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.
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 "débutantes' 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 ofthés dansantsand 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 mannersper 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 wearthem."
"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."
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. "Wedon'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!"
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."
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, Iwilltell you," she retorted. "Mr. Williams thought your name was analias; and I'm not sure that he doesn't still think so."
"The Smiths never have to havealiases. 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?