+
+"That's all past and gone. I didn't give you your chance, but I'm going
+to give it to you now. Let's go--if you're fit to try it."
+
+"Wait a minute. If you think, because you didn't pull your gun just now
+and drop me and leave me to rot in this hole, if you think that squares
+the deal----"
+
+"I'm not making any conditions," Smith interposed. "There are a number
+of telegraph offices in Brewster, and for at least two days longer I
+shall always be within easy reach."
+
+Jibbey's anger flared up once more.
+
+"You think I won't do it? You think I'll be so danged glad to get to
+some place where they sell whiskey that I'll forget all about it and let
+you off? Don't you make any mistake, Monty Smith! You can't knock me on
+the head and lock me up as if I were a yellow dog. I'll fix you!"
+
+Smith made no reply. Linking his free arm in Jibbey's, he led the way
+through the mazes, stopping at the tunnel mouth to blow out the candle
+and to pick up Jibbey's suitcase. In the open air the freed captive
+flung his arms abroad and drank in a deep breath of the clean, sweet,
+outdoor air. "God!" he gasped; "how good it is!" and after that he
+tramped in sober silence at Smith's heels until they reached the
+automobile.
+
+It took some little careful manoeuvring to get the roadster
+successfully turned on the railroad embankment, and Jibbey stood aside
+while Smith worked with the controls. Past this, he climbed into the
+spare seat, still without a word, and the rough four miles over the
+rotting cross-ties were soon left behind. At the crossing of the
+railroad main track and the turn into the highway, the river, bassooning
+deep-toned among its bowlders, was near at hand, and Jibbey spoke for
+the first time since they had left the mine mouth.
+
+"I'm horribly thirsty, Monty. That water in the mine had copper or
+something in it, and I couldn't drink it. You didn't know that, did
+you?--when you put me in there, I mean? Won't you stop the car and let
+me go stick my face in that river?"
+
+The car was brought to a stand and Jibbey got out to scramble down the
+river bank in the starlight. Obeying some inner prompting which he did
+not stop to analyze, Smith left his seat behind the wheel and walked
+over to the edge of the embankment where Jibbey had descended. The path
+to the river's margin was down the steep slope of a rock fill made in
+widening the highway to keep it clear of the railroad track. With the
+glare of the roadster's acetylenes turned the other way, Smith could see
+Jibbey at the foot of the slope lowering himself face downward on his
+propped arms to reach the water. Then, for a single instant, the
+murderous underman rose up and laughed. For in that instant, Jibbey,
+careless in his thirst, lost his balance and went headlong into the
+torrent.
+
+A battling eon had passed before Smith, battered, beaten, and
+half-strangled, succeeded in landing the unconscious thirst-quencher on
+a shelving bank three hundred yards below the stopped automobile. After
+that there was another eon in which he completely forgot his own
+bruisings while he worked desperately over the drowned man, raising and
+lowering the limp arms while he strove to recall more of the
+resuscitative directions given in the Lawrenceville Athletic Club's
+first-aid drills.
+
+In good time, after an interval so long that it seemed endless to the
+despairing first-aider, the breath came back into the reluctant lungs.
+Jibbey coughed, choked, gasped, and sat up. His teeth were chattering,
+and he was chilled to the bone by the sudden plunge into the cold snow
+water, but he was unmistakably alive.
+
+"What--what happened to me, Monty?" he shuddered. "Did I lose my grip
+and tumble in?"
+
+"You did, for a fact."
+
+"And you went in after me?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"No, by Gad! It wasn't 'of course'--not by a long shot! All you had to
+do was to let me go, and the score--your score--would have been wiped
+out for good and all. Why didn't you do it?"
+
+"Because I should have lost my bet."
+
+"Your bet?"
+
+"Well, yes. It wasn't exactly a bet; but I promised somebody that I
+would bring you back to Brewster to-night, alive and well, and able to
+send a telegram. And if I had let you drown yourself, I should have lost
+out."
+
+"You promised somebody?--not Verda?"
+
+"No; somebody else."
+
+Jibbey tried to get upon his feet, couldn't quite compass it, and sat
+down again.
+
+"I don't believe a word of it," he mumbled, loose-lipped. "You did it
+because you're not so danged tough and hard-hearted as you thought you
+were." And then: "Give me a lift, Monty, and get me to the auto. I
+guess--I'm about--all in."
+
+Smith half led, half carried his charge up to the road and then left him
+to go and back the car over the three hundred-odd yards of the
+interspace. A final heave lifted Jibbey into his place, and it is safe
+to say that Colonel Dexter Baldwin's roadster never made better time
+than it did on the race which finally brought the glow of the Brewster
+town lights reddening against the eastern sky.
+
+At the hotel Smith helped his dripping passenger out of the car, made a
+quick rush with him to an elevator, and so up to his own rooms on the
+fourth floor.
+
+"Strip!" he commanded; "get out of those wet rags and tumble into the
+bath. Make it as hot as you can stand it. I'll go down and register you
+and have your trunk sent up from the station. You have a trunk, haven't
+you?"
+
+Jibbey fished a soaked card baggage-check out of his pocket and passed
+it over.
+
+"You're as bad off as I am, Monty," he protested. "Wait and get some dry
+things on before you go."
+
+"I'll be up again before you're out of the tub. I suppose you'd like to
+put yourself outside of a big drink of whiskey, just about now, but
+that's one thing I won't buy for you. How would a pot of hot coffee from
+the cafe strike you?"
+
+"You could make it Mellin's Food and I'd drink it if you said so,"
+chattered the drowned one from the inside of the wet undershirt he was
+trying to pull off over his head.
+
+Smith did his various errands quickly. When he reached the fourth-floor
+suite again, Jibbey was out of the bath; was sitting on the edge of the
+bed wrapped in blankets, with the steaming pot of coffee sent up on
+Smith's hurry order beside him on a tray.
+
+"It's your turn at the tub," he bubbled cheerfully. "I didn't have any
+glad rags to put on, so I swiped some of your bedclothes. Go to it, old
+man, before you catch cold."
+
+Smith was already pointing for the bath. "Your trunk will be up in a few
+minutes, and I've told them to send it here," he said. "When you want to
+quit me, you'll find your rooms five doors to the right in this same
+corridor: suite number four-sixteen."
+
+It was a long half-hour before Smith emerged from his bath-room once
+more clothed and in his right mind. In the interval the reclaimed trunk
+had been sent up, and Jibbey was also clothed. He had found one of
+Smith's pipes and some tobacco and was smoking with the luxurious
+enjoyment of one who had suffered the pangs imposed by two days of total
+abstinence.
+
+"Just hangin' around to say good night," he began, when Smith showed
+himself in the sitting-room. Then he returned the borrowed pipe to its
+place on the mantel and said his small say to the definite end. "After
+all that's happened to us two to-night, Monty, I hope you're going to
+forget my crazy yappings and not lose any sleep about that Lawrenceville
+business. I'm seventeen different kinds of a rotten failure; there's no
+manner of doubt about that; and once in a while--just _once_ in a
+while--I've got sense enough to know it. You saved my life when it would
+have been all to the good for you to let me go. I guess the world
+wouldn't have been much of a loser if I had gone, and you knew that,
+too. Will you--er--would you shake hands with me, Monty?"
+
+Smith did it, and lo! a miracle was wrought: in the nervous grasp of the
+joined hands a quickening thrill passed from man to man;, a thrill
+humanizing, redemptory, heart-mellowing. And, oddly enough, one would
+say, it was the weaker man who gave and the stronger who received.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+The Pace-Setter
+
+
+Smith made an early breakfast on the morning following the auto drive to
+the abandoned mine, hoping thereby to avoid meeting both Miss Richlander
+and Jibbey. The Hophra cafe was practically empty when he went in and
+took his accustomed place at one of the alcove tables, but he had barely
+given his order when Starbuck appeared and came to join him.
+
+"You're looking a whole heap better this morning, John," said the mine
+owner quizzically, as he held up a finger for the waiter. "How's the
+grouch?"
+
+Smith's answering grin had something of its former good nature in it.
+"To-day's the day, Billy," he said. "To-morrow at midnight we must have
+the water running in the ditches or lose our franchise. It's chasing
+around in the back part of my mind that Stanton will make his
+grand-stand play to-day. I'm not harboring any grouches on the edge of
+the battle. They are a handicap, anyway, and always."
+
+"That's good medicine talk," said the older man, eying him keenly. And
+then: "You had us all guessing, yesterday and the day before, John. You
+sure was acting as if you'd gone plumb locoed."
+
+"I was locoed," was the quiet admission.
+
+"What cured you?"
+
+"It's too long a story to tell over the breakfast-table. What do you
+hear from Williams?"
+
+"All quiet during the night; but the weather reports are scaring him up
+a good bit this morning."
+
+"Storms on the range?"
+
+"Yes. The river gained four feet last night, and there is flood water
+and drift coming down to beat the band. Just the same, Bartley says he
+is going to make good."
+
+Smith nodded. "Bartley is all right; the right man in the right place.
+Have you seen the colonel since he left the offices last evening?"
+
+"Yes. I drove him and Corona out to the ranch in my new car. He said
+he'd lost his roadster; somebody had sneaked in and borrowed it."
+
+"I suppose he told you about the latest move--our move--in the
+stock-selling game?"
+
+"No, he didn't; but Stillings did. You played it pretty fine, John; only
+I hope to gracious we won't have to redeem those options. It would
+bu'st our little inside crowd wide open to have to buy in all that stock
+at par."
+
+Smith laughed. "'Sufficient unto the day,' Billy. It was the only way to
+block Stanton. It's neck or nothing with him now, and he has only one
+more string that he can pull."
+
+"The railroad right-of-way deal?"
+
+"Yes; he has been holding that in reserve--that, and one other thing."
+
+"What was the other thing?"
+
+"Me," said Smith, cheerfully disregardful of his English. "You haven't
+forgotten his instructions to the man Lanterby, that night out at the
+road-house on the Topaz pike?--the talk that you overheard?"
+
+"No; I haven't forgotten."
+
+"His idea, then, was to have me killed off in a scrap of some sort--as a
+last resort, of course; but later on he found a safer expedient, and he
+has been trying his level best to work it ever since."
+
+Starbuck was absently fishing for a second cube of sugar in the
+sugar-bowl. "Has it got anything to do with the bunch of news that you
+won't tell us--about yourself, John?"
+
+"It has. Two days ago, Stanton had his finger fairly on the trigger, but
+a friend of mine stepped in and snapped the safety-catch. Last night,
+again, he stood to win out; to have the pry-hold he has been searching
+for handed to him on a silver platter, so to speak. But a man fell into
+the river, and Stanton lost out once more."
+
+Starbuck glanced up soberly. "You're talking in riddles now, John. I
+don't _sabe_."
+
+"It isn't necessary for you to _sabe_. Results are what count. Barring
+accidents, you Timanyoni High Line people can reasonably count on having
+me with you for the next few critical days; and, I may add, you never
+needed me more pointedly."
+
+Starbuck's smile was face-wide.
+
+"I hope I don't feel sorry," he remarked. "Some day, when you can take
+an hour or so off, I'm going to get you to show me around in your little
+mu-zeeum of self-conceit, John. Maybe I can learn how to gather me up
+one."
+
+Smith matched the mine owner's good-natured smile. For some
+unexplainable reason the world, his particular world, seemed to have
+lost its malignance. He could even think of Stanton without bitterness;
+and the weapon which had been weighting his hip pocket for the past few
+days had been carefully buried in the bottom of the lower dressing-case
+drawer before he came down to breakfast.
+
+"You may laugh, Billy, but you'll have to admit that I've been
+outfiguring the whole bunch of you, right from the start," he retorted
+brazenly. "It's my scheme, and I'm going to put it through with a whoop.
+You'll see--before to-morrow night."
+
+"I reckon, when you do put it through, you can ask your own fee," said
+Starbuck quietly.
+
+"I'm going to; and the size of it will astonish you, Billy. I shall turn
+over the little block of stock you folks have been good enough to let me
+carry, give you and the colonel and the board of directors a small
+dinner in the club-room up-stairs and--vanish. But let's get down to
+business. This is practically Stanton's last day of grace. If he can't
+get some legal hold upon us before midnight to-morrow night, or work
+some scheme to make us lose our franchise, his job is gone."
+
+"Show me," said the mine owner succinctly.
+
+"It's easy. With the dam completed and the water running in the ditches,
+we become at once a going concern, with assets a long way in advance of
+our liabilities. The day after to-morrow--if we pull through--you won't
+be able to buy a single share of Timanyoni High Line at any figure. As
+a natural consequence, public sentiment, which, we may say, is at
+present a little doubtful, will come over to our side in a land-slide,
+and Stanton's outfit, if it wants to continue the fight, will have to
+fight the entire Timanyoni, with the city of Brewster thrown in for good
+measure. Am I making it plain?"
+
+"Right you are, so far. Go on."
+
+"On the other hand, if Stanton can block us before to-morrow night; hang
+us up in some way and make us lose our rights under the charter; we're
+gone--snuffed out like a candle. Listen, Billy, and I'll tell you
+something that I haven't dared to tell anybody, not even Colonel
+Baldwin. I've been spending the company's money like water to keep in
+touch. The minute we fail, and long before we could hope to reorganize a
+second time and apply for a new charter, Stanton's company will be in
+the field, with its charter already granted. From that to taking
+possession of our dam, either by means of an enabling act of the
+Legislature, or by purchase from the paper railroad, will be only a
+step. And we couldn't do a thing! We'd have no legal rights, and no
+money to fight with!"
+
+Starbuck pushed his chair away from the table and drew a long breath.
+
+"Good Lord!" he sighed; "I wish to goodness it was day after to-morrow!
+Can you carry it any further, John?"
+
+"Yes; a step or two. For a week Stanton has been busy on the
+paper-railroad claim, and that is what made me buy a few cases of
+Winchesters and send them out to Williams: I was afraid Stanton might
+try force. He won't do that if he can help it; he'll go in with some
+legal show, if possible, because our force at the dam far outnumbers any
+gang he could hire, and he knows we are armed."
+
+"He can't work the legal game," said Starbuck definitively. "I've known
+Judge Warner ever since I was knee-high to a hop-toad, and a squarer man
+doesn't breathe."
+
+"That is all right, but you're forgetting something. The paper railroad
+is--or was once--an interstate corporation, and so may ask for relief
+from the federal courts, thus going over Judge Warner's head. I'm not
+saying anything against Lorching, the federal judge at Red Butte. I've
+met him, and he is a good jurist and presumably an honest man. But he is
+well along in years, and has an exaggerated notion of his own
+importance. Stanton, or rather his figurehead railroad people, have
+asked him to intervene, and he has taken the case under advisement.
+That is where we stand this morning."
+
+Starbuck was nodding slowly. "I see what you mean, now," he said. "If
+Lorching jumps the wrong way for us, you're looking to see a United
+States marshal walk up to Bartley Williams some time to-day and tell him
+to quit. That would put the final kibosh on us, wouldn't it?"
+
+Smith was rising in his place.
+
+"_I'm_ not dead yet, Billy," he rejoined cheerfully. "I haven't let it
+get this far without hammering out a few expedients for our side. If I
+can manage to stay in the fight to-day and to-morrow----"
+
+A little new underclerk had come in from the hotel office and was trying
+to give Starbuck a note in a square envelope, and Starbuck was saying:
+"No; that's Mr. Smith, over there."
+
+Smith took the note and opened it, and he scarcely heard the clerk's
+explanation that it had been put in his box the evening before, and that
+the day clerk had been afraid he would get away without finding it. It
+was from Verda Richlander, and it had neither superscription nor
+signature. This is what Smith read:
+
+"My little ruse has failed miserably. Mr. K's. messenger found my
+father in spite of it, and he--the messenger--returned this evening: I
+know, because he brought a note from father to me. Come to me as early
+to-morrow morning as you can, and we'll plan what can be done."
+
+Smith crushed the note in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.
+Starbuck was making a cigarette, and was studiously refraining from
+breaking in. But Smith did not keep him waiting.
+
+"That was my knock-out, Billy," he said with a quietness that was almost
+overdone. "My time has suddenly been shortened to hours--perhaps to
+minutes. Get a car as quickly as you can and go to Judge Warner's house.
+I have an appointment with him at nine o'clock. Tell him I'll keep it,
+if I can, but that he needn't wait for me if I am not there on the
+minute."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+The Colonel's "Defi"
+
+
+Though it was only eight o'clock, Smith sent his card to Miss
+Richlander's rooms at once and then had himself lifted to the mezzanine
+floor to wait for her. She came in a few minutes, a strikingly beautiful
+figure of a woman in the freshness of her morning gown, red-lipped,
+bright-eyed, and serenely conscious of her own resplendent gifts of face
+and figure. Smith went quickly to meet her and drew her aside into the
+music parlor. Already the need for caution was beginning to make itself
+felt.
+
+"I have come," he said briefly.
+
+"You got my note?" she asked.
+
+"A few minutes ago--just as I was leaving the breakfast-table."
+
+"You will leave Brewster at once--while the way is still open?"
+
+He shook his head, "I can't do that; in common justice to the men who
+have trusted me, and who are now needing me more than ever, I must stay
+through this one day, and possibly another."
+
+"Mr. Kinzie will not be likely to lose any time," she prefigured
+thoughtfully. "He has probably telegraphed to Lawrenceville before
+this." Then, with a glance over her shoulder to make sure that there
+were no eavesdroppers: "Of course, you know that Mr. Stanton is at the
+bottom of all this prying and spying?"
+
+"It is Stanton's business to put me out of the game, if he can. I've
+told you enough of the situation here so that you can understand why it
+is necessary for him to efface me. His time has grown very short now."
+
+Again the statuesque beauty glanced over her shoulder.
+
+"Lawrenceville is a long way off, and Sheriff Macauley is enough of a
+politician--in an election year--to want to be reasonably certain before
+he incurs the expense of sending a deputy all the way out here, don't
+you think?" she inquired.
+
+"Certainty? There isn't the slightest element of uncertainty in it.
+There are hundreds of people in Brewster who can identify me."
+
+"But not one of these Brewsterites can identify you as John Montague
+Smith, of Lawrenceville--the man who is wanted by Sheriff Macauley," she
+put in quickly. Then she added: "My father foresaw that difficulty. As
+I told you in my note, he sent me a letter by Mr. Kinzie's messenger.
+After telling me that he will be detained in the mountains several days
+longer, he refers to Mr. Kinzie's request and suggests----"
+
+The fugitive was smiling grimly. "He suggests that you might help Mr.
+Kinzie out by telling him whether or not he has got hold of the right
+John Smith?"
+
+"Not quite that," she rejoined. "He merely suggests that I may be asked
+to identify you; in which case I am to be prudent, and--to quote him
+exactly--'not get mixed up in the affair in any way so that it would
+make talk.'"
+
+"I see," said Smith. And then: "You have a disagreeable duty ahead of
+you, and I'd relieve you of the necessity by running away, if I could.
+But that is impossible, as I have explained."
+
+She was silent for a moment; then she said: "When I told you a few days
+ago that you were going to need my help, Montague, I didn't foresee
+anything like this. Have you any means of finding out whether or not Mr.
+Kinzie has sent his wire to Lawrenceville?"
+
+"Yes, I think I can do that much."
+
+"Suppose you do it and then let me know. I shall breakfast with the
+Stantons in a few minutes; and after nine o'clock ... if you could
+contrive to keep out of the way until I can get word to you; just so
+they won't be able to bring us face to face with each other----"
+
+Smith saw what she meant; saw, also, whereunto his wretched fate was
+dragging him. It was the newest of all the reincarnations, the one which
+had begun with Jibbey's silent hand-clasp the night before, which
+prompted him to say:
+
+"If they should ask you about me, you must tell them the truth, Verda."
+
+Her smile was mildly scornful.
+
+"Is that what the plain-faced little ranch person would do?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know; yes, I guess it is."
+
+"Doesn't she care any more for you than that?"
+
+Smith did not reply. He was standing where he could watch the comings
+and goings of the elevators. Time was precious and he was chafing at the
+delay, but Miss Richlander was not yet ready to let him go.
+
+"Tell me honestly, Montague," she said; "is it anything more than a case
+of propinquity with this Baldwin girl?--on your part, I mean."
+
+"It isn't anything," he returned soberly. "Corona Baldwin will never
+marry any man who has so much to explain as I have."
+
+"You didn't know this was her home, when you came out here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But you had met her somewhere, before you came?"
+
+"Once; yes. It was in Guthrieville, over a year ago. I had driven over
+to call on some people that I knew, and I met her there at a house where
+she was visiting."
+
+"Does she remember that she had met you?"
+
+"No, not yet." He was certain enough of this to answer without
+reservations.
+
+"But you remembered her?"
+
+"Not at first."
+
+"I see," she nodded, and then, without warning: "What was the matter
+with you last night--about dinner-time?"
+
+"Why should you think there was anything the matter with me?"
+
+"I was out driving with the Stantons. When I came back to the hotel I
+found Colonel Baldwin and another man--a lawyer, I think he was--waiting
+for me. They said you were needing a friend who could go and talk to you
+and--'calm you down,' was the phrase the lawyer used. I was good-natured
+enough to go with them, but when we reached your offices you had gone,
+and the ranch girl was there alone, waiting for her father."
+
+"That was nonsense!" he commented; "their going after you as if I were a
+maniac or a drunken man, I mean."
+
+This time Miss Richlander's smile was distinctly resentful. "I suppose
+the colonel's daughter answered the purpose better," she said. "There
+was an awkward little _contretemps_, and Miss Baldwin refused, rather
+rudely, I thought, to tell her father where you had gone."
+
+Smith broke away from the unwelcome subject abruptly, saying: "There is
+something else you ought to know. Jibbey is here, at last."
+
+"Here in the hotel?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Does he know you are here?"
+
+"He does."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me before? That will complicate things dreadfully.
+Tucker will talk and tell all he knows; he can't help it."
+
+"This is one time when he will not talk. Perhaps he will tell you why
+when you see him."
+
+Miss Richlander glanced at the face of the small watch pinned on her
+shoulder.
+
+"You must not stay here any longer," she protested. "The Stantons may
+come down any minute, now, and they mustn't find us together. I am
+still forgiving enough to want to help you, but you must do your part
+and let me know what is going on."
+
+Smith promised and took his dismissal with a mingled sense of relief and
+fresh embarrassment. In the new development which was threatening to
+drag him back once more into the primitive savageries, he would have
+been entirely willing to eliminate Verda Richlander as a factor, helpful
+or otherwise. But there was good reason to fear that she might refuse to
+be eliminated.
+
+William Starbuck's new car was standing in front of Judge Warner's house
+in the southern suburb when Smith descended from the closed cab which he
+had taken at the Hophra House side entrance. The clock in the
+court-house tower was striking the quarter of nine. The elevated mesa
+upon which the suburb was built commanded a broad view of the town and
+the outlying ranch lands, and in the distance beyond the river the
+Hillcrest cottonwoods outlined themselves against a background of
+miniature buttes.
+
+Smith's gaze took in the wide, sunlit prospect. He had paid and
+dismissed his cabman, and the thought came to him that in a few hours
+the wooded buttes, the bare plains, the mighty mountains, and the
+pictured city spreading map-like at his feet would probably exist for
+him only as a memory. While he halted on the terrace, Starbuck came out
+of the house.
+
+"The judge is at breakfast," the mine owner announced. "You're to go in
+and wait. What do you want me to do next?"
+
+Smith glanced down regretfully at the shining varnish and resplendent
+metal of the new automobile. "If your car wasn't so new," he began; but
+Starbuck cut him off.
+
+"Call the car a thousand years old and go on."
+
+"All right. When I get through with the judge I shall want to go out to
+the dam. Will you wait and take me?"
+
+"Surest thing on earth,"--with prompt acquiescence. And then: "Is it as
+bad as you thought it was going to be, John?"
+
+"It's about as bad as it can be," was the sober reply, and with that
+Smith went in to wait for his interview with the Timanyoni's
+best-beloved jurist.
+
+As we have seen, this was at nine o'clock, or a few minutes before the
+hour, and as Starbuck descended the stone steps to take his seat in the
+car, David Kinzie, at his desk in the Brewster City National, was asking
+the telephone "central" to give him the Timanyoni High Line offices.
+Martin, the bookkeeper, answered, and he took a message from the bank
+president that presently brought Colonel Dexter Baldwin to the private
+room in the bank known to nervous debtors as "the sweat-box".
+
+"Sit down, Dexter," said the banker shortly; "sit down a minute while I
+look at my mail."
+
+It was one of David Kinzie's small subtleties to make a man sit idly
+thus, on one pretext or another; it rarely failed to put the incomer at
+a disadvantage, and on the present occasion it worked like a charm.
+Baldwin had let his cigar go out and had chewed the end of it into a
+pulp before Kinzie swung around in his chair and launched out abruptly.
+
+"You and I have always been pretty good friends, Dexter," he began, "and
+I have called you down here this morning to prove to you that I am still
+your friend. Where is your man Smith?"
+
+Baldwin shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "I haven't seen him
+since last evening."
+
+"Are you sure he is still in town?"
+
+"I haven't any reason to think that he isn't."
+
+"Hasn't run away, then?"
+
+The Missouri colonel squared himself doggedly in the suppliant debtor's
+chair, which was the one Kinzie had placed for him. "What are you
+driving at, Dave?" he demanded.
+
+"We'll tackle your end of it, first," said the banker curtly. "Do you
+know that you and your crowd have come to the bottom of the bag on that
+dam proposition?"
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+"Well, you have. You've got just this one more day to live."
+
+The Missourian fell back upon his native phrase.
+
+"I reckon you'll have to show me, Dave."
+
+"I will. Have you seen the weather report this morning?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I thought not. I've had a trained observer up in the eastern hills for
+the past week. The river rose four feet last night, and there are
+predictions out for more cloudbursts and thunderstorms in the headwater
+region. The snow is melting fast in the higher gulches, and you know as
+well as I do that there is at least a strong probability that your dam
+won't hold the flood rise."
+
+"I don't know it," asserted Baldwin stoutly. "But go on. You've got your
+gun loaded: what are you aiming it at?"
+
+"Just this: there is a chance that you'll lose the dam by natural causes
+before the concrete hardens; but if you don't, you're sure to lose it
+the other way. I told you weeks ago that the other people were carrying
+too many big guns for you. I don't want to see you killed off, Dexter."
+
+"I'm no quitter; you ought to know that, Dave," was the blunt rejoinder.
+
+"I know; but there are times when it is simply foolhardy to hold on. The
+compromise proposition that I put up to you people a while back still
+holds good. But to-day is the last day, Dexter. You must accept it now,
+if you are going to accept it at all."
+
+"And if we still refuse?"
+
+"You'll go smash, the whole kit of you. As I've said, this is the last
+call."
+
+By this time Baldwin's cigar was a hopeless wreck.
+
+"You've got something up your sleeve, Dave: what is it?" he inquired.
+
+The banker pursed his lips and the bristling mustache assumed its most
+aggressive angle.
+
+"There are a number of things, but the one which concerns you most, just
+now, is this: we've got Smith's record, at last. He is an outlaw, with
+a price on his head. We've dug out the whole story. He is a defaulting
+bank cashier, and before he ran away he tried to kill his president."
+
+Baldwin was frowning heavily. "Who told you all this? Was it this Miss
+Richlander over at the Hophra House?"
+
+"No; it was her father. I sent one of my young men out to the Topaz to
+look him up."
+
+"And you have telegraphed to the chief of police, or the sheriff, or
+whoever it is that wants Smith?"
+
+"Not yet. I wanted to give you one more chance, Dexter. Business comes
+first. The Brewster City National is a bank, not a detective agency. You
+go and find Smith and fire him; tell him he is down and out; get rid of
+him, once for all. Then come back here and we'll fix up that compromise
+with Stanton."
+
+Baldwin found a match and tried to relight the dead cigar. But it was
+chewed past redemption.
+
+"Let's get it plumb straight, Dave," he pleaded, in the quiet tone of
+one who will leave no peace-keeping stone unturned. "You say you've got
+John dead to rights. Smith is a mighty common name. I shouldn't wonder
+if there were half a million 'r so John Smiths--taking the country
+over. How do you know you've got the right one?"
+
+"His middle name is 'Montague'," snapped the banker, "and the man who is
+wanted called himself 'J. Montague Smith'. But we can identify him
+positively. There is one person in Brewster who knew Smith before he
+came here; namely, Mr. Richlander's daughter. She can tell us if he is
+the right Smith, and she probably will if the police ask her to."
+
+Baldwin may have had his own opinion about that, but if so, he kept it
+to himself and spoke feelingly of other things.
+
+"Dave," he said, rising to stand over the square-built man in the
+swing-chair, "we've bumped the bumps over a good many miles of rough
+road together since we first hit the Timanyoni years ago, and it's like
+pulling a sound tooth to have to tell you the plain truth. You've got a
+mighty bad case of money-rot. The profit account has grown so big with
+you that you can't see out over the top of it. You've horsed back and
+forth between Stanton's outfit and ours until you can't tell the
+difference between your old friends and a bunch of low-down,
+conscienceless land-pirates. You pull your gun and go to shooting
+whenever you get ready. We'll stay with you and try to hold up our
+end--and John's. And you mark my words, Dave; you're the man that's
+going to get left in this deal; the straddler always gets left." And
+with that he cut the interview short and went back to the High Line
+offices on the upper floor.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+Two Witnesses
+
+
+Driven by Starbuck in the brand-new car, Smith reached the dam at
+half-past ten and was in time to see the swarming carpenters begin the
+placing of the forms for the pouring of the final section of the great
+wall. Though the high water was lapping at the foot timbers of the
+forming, and the weather reports were still portentous, Williams was in
+fine fettle. There had been no further interferences on the part of the
+railroad people, every man on the job was spurting for the finish, and
+the successful end was now fairly in sight.
+
+"We'll be pouring this afternoon," he told Smith, "and with a
+twenty-four-hour set for the concrete, and the forms left in place for
+additional security, we can shut the spillway gates and back the water
+into the main ditch. Instead of being a hindrance then, the flood-tide
+will help. Under slack-water conditions it would take a day or two to
+finish filling the reservoir lake, but now we'll get the few feet of
+rise needed to fill the sluices almost while you wait."
+
+"You have your guards out, as we planned?" Smith inquired.
+
+"Twenty of the best men I could find. They are patrolling on both sides
+of the river, with instructions to report if they see so much as a
+rabbit jump up."
+
+"Good. I'm going to let Starbuck drive me around the lake limits to see
+to it personally that your pickets are on the job. But first, I'd like
+to use your 'phone for a minute or two," and with that Smith shut
+himself up in the small field-office and called Martin, the bookkeeper,
+at the town headquarters.
+
+The result of the brief talk with Martin seemed satisfactory, for when
+it was concluded, Smith rang off and asked for the Hophra House. Being
+given the hotel exchange, he called the number of Miss Richlander's
+suite, and the answer came promptly in the full, throaty voice of the
+Olympian beauty.
+
+"Is that you, Montague?"
+
+"Yes. I'm out at the dam. Nothing has been done yet. No telegraphing, I
+mean. You understand?"
+
+"Perfectly. But something is going to be done. Mr. K. has had Colonel
+B. with him in the bank. I saw the colonel go in while I was at
+breakfast. When are you coming back to town?"
+
+"Not for some time; I have a drive to make that will keep me out until
+afternoon."
+
+"Very well; you'd better stay away as long as you can, and then you'd
+better communicate with me before you show yourself much in public. I'll
+have Jibbey looking out for you."
+
+Smith said "good-by" and hung up the receiver with a fresh twinge of
+dissatisfaction. Every step made his dependence upon Verda Richlander
+more complete. To be sure, he told himself, they had both forsworn
+sentiment in the old days, but was that any guaranty that it was not now
+awakening in Josiah Richlander's daughter? And Corona Baldwin: what
+would she say to this newest alliance? Would she not say again, and this
+time with greater truth, that he was a coward of the basest sort; of the
+type that makes no scruple of hiding behind a woman's skirts?
+
+Happily, there was work to do, and he went out and did it. With the new
+car to cover the longer interspaces, a complete round of Williams's
+sentries was made, with detours up and down the line of the abandoned
+Red Butte Southwestern, whose right-of-way claims had been so recently
+revived. Smith tried to tell himself that he was only making a necessary
+reconnaissance thoroughly; that he was not delaying his return to town
+because Verda had told him to. But when the real motive could no longer
+be denied, he brought himself up with a jerk. If it had come to this,
+that he was afraid to face whatever might be awaiting him in Brewster,
+it was time to take counsel once more of the elemental things.
+
+"Back to Brewster, Billy, by way of the camp," he directed, and the
+overworked car was turned and headed accordingly.
+
+It was some little time before this, between the noon-hour and the
+one-o'clock Hophra House luncheon, to be exact, that Mr. David Kinzie,
+still halting between two opinions, left his desk and the bank and
+crossed the street to the hotel. Inquiry at the lobby counter revealing
+the fact that Miss Richlander was in her rooms, Kinzie wrote his name on
+a card and let the clerk send it up. The boy came back almost
+immediately with word that Miss Richlander was waiting in the mezzanine
+parlors.
+
+The banker tipped the call-boy and went up alone. He had seen Miss
+Richlander, once when she was driving with Smith and again at the
+theatre in the same company. So he knew what to expect when he tramped
+heavily into the parlor overlooking the street. None the less, the
+dazzling beauty of the young woman who rose to shake hands with him and
+call him by name rather took him off his feet. David Kinzie was a
+hopeless bachelor, from choice, but there are women, and women.
+
+"Do you know, Mr. Kinzie, I have been expecting you all day," she said
+sweetly, making him sit down beside her on one of the flaming red
+monstrosities billed in the hotel inventories as "Louis Quinze sofas".
+"My father sent me a note by one of your young men, and he said that
+perhaps you would--that perhaps you might want to--" Her rich voice was
+at its fruitiest, and the hesitation was of exactly the proper shade.
+
+Kinzie, cold-blooded as a fish with despondent debtors, felt himself
+suddenly warmed and moved to be gentle with this gracious young woman.
+
+"Er--yes, Miss Richlander--er--a disagreeable duty, you know. I wanted
+to ask about this young man, Smith. We don't know him very well here in
+Brewster, and as he has considerable business dealings with the bank,
+we--that is, I thought your father might be able to tell us something
+about his standing in his home town."
+
+"And my father did tell you?"
+
+"Well--yes; he--er--he says Smith is a--a grand rascal; a fugitive from
+justice; and we thought--" David Kinzie, well hardened in all the
+processes of dealing with men, was making difficult weather of it with
+this all-too-beautiful young woman.
+
+Miss Richlander's laugh was well restrained. She seemed to be struggling
+earnestly to make it appear so.
+
+"You business gentlemen are so funny!" she commented. "You know, of
+course, Mr. Kinzie, that _this_ Mr. Smith and I are old friends; you've
+probably seen us together enough to be sure of that. Hasn't it occurred
+to you that however well I might know the Mr. Smith my father has
+written you about, I should hardly care to be seen in public with him?"
+
+"Then there are two of them?" Kinzie demanded.
+
+The young woman was laughing again. "Would that be so very
+wonderful?--with so many Smiths in the world?"
+
+"But--er--the middle name, Miss Richlander: _that_ isn't so infern--so
+very common, I'm sure."
+
+"It is rather remarkable, isn't it? But there are a good many Montagues
+in our part of the world, too. The man my father wrote you about always
+signed himself 'J. Montague', as if he were a little ashamed of the
+'John'."
+
+"Then this Brewster Smith isn't the one who is wanted in Lawrenceville
+for embezzlement and attempted murder?"
+
+"Excuse me," said the beauty, with another very palpable attempt to
+smother her amusement. "If you could only know this other Smith; the one
+my father wrote you about, and the one he thinks you were asking about:
+they are not the least bit alike. J. Montague, as I remember him, was a
+typical society man; a dancing man who was the pet of the younger
+girls--and of their mothers, for that matter; you know what I mean--the
+kind of man who wears dress clothes even when he dines alone, and who
+wouldn't let his beard grow overnight for a king's ransom. But wait a
+moment. There is a young gentleman here who came last evening direct
+from Lawrenceville. Let me send for him."
+
+She rose and pressed the bell-push, and when the floor boy came, he was
+sent to the lobby to page Jibbey. During the little wait, David Kinzie
+was skilfully made to talk about other things. Jibbey was easily found,
+as it appeared, and he came at once. Miss Richlander did the honors
+graciously.
+
+"Mr. Kinzie, this is Mr. Tucker Jibbey, the son of one of our
+Lawrenceville bankers. Tucker--Mr. Kinzie; the president of the Brewster
+City National." Then, before Kinzie could begin: "Tucker, I've sent for
+you in self-defense. You know both Mr. John Smith, at present of
+Brewster, and also J. Montague Smith, sometime of Lawrenceville and now
+of goodness only knows where. Mr. Kinzie is trying to make out that they
+are one and the same."
+
+Jibbey laughed broadly. He stood in no awe of banks, bankers, or stubbly
+mustaches.
+
+"I'll tell John, when I see him again--and take a chance on being able
+to run faster than he can," he chuckled. "Ripping good joke!"
+
+"Then you know both men?" said Kinzie, glancing at his watch and rising.
+
+"Like a book. They're no more alike than black and white. Our man here
+is from Cincinnati; isn't that where you met him, Verda? Yes, I'm sure
+it is--that night at the Carsons', if you remember. I believe I was the
+one who introduced him. And I recollect you didn't like him at first,
+because he wore a beard. They told me, the last time I was over in
+Cinci, that he'd gone West somewhere, but they didn't say where. He was
+the first man I met when I lit down here. Damn' little world, isn't it,
+Mr. Kinzie?"
+
+David Kinzie was backing away, watch in hand. Business was very
+pressing, he said, and he must get back to his desk. He was very much
+obliged to Miss Richlander, and was only sorry that he had troubled her.
+When her father should return to Brewster he would be glad to meet him,
+and so on and so on, to and beyond the portieres which finally blotted
+him out, for the two who were left in the Louis Quinze parlor.
+
+"Is that about what you wanted me to say?" queried Jibbey, when the
+click of the elevator door-latch told them that Mr. Kinzie was
+descending.
+
+"Tucker, there are times when you are almost lovable," said the beauty
+softly, with a hand on Jibbey's shoulder.
+
+"I'm glad it's what you wanted, because it's what I was going to say,
+anyway," returned the ne'er-do-well soberly, thus showing that he, too,
+had not yet outlived the influence of the overnight hand-grip.
+
+An hour further along in the afternoon, Starbuck's new car, pausing
+momentarily at the construction camp to give its occupants a chance to
+witness the rapid fulfilment of Williams's prediction in the swiftly
+pouring streams of concrete, advertised its shining presence to the
+engineer, who came up for a word with Smith while Starbuck had his head
+under the hood of the new-paint-burning motor.
+
+"Somebody's been trying to get you over the wire, John; some woman," he
+said, in tones as low as the thunderings of the rock-crushers would
+sanction. "She wouldn't give me her number, but she wanted me to tell
+you, if you came back here, that it was all right; that you had nothing
+to be afraid of. She said you'd understand."
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+The Straddler
+
+
+Since Brewster was a full-fledged city, its banks closed at three
+o'clock. Ten minutes after the hour, which happened also to be about the
+same length of time after Starbuck and Smith had reached town, Mr.
+Crawford Stanton got himself admitted by the janitor at the side door of
+the Brewster City National. President Kinzie was still at his desk in
+his private room, and the promoter entered unannounced.
+
+"I thought I'd hang off and give you the limit--all the time there was,"
+he said, dropping into the debtor's chair at the desk-end. And then,
+with a quarrelsome rasp in his tone: "Are you getting ready to switch
+again?"
+
+Though his victims often cursed the banker for his shrewd caution and
+his ruthless profit-takings, no one had ever accused him of timidity in
+a stand-up encounter.
+
+"You've taken that tone with me before, Stanton, and I don't like it,"
+he returned brusquely. "I've been willing to serve you, as I could, in
+a business matter, and I am still willing to serve you; but you may as
+well keep it in mind that neither you, nor the people you represent, own
+the Brewster City National, or any part of it, in fee simple."
+
+"We can buy you out any minute we think we need you," retorted Stanton.
+"But never mind about that. Your man came back from the Topaz last
+night; I know, because I make it my business to keep cases on you and
+everybody else. You've let the better part of the day go by without
+saying a word, and I've drawn the only conclusion there is to draw:
+you're getting ready to swap sides again."
+
+Kinzie frowned his impatience. "If I have to do business with your
+people much longer, Mr. Stanton, I shall certainly suggest that they put
+a man in charge out here who can control his temper. I have acted in
+perfect good faith with you from the beginning. What you say is true;
+our man did return from the Topaz last night. But I thought it wise to
+make a few investigations on my own account before we should be
+committed to the course you advocated, and it is fortunate for us that I
+did. Here is Mr. Richlander's letter."
+
+Stanton read the letter through hastily, punctuating its final sentence
+with a brittle oath.
+
+"And you've muddled over this all day, when every hour is worth more to
+us than your one-horse bank could earn in a year?" he rapped out. "What
+have you done? Have you telegraphed this sheriff?"
+
+"No; and neither will you when I tell you the facts. I was afraid you
+might go off at half-cock, as usual, if I turned the matter over to you.
+You see what Mr. Richlander says, and you will note his description of
+the man Smith who is wanted in Lawrenceville. It doesn't tally in any
+respect with Baldwin's treasurer, and the common name aroused my
+suspicions at once. We had nothing to go on unless we could identify our
+man definitely, so I took the straightforward course and went to Miss
+Richlander."
+
+Stanton's laugh was a derisive shout.
+
+"You need a guardian, Kinzie; you do, for a fact!" he sneered. "You sit
+here, day in and day out, like a greedy old spider in the middle of a
+web, clawing in a man-fly every time the door opens, but what you don't
+know about women--Bah! you make my back ache! Of course, the girl pulled
+the wool over your eyes; any woman could do that!"
+
+"You are not gaining anything by being abusive, Stanton. As I have said,
+it is fortunate for all of us that I took the matter into my own hands
+and used a little ordinary common sense. There are two Smiths, just as I
+suspected when I read Mr. Richlander's letter. Miss Richlander didn't
+ask me to take her word for it. She called in a young man named Jibbey,
+who arrived here, direct from Lawrenceville, as I understand, last
+evening. He is a banker's son, and he knows both Smiths. This man of
+Baldwin's is not the one Mr. Richlander is trying to describe in that
+letter."
+
+Stanton bit the tip from a cigar and struck a light.
+
+"Kinzie," he said, "you've got me guessing. If you are really the easy
+mark you are trying to tell me you are, you have no business running a
+bank. I'm going to be charitable and put it the other way around. You
+think we're going to lose out, and you are trying to throw me off the
+scent. You had a long talk with Colonel Baldwin this morning--I kept
+cases on that, too--and you figured that you'd make money by seesawing
+again. I'm glad to be able to tell you that you are just about
+twenty-four hours too late."
+
+The round-bodied banker righted his pivot-chair with a snap and his lips
+were puffed out like the lips of a swimmer who sees the saving plank
+drifting out of reach.
+
+"You are wrong, Stanton; altogether wrong!" he protested. "Baldwin was
+here because I sent for him to make a final attempt to swing him over to
+the compromise. You are doing me the greatest possible injustice!"
+
+Stanton rose and made ready to go.
+
+"I think that would be rather hard to do, Kinzie," he flung back.
+"Nobody loves a trimmmer. But in the present case you are not going to
+lose anything. We'll take your stock at par, as I promised you we
+would."
+
+It was at this crisis that David Kinzie showed himself as the exponent
+of the saying that every man has his modicum of saving grace, by smiting
+upon the arm of his chair and glaring up at the promoter.
+
+"There's another promise of yours that you've got to remember, too,
+Stanton," he argued hoarsely. "You've got to hold Dexter Baldwin
+harmless!"
+
+Stanton's smile was a mask of pure malice. "I've made you no definite
+promise as to that; but you shall have one now. I'll promise to break
+Baldwin in two and throw him and his ranchmen backers out of the
+Timanyoni. That's what you get for playing fast and loose with two
+people at the same time. When you look over your paying teller's
+statement for the day, you'll see that I have withdrawn our account from
+your tin-horn money shop. Good-day."
+
+Five minutes later the promoter was squared before his own desk in the
+office across the street and was hastily scribbling a telegram while a
+messenger boy waited. It was addressed to Sheriff Macauley, at
+Lawrenceville, and the wording of it showed how completely Stanton was
+ignoring Banker Kinzie's investigations.
+
+     Your man Montague Smith is here, known as John Smith, secretary
+     and treasurer Timanyoni High Line Company. Wire authority quick
+     to chief police Brewster for his arrest and send deputy with
+     requisition. Rush or you lose him.
+
+     CRAWFORD STANTON.
+
+He let the boy go with this, but immediately set to work on another
+which was addressed to the great man whose private car, returning from
+the Pacific Coast, was due to reach Denver by the evening Union Pacific
+train. This second message he translated laboriously into cipher,
+working it out word by word from a worn code book taken from the safe.
+But the copy from which he translated, and which, after the cipher was
+made, he carefully destroyed, read thus:
+
+     The obstacle is removed. M'Graw and his men will take
+     possession to-night and hold until we can make the turn.
+
+     Stanton.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+The Flesh-Pots of Egypt
+
+
+Convinced by Verda Richlander's telephone message to the construction
+camp that he stood in no immediate danger, Smith spent the heel of the
+afternoon in the High Line offices, keeping in wire touch with
+Stillings, whom he had sent on a secret mission to Red Butte, and with
+Williams at the dam.
+
+Colonel Baldwin, as he learned from Martin, had gone to attend the
+funeral of one of his neighbors, and was thus, for the moment, out of
+reach. Smith told himself that the colonel's presence or absence made
+little difference. The High Line enterprise was on the knees of the
+gods. If Williams could pull through in time, if the river-swelling
+storms should hold off, if Stanton should delay his final raid past the
+critical hour--and there was now good reason to hope that all of these
+contingencies were probable--the victory was practically won.
+
+But in another field the fighting secretary, denying himself in the
+privacy of his office to everybody but Martin, found small matter for
+rejoicing. It was one of life's ironies that the metamorphosis which had
+shown him, among other things, the heights and depths of a pure
+sentiment had apparently deprived him of the power to awaken it in the
+woman he loved.
+
+It was thus that he was interpreting Corona Baldwin's attitude. She had
+recognized the transformation as a thing in process, and had been
+interested in it as a human experiment. Though it was chiefly owing to
+her beckoning that he had stepped out of the working ranks at the
+construction camp, he felt that he had never measured up to her ideals,
+and that her influence over him, so far as it was exerted consciously,
+was as impersonal as that of the sun on a growing plant. She had wished
+objectively to see the experiment succeed, and had been willing to use
+such means as had come to hand to make it succeed. For this cause, he
+concluded, with a curiously bitter taste in his mouth, her interest in
+the human experiment was his best warrant for shutting the door upon his
+love dream. Sentiment, the world over, has little sympathy with
+laboratory processes, and the woman who loves does not apply acid tests
+and call the object of her love a coward.
+
+Letting the sting of the epithet have its full effect, he admitted that
+he was a coward. He had lacked the finer quality of courage when he had
+spirited Jibbey away, and he was lacking it again, now, in accepting the
+defensive alliance with Verda Richlander. He had not shown himself at
+the hotel since his return from the long drive with Starbuck, and the
+reason for it was that he knew his relations with Verda had now become
+an entanglement from which he was going to find it exceedingly difficult
+to release himself. She had served him, had most probably lied for him;
+and he assured himself, again with the bitter taste in his mouth, that
+there would be a price to pay.
+
+It is through such doors of disheartenment that temptation finds its
+easiest entrance. For a dismal hour the old life, with its conventional
+enjoyments and limitations, its banalities, its entire freedom from the
+prickings of the larger ambitions and its total blindness on the side of
+broadening horizons and higher ideals, became a thing most ardently to
+be desired, a welcome avenue of escape from the toils and turmoils and
+the growing-pains of all the metamorphoses. What if a return to it
+should still be possible? What if, surrendering himself voluntarily, he
+should go back to Lawrenceville and fight it out with Watrous Dunham in
+the courts? Was there not more than an even chance that Dunham had
+offered the large reward for his apprehension merely to make sure that
+he would not return? Was it not possible that the thing the crooked
+president least desired was an airing of his iniquitous business methods
+in the courts?
+
+Smith closed his desk at six o'clock and went across to the hotel to
+dress for dinner. The day of suspense was practically at an end and
+disaster still held aloof; was fairly outdistanced in the race, as it
+seemed. Williams's final report had been to the effect that the
+concrete-pouring was completed, and the long strain was off. Smith went
+to his rooms, and, as once before and for a similar reason, he laid his
+dress clothes out on the bed. He made sure that he would be required to
+dine with Verda Richlander, and he was stripping his coat when he heard
+a tap at the door and Jibbey came in.
+
+"Glad rags, eh?" said the _blase_ one, with a glance at the array on the
+bed. "I've just run up to tell you that you needn't. Verda's dining with
+the Stantons, and she wants me to keep you out of sight until afterward.
+By and by, when she's foot-loose, she wants to see you in the
+mezzanine. Isn't there some quiet little joint where we two can go for a
+bite? You know the town, and I don't."
+
+Smith put his coat on and together they circled the square to
+Frascati's, taking a table in the main cafe. While they were giving
+their dinner order, Starbuck came in and joined them, and Smith was
+glad. For reasons which he could scarcely have defined, he was relieved
+not to have to talk to Jibbey alone, and Starbuck played third hand
+admirably, taking kindly to the sham black sheep, and filling him up, in
+quiet, straight-faced humor, with many and most marvellous tales of the
+earlier frontier.
+
+At the end of the meal, while Jibbey was still content to linger,
+listening open-mouthed to Starbuck's romancings, Smith excused himself
+and returned to the hotel. He had scarcely chosen his lounging-chair in
+a quiet corner of the mezzanine before Miss Richlander came to join him.
+
+"It has been a long day, hasn't it?" she began evenly. "You have been
+busy with your dam, I suppose, but I--I have had nothing to do but to
+think, and that is something that I don't often allow myself to do. You
+have gone far since that night last May when you telephoned me that you
+would come up to the house later--and then broke your promise,
+Montague."
+
+"In a way, I suppose I have," he admitted.
+
+"You have, indeed. You are a totally different man."
+
+"In what way, particularly?"
+
+"In every conceivable way. If one could believe in transmigration, one
+would say that you had changed souls with some old, hard-hitting,
+rough-riding ancestor. Mr. Stanton has just been telling me the story of
+how, when you first came here, you fought barehanded with three miners
+somewhere back in the hills."
+
+A bleak little smile of reminiscence wrinkled at the corners of the
+fighter's eyes.
+
+"Did he tell you that I knocked them out--all three of them?" he asked.
+
+"He said you beat them shamefully; and I tried to imagine you doing such
+a thing, and couldn't. Have your ambitions changed, too?"
+
+"I am not sure now that I had any ambitions in that other life."
+
+"Oh, yes, you had," she went on smoothly. "In the 'other life', as you
+call it, you would have been quite willing to marry a woman who could
+assure you a firm social standing and money enough to put you on a
+footing with other men of your capabilities. You wouldn't be willing to
+do that now, would you?--leaving the sentiment out as you used to leave
+it out then?"
+
+"No, I hardly think I should."
+
+Her laugh was musically low and sweet, and only mildly derisive.
+
+"You are thinking that it is change of environment, wider horizons, and
+all that, which has changed you, Montague; but I know better. It is a
+woman, and, as you may remember, I have met her--twice." Then, with a
+faint glow of spiteful fire in the magnificent eyes: "How can you make
+yourself believe that she is pretty?"
+
+He shrugged one shoulder in token of the utter uselessness of discussion
+in that direction.
+
+"Sentiment?" he queried. "I think we needn't go into that, at this late
+day, Verda. It is a field that neither of us entered, or cared to enter,
+in the days that are gone. If I say that Corona Baldwin has--quite
+unconsciously on her part, I must ask you to believe--taught me what
+love means, that ought to be enough."
+
+Again she was laughing softly.
+
+"You seem to have broadly forgotten the old proverb about a woman
+scorned. What have you to expect from me after making such an admission
+as that?"
+
+Smith pulled himself together and stood the argument firmly upon its
+unquestionable footing.
+
+"Let us put all these indirections aside and be for the moment merely a
+man and a woman, as God made us, Verda," he said soberly. "You know, and
+I know, that there was never any question of love involved in our
+relations past and gone. We might have married, but in that case neither
+of us would have gotten or exacted anything more than the conventional
+decencies and amenities. We mustn't try to make believe at this late
+day. You had no illusions about me when I was Watrous Dunham's hired
+man; you haven't any illusions about me now."
+
+"Perhaps not," was the calm rejoinder. "And yet to-day I have lied to
+save you from those who are trying to crush you."
+
+"I told you not to do that," he rejoined quickly.
+
+"I know you did; and yet, when you went away this morning you knew
+perfectly well that I was going to do it if I should get the
+opportunity. Didn't you, Montague?"
+
+He nodded slowly; common honesty demanded that much.
+
+"Very well; you accepted the service, and I gave it freely. Mr. Kinzie
+believes now that you are another Smith--not the one who ran away from
+Lawrenceville last May. Tell me: would the other woman have done as much
+if the chance had fallen to her?"
+
+It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I hope not," but he did not say
+it. Instead, he said: "But you don't really care, Verda; in the way you
+are trying to make me believe you do."
+
+"Possibly not; possibly I am wholly selfish in the matter and am only
+looking for some loophole of escape."
+
+"Escape? From whom?"
+
+She looked away and shook her head. "From Watrous Dunham, let us say.
+You didn't suspect that, did you? It is so, nevertheless. My father
+desires it; and I suppose Watrous Dunham would like to have my
+money--you know I have something in my own right. Perhaps this may help
+to account for some other things--for your trouble, for one. You were in
+his way, you see. But never mind that: there are other matters to be
+considered now. Though Mr. Kinzie has been put off the track, Mr.
+Stanton hasn't. I have earned Mr. Stanton's ill-will because I wouldn't
+tell him about you, and this evening, at table, he took it out on me."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"He gave me to understand, very plainly, that he had done something;
+that there was a sensation in prospect for all Brewster. He was so
+exultantly triumphant that it fairly frightened me. The fact that he
+wasn't afraid to show some part of his hand to me--knowing that I would
+be sure to tell you--makes me afraid that the trap has already been set
+for you."
+
+"In other words, you think he has gone over Kinzie's head and has
+telegraphed to Lawrenceville?"
+
+"Montague, I'm almost certain of it!"
+
+Smith stood up and put his hands behind him.
+
+"Which means that I have only a few hours, at the longest," he said
+quietly. And then: "There is a good bit to be done, turning over the
+business of the office, and all that: I've been putting it off from day
+to day, saying that there would be time enough to set my house in order
+after the trap had been sprung. Now I am like the man who has put off
+the making of his will until it is too late. Will you let me thank you
+very heartily and vanish?"
+
+"What shall you do?" she asked.
+
+"Set my house in order, as I say--as well as I can in the time that
+remains. There are others to be considered, you know."
+
+"Oh; the plain-faced little ranch girl among them, I suppose?"
+
+"No; thank God, she is out of it entirely--in the way you mean," he
+broke out fervently.
+
+"You mean that you haven't spoken to her--yet?"
+
+"Of course I haven't. Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me
+with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?"
+
+"But you are not really guilty."
+
+"That doesn't make any difference: Watrous Dunham will see to it that I
+get what he has planned to give me."
+
+She was tapping an impatient tattoo on the carpet with one shapely foot.
+
+"Why don't you turn this new leaf of yours back and go home and fight it
+out with Watrous Dunham, once for all?" she suggested.
+
+"I shall probably go, fast enough, when Macauley or one of his deputies
+gets here with the extradition papers," he returned. "But as to fighting
+Dunham, without money----"
+
+She looked up quickly, and this time there was no mistaking the meaning
+of the glow in the magnificent brown eyes.
+
+"Your friends have money, Montague--plenty of it. All you have to do is
+to say that you will defend yourself. I am not sure that Watrous Dunham
+couldn't be made to take your place in the prisoner's dock, or that you
+couldn't be put in his place in the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. You
+have captured Tucker Jibbey, and that means Tucker's father; and my
+father--well, when it comes to the worst, my father always does what I
+want him to. It's his one weakness."
+
+For one little instant Smith felt the solid ground slipping from beneath
+his feet. Here was a way out, and his quick mentality was showing him
+that it was a perfectly feasible way. As Verda Richlander's husband and
+Josiah Richlander's son-in-law, he could fight Dunham and win. And the
+reward: once more he could take his place in the small Lawrenceville
+world, and settle down to the life of conventional good report and ease
+which he had once thought the acme of any reasonable man's aspirations.
+But at the half-yielding moment a word of Corona Baldwin's flashed into
+his brain and turned the scale: "It _did_ happen in your case ... giving
+you a chance to grow and expand, and to break with all the old
+traditions ... and the break left you free to make of yourself what you
+should choose." It was the reincarnated Smith who met the look in the
+beautiful eyes and made answer.
+
+[Illustration: "Your friends have money, Montague--plenty of it."]
+
+"No," was the sober decision; and then he gave his reasons. "If I could
+do what you propose, I shouldn't be worth the powder it would take to
+drive a bullet through me, Verda, for now, you see, I know what love
+means. You say I have changed, and I _have_ changed: I can imagine the
+past-and-gone J. Montague jumping at the chance you are offering. But
+the mill will never grind with the water that is past: I'll take what is
+coming to me, and try to take it like a man. Good-night--and good-by."
+And he turned his back upon the temptation and went away.
+
+Fifteen minutes later he was in his office in the Kinzie Building,
+trying in vain to get Colonel Baldwin on the distance wire; trying
+also--and also in vain--to forget the recent clash and break with Verda
+Richlander. He had called it a temptation at the moment, but perhaps it
+was scarcely that. It was more like a final effort of the man who had
+been to retransform the man who was. For a single instant the doors of
+all his former ambitions had stood open. He saw how Josiah Richlander's
+money and influence, directed by Verda's compelling demands, could be
+used to break Dunham; and that done, all the rest would be easy, all the
+paths to the success he had once craved would be made smooth.
+
+On the other hand, there was everything to lose, and nothing, as the
+world measures results, to be gained. In a few hours at the furthest the
+good name he had earned in Brewster would be hopelessly lost, and, so
+far as human foresight could prefigure, there was nothing ahead but loss
+and bitter disgrace. In spite of all this, while the long-distance
+"central" was still assuring him that the Hillcrest wire was busy, he
+found time to be fiercely glad that the choice had been only a choice
+offered and not a choice accepted. For love's sake, if for no higher
+motive, he would go down like a man, fighting to the end for the right
+to live and think and love as a man.
+
+He was jiggling the switch of the desk 'phone for the twentieth time in
+the effort to secure the desired line of communication with Baldwin when
+a nervous step echoed in the corridor and the door opened to admit
+William Starbuck. There was red wrath in the mine owner's ordinarily
+cold eyes when he flung himself into a chair and eased the nausea of his
+soul in an outburst of picturesque profanity.
+
+"The jig's up--definitely up, John," he was saying, when his speech
+became lucid enough to be understood. "We know now what Stanton's 'other
+string' was. A half-hour ago, a deputy United States marshal, with a
+posse big enough to capture a town, took possession of the dam and
+stopped the work. He says it's a court order from Judge Lorching at Red
+Butte, based on the claims of that infernal paper railroad!"
+
+Smith pushed the telephone aside.
+
+"But it's too late!" he protested. "The dam is completed; Williams
+'phoned me before I went to dinner. All that remains to be done to save
+the charter is to shut the spillways and let the water back up so that
+it will flow into the main ditch!"
+
+"Right there's where they've got us!" was the rasping reply. "They won't
+let Williams touch the spillway gates, and they're not going to let him
+touch them until after we have lost out on the time limit! Williams's
+man says they've put the seal of the court on the machinery and have
+posted armed guards everywhere. Wouldn't that make you run around in
+circles and yelp like a scalded dog?"
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+A Strong Man Armed
+
+
+When the full meaning of Stanton's _coup_ had thus set itself forth in
+terms unmistakable, Smith put his elbows on the desk and propped his
+head in his hands. It was not the attitude of dejection; it was rather a
+trance-like rigor of concentration, with each and all of the newly
+emergent powers once more springing alive to answer the battle-call. At
+the desk-end Starbuck sat with his hands locked over one knee, too
+disheartened to roll a cigarette, normal solace for all woundings less
+than mortal. After a minute or two Smith jerked himself around to face
+the news-bringer.
+
+"Does Colonel Baldwin know?" he asked.
+
+"Sure! That's the worst of it. Didn't I tell you? After he got back from
+Stuart's funeral he drove out to the dam, reaching the works just ahead
+of the trouble. When M'Graw and the posse outfit showed up, the colonel
+got it into his head that the whole thing was merely another trick of
+Stanton's--a fake. Ginty, the quarry boss, brought the news to town. He
+says there was a bloody mix-up, and at the end of it the colonel and
+Williams were both under arrest for resisting the officers."
+
+Smith nodded thoughtfully. "Of course; that was just what was needed.
+With the president and the chief of construction locked up, and the
+wheels blocked for the next twenty-four hours, our charter will be
+gone."
+
+"This world and another, and then the fireworks," Starbuck threw in.
+"With the property all roped up in a law tangle, and those stock options
+of yours due to fall in, it looks as if a few prominent citizens of the
+Timanyoni would have to take to the high grass and the tall timber. It
+sure does, John."
+
+"The colonel was not entirely without his warrant for putting up a
+fight," Smith went on, after another reflective minute. "Do you know,
+Billy, I have been expecting something of this kind--and expecting it to
+be a fake. That's why I sent Stillings to Red Butte; to keep watch of
+Judge Lorching's court. Stillings was to 'phone me if Lorching issued an
+order."
+
+"And he hasn't phoned you?"
+
+"No; but that doesn't prove anything. The order may have been issued,
+and Stillings may have tried to let us know. There are a good many ways
+in which a man's mouth may be stopped--when there are no scruples on the
+other side."
+
+"Then you think there is no doubt that the court order is straight, and
+that this man M'Graw is really a deputy marshal and has the law for what
+he is doing?"
+
+"In the absence of any proof to the contrary, we are obliged to believe
+it--or at least to accept it. But we're not dead yet.... Billy, it's
+running in my mind that we've got to go out there and clean up Mr.
+M'Graw and his crowd."
+
+Starbuck threw up his hands and made a noise like a dry wagon-wheel.
+
+"Holy smoke!--go up against the whole United States?" he gasped.
+
+Smith's grin showed his strong, even teeth.
+
+"Starbuck, you remember what I told you one night?--the night I dragged
+you up to my rooms in the hotel and gave you a hint of the reason why I
+had no business to make love to Corona Baldwin?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"Well, the time has come when I may as well fill out the blanks in the
+story for you. The night I left my home city in the Middle West I was
+called down to the bank of which I was the cashier and was shown how I
+was going to be dropped into a hole for a hundred thousand dollars of
+the bank's money; a loan which I had made as cashier in the absence of
+the president, but which had been authorized, verbally, by the president
+before he went away."
+
+"A scapegoat, eh? There have been others. Go on."
+
+"It was a frame-up, all around. The loan had been made to a friend of
+mine for the express purpose of smashing him--that was the president's
+object in letting it go through. Unluckily, I held a few shares of stock
+in my friend's company: and there you have it. Unless the president
+would admit that he had authorized the loan, I was in for an offense
+that could be easily twisted into embezzlement."
+
+"The president stacked the cards on you?"
+
+"He did. It was nine o'clock at night and we were alone together in the
+bank. He wanted me to shoulder the blame and run away; offered me money
+to go with. One word brought on another; and finally, when I dared him
+to press the police-alarm button, he pulled a gun on me. I hit him, just
+once, Billy, and he dropped like a stone."
+
+"Great Moses!--dead?"
+
+"I thought he was. His heart had stopped, and I couldn't get him up.
+Picture it, if you can--but you can't. I had never struck a man in anger
+before in all my life. My first thought was to go straight to the police
+station and make a clean breast of it. Then I saw how impossible it was
+going to be to dodge the penitentiary, and I bolted; jumped a
+freight-train and hoboed my way out of town. Two days later I got hold
+of a newspaper and found that I hadn't killed Dunham; but I was
+outlawed, just the same, and there was a reward offered."
+
+Starbuck was nodding soberly. "You sure have been carrying a back-load
+all these weeks, John, never knowing what minute was going to be the
+next. Now I know what you meant when you hinted around about this Miss
+Rich-pastures. She knows you and she could give you away if she wanted
+to. Has she done it, John?"
+
+"No; but her father has. Kinzie sent one of his clerks out to the Topaz
+to hunt up the old man. Kinzie hasn't done anything, himself, I guess;
+Miss Richlander told me that much; but Stanton has got hold of the end
+of the thread, and, while I don't know it definitely, it is practically
+certain he has sent a wire. If the Brewster police are not looking for
+me at this moment, they will be shortly. That brings us back to this
+High Line knock-out. As the matter stands, I'm the one man in our outfit
+who has absolutely nothing to lose. I am an officer of the company, and
+no legal notice has been served upon me. Can you fill out the remainder
+of the order?"
+
+"No, I'll be switched if I can!"
+
+"Then I'll fill it for you. So far as I know--legally, you
+understand--this raid has never been authorized by the courts; at least,
+that is what I'm going to assume until the proper papers have been
+served on me. Therefore I am free to strike one final blow for the
+colonel and his friends, and I'm going to do it, if I can dodge the
+police long enough to get action."
+
+Starbuck's tilting chair righted itself with a crash.
+
+"You've thought it all out?--just how to go at it?"
+
+"Every move; and every one of them a straight bid for a second
+penitentiary sentence."
+
+"All right," said the mine owner briefly. "Count me in."
+
+"For information only," was the brusque reply. "You have a stake in the
+country and a good name to maintain. I have nothing. But you can tell
+me a few things. Are our workmen still on the ground?"
+
+"Yes. Ginty said there were only a few stragglers who came to town with
+him. Most of the two shifts are staying on to get their pay--or until
+they find out that they aren't going to get it."
+
+"And the colonel and Williams: the marshal is holding them out at the
+dam?"
+
+"Uh-huh; locked up in the office shack, Ginty says."
+
+"Good. I shan't need the colonel, but I shall need Williams. Now another
+question: you know Sheriff Harding fairly well, don't you? What sort of
+a man is he?"
+
+"Square as a die, and as nervy as they make 'em. When he gets a warrant
+to serve, he'll bring in his man, dead or alive."
+
+"That's all I'll ask of him. Now go and find me an auto, and then you
+can fade away and get ready to prove a good, stout _alibi_."
+
+"Yes--like fits I will!" retorted the mine owner. "I told you once,
+John, that I was in this thing to a finish, and I meant it. Go on giving
+your orders."
+
+"Very well; you've had your warning. The next thing is the auto. I want
+to catch Judge Warner before he goes to bed. I'll telephone while
+you're getting a car."
+
+Starbuck had no farther to go than to the garage where he had put up his
+new car, and when he got it and drove to the Kinzie Building, Smith came
+out of the shadow of the entrance to mount beside him.
+
+"Drive around to the garage again and let me try another 'phone," was
+the low-spoken request. "My wire isn't working."
+
+The short run was quickly made, and Smith went to the garage office. A
+moment later a two-hundred-pound policeman strolled up to put a huge
+foot on the running-board of the waiting auto. Starbuck greeted him as a
+friend.
+
+"Hello, Mac. How's tricks with you to-night?"
+
+"Th' tricks are even, an' I'm tryin' to take th' odd wan," said the big
+Irishman. "'Tis a man named Smith I'm lookin' for, Misther Starbuck--J.
+Mon-tay-gue Smith; th' fi-nanshal boss av th' big ditch comp'ny. Have ye
+seen 'um?"
+
+Starbuck, looking over the policeman's shoulder, could see Smith at the
+telephone in the garage office. Another man might have lost his head,
+but the ex-cow-puncher was of the chosen few whose wits sharpen handily
+in an emergency.
+
+"He hangs out at the Hophra House a good part of the time in the
+evenings," he replied coolly. "Hop in and I'll drive you around."
+
+Three minutes later the threatening danger was a danger pushed a little
+way into the future, and Starbuck was back at the garage curb waiting
+for Smith to come out. Through the window he saw Smith replacing the
+receiver on its hook, and a moment afterward he was opening the car door
+for his passenger.
+
+"Did you make out to raise the judge?" he inquired, as Smith climbed in.
+
+"Yes. He will meet me at his chambers in the court-house as soon as he
+can drive down from his house."
+
+"What are you hoping to do, John? Judge Warner is only a circuit judge;
+he can't set an order of the United States court aside, can he?"
+
+"No; but there is one thing that he can do. You may remember that I had
+a talk with him this morning at his house. I was trying then to cover
+all the chances, among them the possibility that Stanton would jump in
+with a gang of armed thugs at the last minute. We are going to assume
+that this is what has been done."
+
+Starbuck set the car in motion and sent it spinning out of the side
+street, around the plaza, and beyond to the less brilliantly
+illuminated residence district--which was not the shortest way to the
+court-house.
+
+"You mustn't pull Judge Warner's leg, John," he protested, breaking the
+purring silence after the business quarter had been left behind; "he's
+too good a man for that."
+
+"I shall tell him the exact truth, so far as we know it," was the quick
+reply. "There is one chance in a thousand that we shall come out of this
+with the law--as well as the equities--on our side. I shall tell the
+judge that no papers have been served on us, and, so far as I know, they
+haven't. What are you driving all the way around here for?"
+
+"This is one of the times when the longest way round is the shortest way
+home," Starbuck explained. "The bad news you were looking for 'has
+came'. While you were 'phoning in the garage I put one policeman
+wise--to nothing."
+
+"He was looking for me?"
+
+"Sure thing--and by name. We'll fool around here in the back streets
+until the judge has had time to show up. Then I'll drop you at the
+court-house and go hustle the sheriff for you. You'll want Harding, I
+take it?"
+
+"Yes. I'm taking the chance that only the city authorities have been
+notified in my personal affair--not the county officers. It's a long
+chance, of course; I may be running my neck squarely into the noose. But
+it's all risk, Billy; every move in this night's game. Head up for the
+court-house. The judge will be there by this time."
+
+Two minutes beyond this the car was drawing up to the curb on the
+mesa-facing side of the court-house square. There were two lighted
+windows in the second story of the otherwise darkened building, and
+Smith sprang to the sidewalk.
+
+"Go now and find Harding, and have him bring one trusty deputy with him:
+I'll be ready by the time you get back," he directed; but Starbuck
+waited until he had seen Smith safely lost in the shadows of the
+pillared court-house entrance before he drove away.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+A Race to the Swift
+
+
+Since Sheriff Harding had left his office in the county jail and had
+gone home to his ranch on the north side of the river some hours
+earlier, not a little precious time was consumed in hunting him up.
+Beyond this, there was another delay in securing the deputy. When
+Starbuck's car came to a stand for a second time before the
+mesa-fronting entrance of the court-house, Smith came quickly across the
+walk from the portal.
+
+"Mr. Harding," he began abruptly, "Judge Warner has gone home and he has
+made me his messenger. There is a bit of sharp work to be done, and
+you'll need a strong posse. Can you deputize fifteen or twenty good men
+who can be depended upon in a fight and rendezvous them on the
+north-side river road in two hours from now?"
+
+The sheriff, a big, bearded man who might have sat for the model of one
+of Frederic Remington's frontiersmen, took time to consider. "Is it a
+scrap?" he asked.
+
+"It is likely to be. There are warrants to be served, and there will
+most probably be resistance. Your posse should be well armed."
+
+"We'll try for it," was the decision. "On the north-side river road, you
+say? You'll want us mounted?"
+
+"It will be better to take horses. We could get autos, but Judge Warner
+agrees with me that the thing had better be done quietly and without
+making too much of a stir in town."
+
+"All right," said the man of the law. "Is that all?"
+
+"No, not quite all. The first of the warrants is to be served here in
+Brewster--upon Mr. Crawford Stanton. Your deputy will probably find him
+at the Hophra House. Here is the paper: it is a bench warrant of
+commitment on a charge of conspiracy, and Stanton is to be locked up.
+Also you are to see to it that your jail telephone is out of order; so
+that Stanton won't be able to make any attempt to get a hearing and bail
+before to-morrow."
+
+"That part of it is mighty risky," said Harding. "Does the judge know
+about that, too?"
+
+"He does; and for the ends of pure justice, he concurs with me--though,
+of course, he couldn't give a mandatory order."
+
+The sheriff turned to his jail deputy, who had descended from the rumble
+seat in the rear.
+
+"You've heard the dope, Jimmie," he said shortly. "Go and get His Nobs
+and lock him up. And if he wants to be yelling 'Help!' and sending for
+his lawyer or somebody, why, the telephone's takin' a lay-off. _Savvy?_"
+
+The deputy nodded and turned upon his heel, stuffing the warrant for
+Stanton's arrest into his pocket as he went. Smith swung up beside
+Starbuck, saying: "In a couple of hours, then, Mr. Harding; somewhere
+near the bridge approach on the other side of the river."
+
+Starbuck had started the motor and was bending forward to adjust the oil
+feed when the sheriff left them.
+
+"You seem to have made a ten-strike with Judge Warner," the
+ex-cow-puncher remarked, replacing the flash-lamp in its seat pocket.
+
+"Judge Warner is a man in every inch of him; but there is something
+behind this night's work that I don't quite understand," was the quick
+reply. "I had hardly begun to state the case when the judge interrupted
+me. 'I know,' he said. 'I have been waiting for you people to come and
+ask for relief.' What do you make of that, Billy?"
+
+"I don't know; unless somebody in Stanton's outfit has welshed. Shaw
+might have done it. He has been to Bob Stillings, and Stillings says he
+is sore at Stanton for some reason. Shaw was trying to get Stillings to
+agree to drop the railroad case against him, and Bob says he made some
+vague promise of help in the High Line business if the railroad people
+would agree not to prosecute."
+
+"There is a screw loose somewhere; I know by the way Judge Warner took
+hold. When I proposed to swear out the warrant for Stanton's arrest, he
+said, 'I can't understand, Mr. Smith, why you haven't done this before,'
+and he sat down and filled out the blank. But we can let that go for the
+present. How are you going to get me across the river without taking me
+through the heart of the town and giving the Brewster police a shy at
+me?"
+
+Starbuck's answer was wordless. With a quick twist of the pilot wheel he
+sent the car skidding around the corner, using undue haste, as it
+seemed, since they had two hours before them. A few minutes farther
+along the lights of the town had been left behind and the car was
+speeding swiftly westward on a country road paralleling the railway
+track; the road over which Smith had twice driven with the kidnapped
+Jibbey.
+
+"I'm still guessing," the passenger ventured, when the last of the
+railroad distance signals had flashed to the rear. And then: "What's the
+frantic hurry, Billy?"
+
+Starbuck was running with the muffler cut out, but now he cut it in and
+the roar of the motor sank to a humming murmur.
+
+"I thought so," he remarked, turning his head to listen. "You didn't
+notice that police whistle just as we were leaving the court-house, did
+you?--nor the answers to it while we were dodging through the suburbs?
+Somebody has marked us down and passed the word, and now they're chasing
+us with a buzz-wagon. Don't you hear it?"
+
+By this time Smith could hear the sputtering roar of the following car
+only too plainly.
+
+"It's a big one," he commented. "You can't outrun it, Billy; and,
+besides, there is nowhere to run to in this direction."
+
+Again Starbuck's reply translated itself into action. With a skilful
+touch of the controls he sent the car ahead at top speed, and for a
+matter of ten miles or more held a diminishing lead in the race through
+sheer good driving and an accurate knowledge of the road and its
+twistings and turnings. Smith knew little of the westward half of the
+Park which they were approaching, and the little was not encouraging.
+Beyond Little Butte and the old Wire Silver mine the road they were
+traversing would become a cart track in the mountains; and there was no
+outlet to the north save by means of the railroad bridge at Little Butte
+station.
+
+Throughout the race the pursuers had been gradually gaining, and by the
+time the forested bulk of Little Butte was outlining itself against the
+clouded sky on the left, the headlights of the oncoming police car were
+in plain view to the rear. Worse still, there were three grade crossings
+of the railroad track just ahead in the stretch of road which rounded
+the toe of the mountain; and from somewhere up the valley and beyond the
+railroad bridge came the distance-softened whistle of a train.
+
+Starbuck set a high mark for himself as a courageous driver of
+motor-cars when he came to the last of the three road crossings. Jerking
+the car around sharply at the instant of track-crossing, he headed
+straight out over the ties for the railroad bridge. It was a courting of
+death. To drive the bridge at racing speed was hazardous enough, but to
+drive it thus in the face of a down-coming train seemed nothing less
+than madness.
+
+It was after the car had shot into the first of the three bridge spans
+that the pursuers pulled up and opened fire. Starbuck bent lower over
+his wheel, and Smith clutched for handholds. Far up the track on the
+north side of the river a headlight flashed in the darkness, and the
+hoarse blast of a locomotive, whistling for the bridge, echoed and
+re-echoed among the hills.
+
+Starbuck, tortured because he could not remember what sort of an
+approach the railway track made to the bridge on the farther side, drove
+for his life. With the bridge fairly crossed he found himself on a high
+embankment; and the oncoming train was now less than half a mile away.
+To turn out on the embankment was to hurl the car to certain
+destruction. To hold on was to take a hazardous chance of colliding with
+the train. Somewhere beyond the bridge approach there was a road; so
+much Starbuck could recall. If they could reach its crossing before the
+collision should come----
+
+They did reach it, by what seemed to Smith a margin of no more than the
+length of the heavy freight train which went jangling past them a scant
+second or so after the car had been wrenched aside into the obscure mesa
+road. They had gone a mile or more on the reverse leg of the long
+down-river detour before Starbuck cut the speed and turned the wheel
+over to his seat-mate.
+
+"Take her a minute while I get the makings," he said, dry-lipped,
+feeling in his pockets for tobacco and the rice-paper. Then he added:
+"Holy Solomon! I never wanted a smoke so bad in all my life!"
+
+Smith's laugh was a chuckle.
+
+"Gets next to you--after the fact--doesn't it? That's where we split. I
+had my scare before we hit the bridge, and it tasted like a mouthful of
+bitter aloes. Does this road take us back up the river?"
+
+"It takes us twenty miles around through the Park and comes in at the
+head of Little Creek. But we have plenty of time. You told Harding two
+hours, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes; but I must have a few minutes at Hillcrest before we get action,
+Billy."
+
+Starbuck took the wheel again and said nothing until the roundabout race
+had been fully run and he was easing the car down the last of the hills
+into the Little Creek road. There had been three-quarters of an hour of
+skilful driving over a bad road to come between Smith's remark and its
+reply, but Starbuck apparently made no account of the length of the
+interval.
+
+"You're aiming to go and see Corry?" he asked, while the car was
+coasting to the hill bottom.
+
+"Yes."
+
+With a sudden flick of the controls and a quick jamming of the brakes,
+Starbuck brought the car to a stand just as it came into the level road.
+
+"We're man to man here under the canopy, John; and Corry Baldwin hasn't
+got any brother," he offered gravely. "I'm backing you in this business
+fight for all I'm worth--for Dick Maxwell's sake and the colonel's, and
+maybe a little bit for the sake of my own ante of twenty thousand. And
+I'm ready to back you in this old-home scrap with all the money you'll
+need to make your fight. But when it comes to the little girl it's
+different. Have you any good and fair right to hunt up Corry Baldwin
+while things are shaping themselves up as they are?"
+
+Since Smith had made the acquaintance of the absolute ego he had
+acquired many things new and strange, among them a great ruthlessness in
+the pursuit of the desired object, and an equally large carelessness for
+consequences past the instant of attainment. None the less, he met the
+shrewd inquisition fairly.
+
+"Give it a name," he said shortly.
+
+"I will: I'll give it the one you gave it a while back. You said you
+were an outlaw, on two charges: embezzlement and assault. We'll let the
+assault part of it go. Even a pretty humane sort of fellow may have to
+kill somebody now and then and call it all in the day's work. But the
+other thing doesn't taste good."
+
+"I didn't embezzle anything, Billy. I thought I made that plain."
+
+"So you did. But you also made it plain that the home court would be
+likely to send you up for it, guilty or not guilty. And with a thing
+like that hanging over you ... you see, I know Corry Baldwin, John. If
+you put it up to her to-night, and she happens to fall in with your side
+of it--which is what you're aiming to make her do--all hell won't keep
+her from going back home with you and seeing you through!"
+
+"Good God, Billy! If I thought she loved me well enough to do that! But
+think a minute. It may easily happen that this is my last chance. I may
+never see her again. I said I wouldn't tell her--that I loved her too
+well to tell her ... but now the final pinch has come, and I----"
+
+"And that isn't all," Starbuck went on relentlessly. "There's this Miss
+Rich-acres. You say there's nothing to it, there, but you've as good as
+admitted that she's been lying to Dave Kinzie for you. Your hands ain't
+clean, John; not clean enough to let you go to Hillcrest to-night."
+
+Smith groped in his pockets, found a cigar and lighted it. Perhaps he
+was recalling his own words spoken to Verda Richlander only a few hours
+earlier: "_Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the
+shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?_" And yet that was just what
+he was about to do--or had been about to do.
+
+"Pull out to the side of the road and we'll kill what time there is to
+kill right here," he directed soberly. And then: "What you say is right
+as right, Billy. Once more, I guess, I was locoed for the minute. Forget
+it; and while you're about it, forget Miss Richlander, too. Luckily for
+her, she is out of it--as far out of it as I am."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+Freedom
+
+
+The Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its upper and lower reaches,
+becomes a placid river of the plain at Brewster, dividing its flow among
+sandy islets, and broadening in its bed to make the long bridge
+connecting the city with the grass-land mesas a low, trestled causeway.
+On the northern bank of the river the Brewster street, of which the
+bridge is a prolongation, becomes a country road, forking a few hundred
+yards from the bridge approach to send one of its branchings northward
+among the Little Creek ranches and another westward up the right bank of
+the stream.
+
+At this fork of the road, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the night
+of alarms, Sheriff Harding's party of special deputies began to
+assemble; mounted ranchmen for the greater part, summoned by the rural
+telephones and drifting in by twos and threes from the outlying
+grass-lands. Under each man's saddle-flap was slung the regulation
+weapon of the West--a scabbarded repeating rifle; and the small troop
+bunching itself in the river road looked serviceably militant and
+businesslike.
+
+While Harding was counting his men and appointing his lieutenants an
+automobile rolled silently down the mesa road from the north and came to
+a stand among the horses. The sheriff drew rein beside the car and spoke
+to one of the two occupants of the double seat, saying:
+
+"Well, Mr. Smith, we're all here."
+
+"How many?" was the curt question.
+
+"Twenty."
+
+"Good. Here is your authority"--handing the legal papers to the officer.
+"Before we go in you ought to know the facts. A few hours ago a man
+named M'Graw, calling himself a deputy United States marshal and
+claiming to be acting under instructions from Judge Lorching's court in
+Red Butte, took possession of our dam and camp. On the even chance that
+he isn't what he claims to be, we are going to arrest him and every man
+in his crowd. Are you game for it?"
+
+"I'm game to serve any papers that Judge Warner's got the nerve to
+issue," was the big man's reply.
+
+"That's the talk; that's what I hoped to hear you say. We may have the
+law on our side, and we may not; but we certainly have the equities.
+Was Stanton arrested?"
+
+"He sure was. Strothers found him in the Hophra House bar, and the line
+of talk he turned loose would have set a wet blanket afire. Just the
+same, he had to go along with Jimmie and get himself locked up."
+
+"That is the first step; now if you're ready, we'll take the next."
+
+Harding rode forward to marshal his troop, and when the advance began
+Starbuck shut off his car lamps and held his place at the rear of the
+straggling column, juggling throttle and spark until the car kept even
+pace with the horses and the low humming of the motor was
+indistinguishable above the muffled drumming of hoof-beats.
+
+For the first mile or so the midnight silence was unbroken save by the
+subdued progress noises and the murmurings of the near-by river in its
+bed. Once Smith took the wheel while Starbuck rolled and lighted a
+cigarette, and once again, in obedience to a word from the mine owner,
+he turned the flash-light upon the gasolene pressure-gauge. In the
+fulness of time it was Starbuck who harked back to the talk which had
+been so abruptly broken off at the waiting halt in the Little Creek
+road.
+
+"Let's not head into this ruction with an unpicked bone betwixt us,
+John," he began gently. "Maybe I said too much, back yonder at the foot
+of the hill."
+
+"No; you didn't say too much," was the low-toned reply. And then:
+"Billy, I've had a strange experience this summer; the strangest a man
+ever lived through, I believe. A few months ago I was jerked out of my
+place in life and set down in another place where practically everything
+I had learned as a boy and man had to be forgotten. It was as if my life
+had been swept clean of everything that I knew how to use--like a house
+gutted of its well-worn and familiar furniture, and handed back to its
+tenant to be refitted with whatever could be found and made to serve. I
+don't know that I'm making it understandable to you, but----"
+
+"Yes, you are," broke in the man at the wheel. "I've had to turn two or
+three little double somersaults myself in the years that are gone."
+
+"They used to call me 'Monty-Boy,' back there in Lawrenceville, and I
+fitted the name," Smith went on. "I was neither better nor worse than
+thousands of other home-bred young fellows just like me, nor different
+from them in any essential way. I had my little tin-basin round of work
+and play, and I lived in it. I've spent half an hour, many a time, in a
+shop picking out the exactly right shade in a tie to wear with the socks
+that I had, perhaps, spent another half-hour in selecting."
+
+"I'm getting you," said Starbuck, not without friendly sympathy. "Go
+on."
+
+"Then, suddenly, as I have said, the house was looted. And, quite as
+suddenly, it grew and expanded and took on added rooms and spaces that
+I'd never dreamed of. I've had to fill it up as best I could, Billy: I
+couldn't put back any of the old things; they were so little and trivial
+and childish. And some of the things I've been putting in are fearfully
+raw and crude. I've just had to do the best I could--with an empty
+house. I found that I had a body that could stand man-sized hardship,
+and a kind of savage nerve that could give and take punishment, and a
+soul that could drive both body and nerve to the limit. Also, I've found
+out what it means to love a woman."
+
+Starbuck checked the car's speed a little more to keep it well in the
+rear of the ambling cavalcade.
+
+"That's your one best bet, John," he said soberly.
+
+"It is. I've cleaned out another room since you called me down back
+yonder in the Little Creek road, Starbuck. I can't trust my own leadings
+any more; they are altogether too primitive and brutal; so I'm going to
+take hers. She'd send me into this fight that is just ahead of us, and
+all the other fights that are coming, with a heart big enough to take in
+the whole world. She said I'd understand, some day; that I'd know that
+the only great man is one who is too big to be little; who can fight
+without hating; who can die to make good, if that is the only way that
+offers."
+
+"That's Corry Baldwin, every day in the week, John. They don't make 'em
+any finer than she is," was Starbuck's comment. And then: "I'm beginning
+to kick myself for not letting you go and have one more round-up with
+her. She's doing you good, right along."
+
+"You didn't stop me," Smith affirmed; "you merely gave me a chance to
+stop myself. It's all over now, Billy, and my little race is about run.
+But whatever happens to me, either this night, or beyond it, I shall be
+a free man. You can't put handcuffs on a soul and send it to prison, you
+know. That is what Corona was trying to make me understand; and I
+couldn't--or wouldn't."
+
+Harding had stopped to let the auto come up. Over a low hill just ahead
+the pole-bracketed lights at the dam were starring themselves against
+the sky, and the group of horsemen was halting at the head of the
+railroad trestle which marked the location of the north side unloading
+station.
+
+From the halt at the trestle head, Harding sent two of his men forward
+to spy out the ground. Returning speedily, these two men reported that
+there were no guards on the north bank of the river, and that the
+stagings, which still remained in place on the down-stream face of the
+dam, were also unguarded. Thereupon Harding made his dispositions. Half
+of the posse was to go up the northern bank, dismounted, and rush the
+camp by way of the stagings. The remaining half, also on foot, was to
+cross at once on the railroad trestle, and to make its approach by way
+of the wagon road skirting the mesa foot. At an agreed-upon signal, the
+two detachments were to close in upon the company buildings in the
+construction camp, trusting to the surprise and the attack from opposite
+directions to overcome any disparity in numbers.
+
+At Smith's urgings, Starbuck went with the party which crossed by way of
+the railroad trestle, Smith himself accompanying the sheriff's
+detachment. With the horses left behind under guard at the trestle head,
+the up-river approach was made by both parties simultaneously, though in
+the darkness, and with the breadth of the river intervening, neither
+could see the movements of the other. Smith kept his place beside
+Harding, and to the sheriff's query he answered that he was unarmed.
+
+"You've got a nerve," was all the comment Harding made, and at that they
+topped the slight elevation and came among the stone debris in the
+north-side quarries.
+
+From the quarry cutting the view struck out by the camp mastheads was
+unobstructed. The dam and the uncompleted power-house, still figuring to
+the eye as skeleton masses of form timbering, lay just below them, and
+on the hither side the flooding torrent thundered through the spillway
+gates, which had been opened to their fullest capacity. Between the
+quarry and the northern dam-head ran the smooth concreted channel of the
+main ditch canal, with the water in the reservoir lake still lapping
+several feet below the level of its entrance to give assurance that,
+until the spillways should be closed, the charter-saving stream would
+never pour through the canal.
+
+On the opposite side of the river the dam-head and the camp street were
+deserted, but there were lights in the commissary, in the office shack,
+and in Blue Pete Simms's canteen doggery. From the latter quarter sounds
+of revelry rose above the spillway thunderings, and now and again a
+drunken figure lurched through the open door to make its way uncertainly
+toward the rank of bunk-houses.
+
+Harding was staring into the farther nimbus of the electric rays, trying
+to pick up some sign of the other half of his posse, when Smith made a
+suggestion.
+
+"Both of your parties will have the workmen's bunk-houses in range, Mr.
+Harding, and we mustn't forget that Colonel Baldwin and Williams are
+prisoners in the timekeeper's shack. If the guns have to be used----"
+
+"There won't be any wild shooting, of the kind you're thinking of,"
+returned the sheriff grimly. "There ain't a single man in this posse
+that can't hit what he aims at, nine times out o' ten. But here's hopin'
+we can gather 'em in without the guns. If they ain't lookin' for us----"
+
+The interruption was the whining song of a jacketed bullet passing
+overhead, followed by the crack of a rifle. "Down, boys!" said the
+sheriff softly, setting the example by sliding into the ready-made
+trench afforded by the dry ditch of the outlet canal; and as he said it
+a sharp fusillade broke out, with fire spurtings from the commissary
+building and others from the mesa beyond to show that the surprise was
+balked in both directions.
+
+"They must have had scouts out," was Smith's word to the sheriff, who
+was cautiously reconnoitring the newly developed situation from the
+shelter of the canal trench. "They are evidently ready for us, and that
+knocks your plan in the head. Your men can't cross these stagings under
+fire."
+
+"Your 'wops' are all right, anyway," said Harding. "They're pouring out
+of the bunk-houses and that saloon over there and taking to the hills
+like a flock o' scared chickens." Then to his men: "Scatter out, boys,
+and get the range on that commissary shed. That's where most of the
+rustlers are _cached_."
+
+Two days earlier, two hours earlier, perhaps, Smith would have begged a
+weapon and flung himself into the fray with blood lust blinding him to
+everything save the battle demands of the moment. But now the final
+mile-stone in the long road of his metamorphosis had been passed and
+the darksome valley of elemental passions was left behind.
+
+"Hold up a minute, for God's sake!" he pleaded hastily. "We've got to
+give them a show, Harding! The chances are that every man in that
+commissary believes that M'Graw has the law on his side--and we are not
+sure that he hasn't. Anyway, they don't know that they are trying to
+stand off a sheriff's posse!"
+
+Harding's chuckle was sardonic. "You mean that we'd ought to go over
+yonder and read the riot act to 'em first? That might do back in the
+country where you came from. But the man that can get into that camp
+over there with the serving papers now 'd have to be armor-plated, I
+reckon."
+
+"Just the same, we've got to give them their chance!" Smith insisted
+doggedly. "We can't stand for any unnecessary bloodshed--_I_ won't stand
+for it!"
+
+Harding shrugged his heavy shoulders. "One round into that sheet-iron
+commissary shack'll bring 'em to time--and nothing else will. I hain't
+got any men to throw away on the dew-dabs and furbelows."
+
+Smith sprang up and held out his hand.
+
+"You have at least one man that you can spare, Mr. Harding," he
+snapped. "Give me those papers. I'll go over and serve them."
+
+At this the big sheriff promptly lost his temper.
+
+"You blamed fool!" he burst out. "You'd be dog-meat before you could get
+ten feet away from this ditch!"
+
+"Never mind: give me those papers. I'm not going to stand by quietly and
+see a lot of men shot down on the chance of a misunderstanding!"
+
+"Take 'em, then!" rasped Harding, meaning nothing more than the calling
+of a foolish theorist's bluff.
+
+Smith caught at the warrants, and before anybody could stop him he was
+down upon the stagings, swinging himself from bent to bent through a
+storm of bullets coming, not from the commissary, but from the saloon
+shack on the opposite bank--a whistling shower of lead that made every
+man in the sheriff's party duck to cover.
+
+How the volunteer process-server ever lived to get across the bridge of
+death no man might know. Thrice in the half-minute dash he was hit; yet
+there was life enough left to carry him stumbling across the last of the
+staging bents; to send him reeling up the runway at the end and across
+the working yard to the door of the commissary, waving the folded
+papers like an inadequate flag of truce as he fell on the door-step.
+
+After that, all things were curiously hazy and undefined for him; blind
+clamor coming and going as the noise of a train to a dozing traveller
+when the car doors are opened and closed. There was the tumult of a
+fierce battle being waged over him; a deafening rifle fire and the
+_spat-spat_ of bullets puncturing the sheet-iron walls of the
+commissary. In the midst of it he lost his hold upon the realities, and
+when he got it again the warlike clamor was stilled and Starbuck was
+kneeling beside him, trying, apparently, to deprive him of his clothes
+with the reckless slashings of a knife.
+
+Protesting feebly and trying to rise, he saw the working yard filled
+with armed men and the returning throng of laborers; saw Colonel Baldwin
+and Williams talking excitedly to the sheriff; then he caught the eye of
+the engineer and beckoned eagerly with his one available hand.
+
+"Hold still, until I can find out how dead you are!" gritted the
+rough-and-ready surgeon who was plying the clothes-ripping knife. But
+when Williams came and bent down to listen, Smith found a voice, shrill
+and strident and so little like his own that he scarcely recognized it.
+
+"Call 'em out--call the men out and start the gate machinery!" he panted
+in the queer, whistling voice which was, and was not, his own.
+"Possess--possession is nine points of the law--that's what Judge Warner
+said: the spillways, Bartley--shut 'em quick!"
+
+"The men are on the job and the machinery is starting right now," said
+Williams gently. "Don't you hear it?" And then to Starbuck: "For
+Heaven's sake, do something for him, Billy--anything to keep him with us
+until a doctor can get here!"
+
+Smith felt himself smiling foolishly.
+
+"I don't need any doctor, Bartley; what I need is a new ego: then I'd
+stand some sha--some chance of finding--" he looked up appealingly at
+Starbuck--"what is it that I'd stand some chance of finding, Billy? I--I
+can't seem to remember."
+
+Williams turned his face away and Starbuck tightened his benumbing grip
+upon the severed artery in the bared arm from which he had cut the
+sleeve. Smith seemed to be going off again, but he suddenly opened his
+eyes and pointed frantically with a finger of the one serviceable hand.
+"Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield, and he's going
+to dy-dynamite the dam!"
+
+Clinging to consciousness with a grip that not even the blood loss could
+break, Smith saw Williams spring to his feet and give the alarm; saw
+three or four of the sheriff's men drop their weapons and hurl
+themselves upon another man who was trying to make his way unnoticed to
+the stagings with a box of dynamite on his shoulder. Then he felt the
+foolish smile coming again when he looked up at Starbuck.
+
+"Don't let them hurt him, Billy; him nor Simms nor Lanterby, nor that
+other one--the short-hand man--I--I can't remember his name. They're
+just poor tools; and we've got to--to fight without hating, and--and--"
+foolish witlessness was enveloping him again like a clinging garment and
+he made a masterful effort to throw it off. "Tell the little girl--tell
+her--you know what to tell her, Billy; about what I tried to do. Harding
+said I'd get killed, but I remembered what she said, and I didn't care.
+Tell her I said that that one minute was worth living for--worth all it
+cost."
+
+The raucous blast of a freak auto horn ripped into the growling murmur
+of the gate machinery, and a dust-covered car pulled up in front of the
+commissary. Out of it sprang first the doctor with his instrument bag,
+and, closely following him, two plain-clothes men and a Brewster
+police captain in uniform. Smith looked up and understood.
+
+[Illustration: "Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield,
+and he's going to dy-dynamite the dam!"]
+
+"They're just--a little--too late, Billy, don't you think?" he quavered
+weakly. "I guess--I guess I've fooled them, after all." And therewith he
+closed his eyes wearily upon all his troubles and triumphings.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+In Sunrise Gulch
+
+
+William Starbuck drew the surgeon aside after the first aid had been
+rendered, and Smith, still unconscious, had been carried from the
+makeshift operating-table in the commissary to Williams's cot in the
+office shack.
+
+"How about it, Doc?" asked the mine owner bluntly.
+
+The surgeon shook his head doubtfully.
+
+"I can't say. The arm and the shoulder won't kill him, but that one in
+the lung is pretty bad; and he has lost a lot of blood."
+
+"Still, he may pull through?"
+
+"He may--with good care and nursing. But if you want my honest opinion,
+I'm afraid he won't make it. He'll be rather lucky if he doesn't make
+it, won't he?"
+
+Starbuck remembered that the doctor had come out in the auto with the
+police captain and the two plain-clothes men.
+
+"Hackerman has been talking?" he queried.
+
+The surgeon nodded. "He told me on the way out that Smith was a
+fugitive from justice; that he'd be likely to get ten years or more when
+they took him back East. If I were in Smith's place, I'd rather pass out
+with a bullet in my lung. Wouldn't you?"
+
+Starbuck was frowning sourly. "Suppose you make it a case of suspended
+judgment, Doc," he suggested. "The few of us here who know anything
+about it are giving John the benefit of the doubt. I've got a few
+thousand dollars of my own money that says he isn't guilty; and if he
+makes a live of it, they'll have to show me, and half a dozen more of
+us, before they can send him over the road."
+
+"He knew they were after him?"
+
+"Sure thing; and he had all the chance he needed to make his get-away.
+He wouldn't take it; thought he owed a duty to the High Line
+stockholders. He's a man to tie to, Doc. He was shot while he was trying
+to get between and stop the war and keep others from getting killed."
+
+"It's a pity," said the surgeon, glancing across at the police captain
+to whom Colonel Baldwin was appealing. "They'll put him in the hospital
+cell at the jail, and that will cost him whatever slender chance he
+might otherwise have to pull through."
+
+Starbuck looked up quickly. "Tell 'em he can't be moved, Doc Dan," he
+urged suddenly. And then: "You're Dick Maxwell's family physician, and
+Colonel Dexter's, and mine. Surely you can do that much for us?"
+
+"I can, and I will," said the surgeon promptly, and then he went to join
+Baldwin and the police captain, who were still arguing. What he said was
+brief and conclusive; and a little later, when the autos summoned from
+town by Sheriff Harding came for their lading of prisoners, Smith was
+left behind, with two of M'Graw's men who were also past moving. In the
+general clearing of the field Starbuck and Williams stayed behind to
+care for the wounded, and one of the plain-clothes men remained to stand
+guard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days after the wholesale arrest at the dam, Brewster gossip had
+fairly outworn itself telling and retelling the story of how the High
+Line charter had been saved; of how Crawford Stanton's bold ruse of
+hiring an ex-train-robber to impersonate a federal-court officer had
+fallen through, leaving Stanton and his confederates, ruthlessly
+abandoned by their unnamed principals, languishing bailless in jail; of
+how Smith, the hero of all these occasions, was still lying at the
+point of death in the office shack at the construction camp, and David
+Kinzie, once more in keen pursuit of the loaves and fishes, was combing
+the market for odd shares of the stock which was now climbing swiftly
+out of reach. But at this climax of exhaustion--or satiety--came a
+distinctly new set of thrills, more titillating, if possible, than all
+the others combined.
+
+It was on the morning of the third day that the _Herald_ announced the
+return of Mr. Josiah Richlander from the Topaz; and in the marriage
+notices of the same issue the breakfast-table readers of the newspapers
+learned that the multimillionaire's daughter had been privately married
+the previous evening to Mr. Tucker Jibbey. Two mining speculators, who
+had already made Mr. Jibbey's acquaintance, were chuckling over the news
+in the Hophra House grill when a third late breakfaster, a man who had
+been sharing Stanton's office space as a broker in improved ranch lands,
+came in to join them.
+
+"What's the joke?" inquired the newcomer; and when he was shown the
+marriage item he nodded gravely. "That's all right; but the _Herald_ man
+didn't get the full flavor of it. It was a sort of runaway match, it
+seems; the fond parent wasn't invited or consulted. The boys in the
+lobby tell me that the old man had a fit when he came in this morning
+and a _Herald_ reporter showed him that notice and asked for more dope
+on the subject."
+
+"I don't see that the fond parent has any kick coming," said the one who
+had sold Jibbey a promising prospect hole on Topaz Mountain two days
+earlier. "The young fellow's got all kinds of money."
+
+"I know," the land broker put in. "But they're whispering it around that
+Mr. Richlander had other plans for his daughter. They also say that
+Jibbey wouldn't stay to face the music; that he left on the midnight
+train last night a few hours after the wedding, so as not to be among
+those present when the old man should blow in."
+
+"What?"--in a chorus of two--"left his wife?"
+
+"That's what they say. But that's only one of the new and startling
+things that isn't in the morning papers. Have you heard about Smith?--or
+haven't you been up long enough yet?"
+
+"I heard yesterday that he was beginning to mend," replied the
+breakfaster on the left; the one who had ordered bacon and eggs, with
+the bacon cooked to a cinder.
+
+"You're out of date," this from the dealer in ranches. "You know the
+story that was going around about his being an escaped convict, or
+something of that sort? It gets its 'local color' this morning. There's
+a sheriff here from back East somewhere--came in on the early train;
+name's Macauley, and he's got the requisition papers. But Smith's fooled
+him good and plenty."
+
+Again the chorus united in an eager query.
+
+"How?"
+
+"He died last night--a little past midnight. They say they're going to
+bury him out at the dam--on the job that he pulled through and stood on
+its feet. One of Williams's quarrymen drifted in with the story just a
+little while ago. I'm here to bet you even money that the whole town
+goes to the funeral."
+
+"Great gosh!" said the man who was crunching the burnt bacon. "Say,
+that's tough, Bixby! I don't care what he'd run away from back East; he
+was a man, right. Harding has been telling everybody how Smith wouldn't
+let the posse open fire on that gang of hold-ups last Friday night; how
+he chased across on the dam stagings alone and unarmed to try to serve
+the warrants on 'em and make 'em stop firing. It was glorious, but it
+wasn't war."
+
+To this the other mining man added a hard word. "Dead," he gritted; "and
+only a few hours earlier the girl had taken snap judgment on him and
+married somebody else! That's the woman of it!"
+
+"Oh, hold on, Stryker," the ranch broker protested. "Don't you get too
+fierce about that. There are two strings to that bow and the longest and
+sorriest one runs out to Colonel Baldwin's place on Little Creek, I'm
+thinking. The Richlander business was only an incident. Stanton told me
+that much."
+
+As the event proved, the seller of ranch lands would have lost his bet
+on the funeral attendance. For some unknown reason the notice of Smith's
+death did not appear in the afternoon papers, and only a few people went
+out in autos to see the coffin lowered by Williams's workmen into a
+grave on the mesa behind the construction camp; a grave among others
+where the victims of an early industrial accident at the dam had been
+buried. Those who went out from town came back rather scandalized. There
+had been a most hard-hearted lack of the common formalities, they said;
+a cheap coffin, no minister, no mourners, not even the poor fellow's
+business associates in the company he had fought so hard to save from
+defeat and extinction. It was a shame!
+
+With this report passing from lip to lip in Brewster, another bit of
+gossip to the effect that Starbuck and Stillings had gone East with the
+disappointed sheriff, "to clear Smith's memory," as the street-talk had
+it, called forth no little comment derogatory. As it chanced, the two
+mining speculators and Bixby, the ranch seller, met again in the Hophra
+House cafe at the dinner-table on the evening of the funeral day, and
+Stryker, the captious member of the trio, was loud in his criticisms of
+the High Line people.
+
+"Yes!" he railed; "a couple of 'em will go on a junketing trip East to
+'clear his memory,' after they've let their 'wops' at the dam bury him
+like a yellow dog! I thought better than that of Billy Starbuck, and a
+whole lot better of Colonel Dexter. And this Richlander woman; they say
+she'd known him ever since he and she were school kids together; she
+went down and took the train with her father just about the time they
+were planting the poor devil among the sagebrush roots up there on that
+bald mesa!"
+
+"I'm disappointed, too," confessed the dealer in improved ranch lands.
+"I certainly thought that if nobody else went, the little girl from the
+Baldwin place would be out there to tell him good-by. But she wasn't."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by without
+incident other than the indictment by the grand jury of Crawford
+Stanton, Barney M'Graw, and a number of others on a charge of
+conspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of the grand
+_battue_ in which Sheriff Harding had figured as the master of the hunt,
+had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery in
+the lately finished power-house.
+
+Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni a
+wandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike in
+Sunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty years
+earlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely,
+the tale-bringer confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike;
+but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading to
+the old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he had
+seen smoke arising.
+
+As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was not at fault.
+On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, clad
+in serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy Stetson and buff top-boots
+in good countenance by riding astride in a man's saddle, was pushing her
+mount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little rise
+the abandoned camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravel
+sprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and its
+crumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitable
+entirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch.
+
+At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and shaded her eyes with
+a gauntleted hand. On a bench beside the door of the single tenanted
+cabin a man was sitting, and she saw him stand to answer her hand-wave.
+A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in a
+sling and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands,
+was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, but
+she pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing at
+him out of a pair of slate-gray eyes and saying: "How often have I got
+to tell you that you simply _can't_ help a woman out of a man's saddle?"
+
+The man smiled at that.
+
+"It's automatic," he returned. "I shall never get over wanting to help
+you, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I can go?"
+
+Flinging the bridle-reins over the head of the wiry little cow-pony
+which was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creek
+valley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sit
+down.
+
+"You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?" she
+teased, sitting beside him. "Every time I come it's always the same
+thing: 'When can I go?' You're not well yet."
+
+"I'm well enough to do what I've got to do, Corona; and until it's
+done.... Besides, there is Jibbey."
+
+"Where is Mr. Jibbey this morning?"
+
+"He has gone up the creek, fishing. I made him go. If I didn't take a
+club to him now and then he'd hang over me all the time. There never was
+another man like him, Corona. And at home we used to call him 'the black
+sheep' and 'the failure,' and cross the street to dodge him when he'd
+been drinking too much!"
+
+"He says you've made a man of him; that you saved his life when you had
+every reason not to. You never told me that, John."
+
+"No; I didn't mean to tell any one. But to think of his coming out here
+to nurse me, leaving Verda on the very night he married her! A brother
+of my own blood wouldn't have done it."
+
+The young woman was looking up with a shrewd little smile. "Maybe the
+blood brother would do even that, if you had just made it possible for
+him to marry the girl he'd set his heart on, John."
+
+"Piffle!" growled the man. And then: "Hasn't the time come when you can
+tell me a little more about what happened to me after the doctor put me
+to sleep that night at the dam?"
+
+"Yes. The only reason you haven't been told was because we didn't want
+you to worry; we wanted you to have a chance to get well and strong
+again."
+
+The man's eyes filled suddenly, and he took no shame. He was still shaky
+enough in nerve and muscle to excuse it. "Nobody ever had such friends,
+Corona," he said. "You all knew I'd have to go back to Lawrenceville and
+fight it out, and you didn't want me to go handicapped and half-dead.
+But how did they come to let you take me away? I've known Macauley ever
+since I was in knickers. He is not the man to take any chances."
+
+The young woman's laugh was soundless. "Mr. Macauley wasn't asked. He
+thinks you are dead," she said.
+
+"What!"
+
+"It's so. You were not the only one wounded in the fight at the dam.
+There were two others--two of M'Graw's men. Three days later, just as
+Colonel-daddy and Billy Starbuck were getting ready to steal you away,
+one of the others died. In some way the report got out that you were the
+one who died, and that made everything quite easy. The report has never
+been contradicted, and when Mr. Macauley reached Brewster the police
+people told him that he was too late."
+
+"Good heavens! Does everybody in Brewster think I'm dead?"
+
+"Nearly everybody. But you needn't look so horrified. You're not dead,
+you know; and there were no obituaries in the newspapers, or anything
+like that."
+
+The man got upon his feet rather unsteadily.
+
+"That's the limit," he said definitively. "I'm a man now, Corona; too
+much of a man, I hope, to hide behind another man's grave. I'm going
+back to Brewster, _to-day_!"
+
+The young woman made a quaint little grimace at him. "How are you going
+to get there?" she asked. "It's twenty miles, and the walking is awfully
+bad--in spots."
+
+"But I _must_ go. Can't you see what everybody will say of me?--that I
+was too cowardly to face the music when my time came? Nobody will
+believe that I wasn't a consenting party to this hide-away!"
+
+"Sit down," she commanded calmly; and when he obeyed: "From day to day,
+since I began coming out here, John, I've been trying to rediscover the
+man whom I met just once, one evening over a year ago, at Cousin Adda's
+house in Guthrieville: I can't find him--he's gone."
+
+"_Corona!_" he said. "Then you recognized me?"
+
+"Not at first. But after a while little things began to come back; and
+what you told me--about Miss Richlander, you know, and the hint you gave
+me of your trouble--did the rest."
+
+"Then you knew--or you thought--I was a criminal?"
+
+She nodded, and her gaze was resting upon the near-by gravel heaps.
+"Cousin Adda wrote me. But that made no difference. I didn't know
+whether you had done the things they said you had, or not. What I did
+know was that you had broken your shackles in some way and were trying
+to get free. You were, weren't you?"
+
+"I suppose so; in some blind fashion. But it is you who have set me
+free, Corona. It began that night in Guthrieville when I stole one of
+your gloves; it wasn't anything you said; it was what you so evidently
+believed and lived. And out here: I was simply a raw savage when you
+first saw me. I had tumbled headlong into the abyss of the new and the
+elemental, and if I am trying to scramble out now on the side of honor
+and clean manhood, it is chiefly because you have shown me the way."
+
+"When did I ever, John?"--with an up-glance of the gray eyes that was
+almost wistful.
+
+"Always; and with a wisdom that makes me almost afraid of you. For
+example, there was the night when I was fairly on the edge of letting
+Jibbey stay in the mine and go mad if he wanted to: you lashed me with
+the one word that made me save his life instead of taking it. How did
+you know that was the one word to say?"
+
+"How do we know anything?" she inquired softly. "The moment brings its
+own inspiration. It broke my heart to see what you could be, and to
+think that you might not be it, after all. But I came out here this
+morning to talk about something else. What are you going to do when you
+are able to leave Sunrise Gulch?"
+
+"The one straightforward thing there is for me to do. I shall go back
+to Lawrenceville and take my medicine."
+
+"And after that?"
+
+"That is for you to say, Corona. Would you marry a convict?"
+
+"You are not guilty."
+
+"That is neither here nor there. They will probably send me to prison,
+just the same, and the stigma will be mine to wear for the remainder of
+my life. I can wear it now, thank God! But to pass it on to you--and to
+your children, Corona ... if I could get my own consent to that, you
+couldn't get yours."
+
+"Yes, I could, John; I got it the first time Colonel-daddy brought me
+out here and let me see you. You were out of your head, and you thought
+you were talking to Billy Starbuck--in the automobile on the night when
+you were going with him to the fight at the dam. It made me go down on
+my two knees, John, and kiss your poor, hot hands."
+
+He slipped his one good arm around her and drew her close.
+
+"Now I can go back like a man and fight it through to the end," he
+exulted soberly. "Jibbey will take me; I know he is wearing himself out
+trying to make me believe that he can wait, and that Verda understands,
+though he won't admit it. And when it is all over, when they have done
+their worst to me----"
+
+With a quick little twist she broke away from the encircling arm.
+
+"John, dear," she said, and her voice was trembling between a laugh and
+a sob, "I'm the wickedest, _wickedest_ woman that ever lived and
+breathed--and the happiest! I knew what you would do, but I couldn't
+resist the temptation to make you say it. Listen: this morning
+Colonel-daddy got a night-letter from Billy Starbuck. You have been
+wondering why Billy never came out here to see you--it was because he
+and Mr. Stillings have been in Lawrenceville, trying to clear you. They
+are there now, and the wire says that Watrous Dunham has been arrested
+and that he has broken down and confessed. You are a free man, John;
+you----"
+
+The grass-cropping pony had widened its circle by a full yard, and the
+westward-pointing shadows of the firs were growing shorter and more
+clearly defined as the August sun swung higher over the summits of the
+eastern Timanyonis. For the two on the house bench, time, having all its
+interspaces filled with beatific silences, had no measure that was worth
+recording. In one of the more coherent intervals it was the man who
+said:
+
+"Some things in this world are very wonderful, Corona. We call them
+happenings, and try to account for them as we may by the laws of chance.
+Was it chance that threw us together at your cousin's house in
+Guthrieville a year ago last June?"
+
+She laughed happily. "I suppose it was--though I'd like to be romantic
+enough to believe that it wasn't."
+
+"Debritt would say that it was the Absolute Ego," he said, half
+musingly.
+
+"And who is Mr. Debritt?"
+
+"He is the man I dined with on my last evening in Lawrenceville. He had
+been joking me about my various little smugnesses--good job, good
+clothes, easy life, and all that, and he wound up by warning me to watch
+out for the Absolute Ego."
+
+"What is the Absolute Ego?" she asked dutifully.
+
+John Montague Smith, with his curling yellow beard three weeks
+untrimmed, with his clothes dressing the part of a neglected camper, and
+with a steel-jacketed bullet trying to encyst itself under his right
+shoulder-blade, grinned exultantly.
+
+"Debritt didn't know, himself; but I know now: it's the primitive
+man-soul; the 'I' that is able to refuse to be bound down and tied by
+environment or habit or petty conventions, or any of the things we
+misname 'limitations.' It's asleep in most of us; it was asleep in me.
+You made it sit up and rub its eyes for a minute or two that evening in
+Guthrieville, but it dozed off again, and there had to be an earthquake
+at the last to shake it alive. Do you know the first thing it did when
+it took hold and began to drive?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Here is where the law of chances falls to pieces, Corona. Without
+telling me anything about it, this newly emancipated man-soul of mine
+made a bee-line for the only Absolute Ego woman it had ever known. And
+it found her."
+
+Again the young woman laughed happily. "If you are going to call me
+names, Ego-man, you'll have to make it up to me some other way," she
+said.
+
+Whereupon, the moment being strictly elemental and sacred to
+demonstrations of the absolute, he did.
+
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+    PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+    The Real Man. Illus.
+
+    The City of Numbered Days. Illus.
+
+    The Honorable Senator Sage-brush.
+
+    Scientific Sprague. Illus.
+
+    The Price.
+
+    The Taming of Red Butte Western.
+
+    The King of Arcadia. Illus.
+
+    A Romance In Transit.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Real Man, by Francis Lynde
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL MAN ***
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