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 theChicago Tribunesome 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.
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.
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 dramaticcoupin 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 didnotknow 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.
"Ido. 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 whatshe'dsay? 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 salaryandcommission, 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—andbang!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 café 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.
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, Idowant 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—Iknow," 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 détour 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.
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,Ishouldn'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."
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 analias."
"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.