"Done and well covered up?"
"Yep. It'll be charged up to the high water—maybe."
"Is the river still rising?"
"A little bit higher every night now. That's the way it comes up. The snow on the mountain melts in the day and the run-off comes in the night."
"You can handle it by yourself, can't you?"
"Me and Boogerfield can."
"All right. Get everything ready and wait for the word from me. You didn't let Pegleg in on it, did you?"
"I had to. We'd have to work from his joint."
"That was a bad move. Simms would sell you out if anybody wanted to buy. He'd sell his best friend," frowned Stanton.
Lanterby showed the whites of his eyes and a set of broken teeth in a wolfish grin.
"Pete can't run fast enough to sell me out," he boasted. "I'll have somethin' in my clothes that'll run faster than he can, with that wooden leg o' his."
Stanton nodded and poured himself another drink—a larger one than the first; and then thought better of it and spilled the liquor on the floor.
"That will do for the dynamite part of it. It's a last resort, of course. We don't want to have to rebuild the dam, and I have one more string that I want to pull first. This man Smith: I've got a pointer on him, at last. Is Boogerfield still feeling sore about the man-handling Smith gave him?"
"You bet your life he is."
"Good. Keep him stirred up along that line." Stanton got up and looked thirstily at the bottle, but let it alone. "That's all for to-night. Stay out of sight as much as you can, and go easy on the whiskey. I may not come here again. If I don't, I'll send you one of two words. 'Williams' will mean that you're to strike for the dam. 'Jake' will mean that you are to get Boogerfield fighting drunk and send him after Smith. Whichever way it comes out, you'll find the money where I've said it will be, and you and Boogerfield had better fade away—and take Pegleg with you, if you can."
The hired car was still waiting when Stanton went out through the bar-room and gave the driver his return orders. And, because the night was dark, neither of the two at the car saw the man in the soft Stetson straighten himself up from his crouching place under the back-room window and vanish silently in the gloom.
Smith had seen nothing of Miss Richlander during the day of the Stanton plottings, partly because there was a forenoon meeting of the High Line stockholders called for the purpose of electing him secretary and treasurer in fact of the company, and partly because the major portion of the afternoon was spent in conference with Williams at the dam.
The work of construction had now reached its most critical stage, and Williams was driving it strenuously. Each twenty-four hours, with the recurring night rise from the melting snows, the torrenting river reached a higher water-mark, and three times in as many weeks the engineer had changed from a quick-setting cement to a still quicker, time-saving and a swift piling-up of the great dike wall being now the prime necessities.
Returning from the dam site quite late in the evening, Smith spent a hard-working hour or more at his desk in the Kinzie Building offices; and it was here that Starbuck found him.
"What?" said the new secretary, looking up from his work when Starbuck's wiry figure loomed in the doorway, "I thought you were once more a family man, and had cut out the night prowling."
Starbuck jack-knifed himself comfortably in a chair.
"I was. But the little girl's run away again; gone with her sister—Maxwell's wife, you know—to Denver to get her teeth fixed; and I'm foot-loose. Been butting in a little on your game, this evening, just to be doing. How's tricks with you, now?"
"We're strictly in the fight," declared Smith enthusiastically. "We closed the deal to-day for the last half-mile of the main ditch right of way, which puts us up on the mesa slope above the Escalante Grant. If they knock us out now, they'll have to do it with dynamite."
"Yes," said the ex-cow-man, thoughtfully; "with dynamite." Then: "How is Williams getting along?"
"Fine! The water is crawling up on him a little every night, but with no accidents, he'll be able to hold the flood rise when it comes. The only thing that worries me now is the time limit."
"The time limit?" echoed Starbuck. "What's that?"
"It's the handicap we inherit from the original company. Certain State rights to the water were conveyed in the old charter, on condition that the project should be completed, or at least be far enough along to turn water into the ditches, by a given date. This time limit, which carries over from Timanyoni Ditch to Timanyoni High Line, expires next week. We're petitioning for an extension, but if we don't get it we shall still be able to back the water up so that it will flow into the lower level of ditches by next Thursday; that is, barring accidents."
"Yes; with no accidents," mused Starbuck. "Can't get shut of the 'if,' no way nor shape, can we? So that's why the Stanton people have been fighting so wolfishly for delay, is it? Wanted to make the High Line lose its charter? John, this is a wicked, wicked world, and I can sympathize with the little kiddie who said he was going out in the garden to eat worms." Then he switched abruptly. "Where did you corral all those good looks you took to the opera-house last night, John?"
Smith's laugh was strictly perfunctory.
"That was Miss Verda Richlander, an old friend of mine from back home. She is out here with her father, and the father has gone up into the Topaz country to buy him a gold brick."
"Not in the Topaz," Starbuck struck in loyally. "We don't make the bricks up there—not the phony kind. But let that go and tell me something else. A while back, when you were giving me a little song and dance about the colonel's daughter, you mentioned another woman—though not by name, if you happen to recollect. I was just wondering if this Miss Rich-people, or whatever her name is, might be the other one."
Again the new secretary laughed—this time without embarrassment. "You've called the turn, Billy. She is the other one."
"H'm; chasing you up?"
"Oh, no; it was just one of the near-miracles. She didn't know I was here, and I had no hint that she was coming."
"I didn't know," commented the reformed cowboy. "Sometimes when you think it's a cold trail, it's a warm one; and then again when you think it's warm, it fools you."
"Oh, pshaw!" scoffed the trail-maker, "you make me weary, Billy. We are merely good friends. No longer ago than last night I had the strongest possible proof of Miss Richlander's friendship."
"Did, eh? All right; it's your roast; not mine. But I'm going to pull one chestnut out of the fire for you, even if I do get my fingers burned. This Miss Rich-folks has had only one day here in Brewster, but she's used it in getting mighty chummy with the Stantons. Did you know that?"
"What!" ejaculated Smith.
"Jesso," smiled Starbuck. "She had her luncheon with 'em to-day, and for an hour or so this evening the three of 'em sat together up in the Hophra inside-veranda parlor. Does that figure as news to you?"
"It does," said Smith simply; and he added: "I don't understand it."
"Funny," remarked the ex-cow-man. "It didn't ball me up for more than a minute or two. Stanton fixed it some way—because he needed to. Tell me something, John; could this Miss Rich-garden help Stanton out in any of his little schemes, if she took a notion?"
Smith turned away and stared at the blackened square of outer darkness lying beyond the office window.
"She could, Billy—but she won't," he answered.
"You can dig up your last dollar and bet on that, can you?"
"Yes, I think I can."
"H'm; that's just what I was most afraid of."
"Don't be an ass, Billy."
"I'm trying mighty hard not to be, John, but sometimes the ears will grow on the best of us—in spite of the devil. What I mean is this: when a woman thinks enough of a man to keep his secrets, she's mighty likely to think too much of him to keep those same secrets from spreading themselves on the bill-boards when the pinch comes."
"I'm no good at conundrums," said Smith. "Put it in plain words."
"So I will," snapped Starbuck, half morosely. "Two nights ago, when you were telling me about this Miss Rich-acres, you said there was nothing to it, and I said you never could tell, when there was a woman in it. I saw you two when you came out of the Hophra dining-room together last night, and I saw the look in that girl's eyes. Do you know what I said to myself right then, John? I said: 'Oh, you little girl out at the Hillcrest ranch—good-by, you!'"
Smith's grin was half antagonistic. "Youarean ass, Billy," he asserted. "I never was in love with Verda Richlander, nor she with me."
"Speak for yourself and let it hang there, John. You can't speak for the woman—no man ever can. What I'm hoping now is that she doesn't know anything about you that Stanton could make use of."
Again the High Line's new secretary turned to stare at the black backgrounded window.
"You mean that she might hear of—of Miss Corona?" he suggested.
"You've roped it down, at last," said the friendly enemy. "Stanton'll tell her—he'll tell her anything and everything that might make her turn loose any little bit of information she may have about you. As I said a minute ago, I'm hoping she hasn't got anything on you, John."
Smith was still facing the window when he replied. "I'm sorry to have to disappoint you, Starbuck. What Miss Richlander could do to me, if she chooses, would be good and plenty."
The ex-cowboy mine owner drew a long breath and felt for his tobacco-sack and rice-paper.
"All of which opens up more talk trails," he said thoughtfully. "Since you wouldn't try to take care of yourself, and since your neck happens to be the most valuable asset Timanyoni High Line has, just at present, I've been butting in, as I told you. Listen to my tale of woe, if you haven't anything better to do. Besides the Miss Rich-ranches episode there are a couple of others. Want to hear about 'em?"
Smith nodded.
"All right. A little while past dinner this evening, Stanton had a hurry call to meet the 'Nevada Flyer.' Tailed onto the train there was a private luxury car, and in the private car sat a gentleman whose face you've seen plenty of times in the political cartoons, usually with cuss-words under it. He is one of Stanton's bosses; and Stanton was in for a wigging—and got it. I couldn't hear, but I could see—through the car window. He had Stanton standing on one foot before the train pulled out and let Crawford make his get-away. You guess, and I'll guess, and we'll both say it was about this Escalante snap which is aiming to be known as the Escalante fizzle. Ain't it the truth?"
Again Smith nodded, and said: "Go on."
"After Number Five had gone, Stanton broke for his auto-cab, looking like he could bite a nail in two. I happened to hear the order he gave the shover, and I had my cayuse hitched over at Bob Sharkey's joint. Naturally, I ambled along after Crawford, and while I didn't beat him to it, I got there soon enough. It was out at Jeff Barton's road-house on the Topaz trail, and Stanton was shut up in the back room with a sort of tin-horn 'bad man' named Lanterby."
"You listened?" said Smith, still without eagerness.
"Right you are. And they fooled me. Two schemes were on tap; one pointing at Williams and the dam, and the other at you. These were both 'last resorts'; Stanton said he had one more string to pull first. If that broke—well, I've said it half a dozen times already, John: you'll either have to hire a body-guard or go heeled. I'm telling you right here and now, that bunch is going to get you, even if it costs money!"
"You say Stanton said he had one more string to pull: he didn't give it a name, did he?"
"No, but I've got a notion of my own," was the ready answer. "He's trying to get next to you through the women, with this Miss Rich-pasture for his can-opener. But when everything else fails, he is to send a password to Lanterby, one of two passwords. 'Williams' means dynamite and the dam: 'Jake' means the removal from the map of a fellow named Smith. Nice prospect, isn't it?"
Smith was jabbing his paper-knife absently into the desk-blotter. "And yet we go on calling this a civilized country!" he said meditatively. Then with a sudden change of front: "I'm in this fight to stay until I win out or die out, Billy; you know that. As I have said, Miss Verda can kill me off if she chooses to; but she won't choose to. Now let's get to work. It's pretty late to rout a justice of the peace out of bed to issue a warrant for us, but we'll do it. Then we'll go after Lanterby and make him turn state's evidence. Come on; let's get busy."
But Starbuck, reaching softly for a chair-righting handhold upon Smith's desk, made no reply. Instead, he snapped his lithe body out of the chair and launched it in a sudden tiger-spring at the door. To Smith's astonishment the door, which should have been latched, came in at Starbuck's wrenching jerk of the knob, bringing with it, hatless, and with the breath startled out of him, the new stenographer, Shaw.
"There's your state's evidence," said Starbuck grimly, pushing the half-dazed door-listener into a chair. "Just put the auger a couple of inches into this fellow and see what you can find."
Measured by any standard of human discomfort, Richard Shaw had an exceedingly bad quarter of an hour to worry through when Smith and Starbuck applied the thumbscrews and sought by every means known to modern inquisitorial methods to force a confession out of him.
Caring nothing for loyalty to the man who was paying him, Shaw had, nevertheless, a highly developed anxiety for his own welfare; and knowing the dangerous ground upon which he stood, he evaded and shuffled and prevaricated under the charges and questionings until it became apparent to both of his inquisitors that nothing short of bribery or physical torture would get the truth out of him. Smith was not willing to offer the bribe, and since the literal thumbscrews were out of the question, Shaw was locked into one of the vacant rooms across the corridor until his captors could determine what was to be done with him.
"That is one time when I fired and missed the whole side of the barn," Starbuck admitted, when Shaw had been remanded to the makeshift cell across the hall. "I know that fellow is on Stanton's pay-roll; and it's reasonably certain that he got his job with you so that he could keep cases on you. But we can't prove anything that we say, so long as he refuses to talk."
"No," Smith agreed. "I can discharge him, and that's about all that can be done with him. We can't even tax him with listening. You heard what he said—that he saw the light up here from the street, and came up to see if I didn't need him."
"He is a pretty smooth article," said Starbuck reflectively. "He used to be a clerk in Maxwell's railroad office, and he was mixed up in some kind of crookedness, I don't remember just what."
Smith caught quickly at the suggestion.
"Wait a minute, Billy," he broke in; and then: "There's no doubt in your mind that he's a spy?"
"Sure, he is," was the prompt rejoinder.
"I was just thinking—he has heard what was said here to-night—which is enough to give Stanton a pretty good chance to outfigure us again."
"Right you are."
"In which case it would be little short of idiotic in us to turn him loose. We've got to hold him, proof or no proof. Where would we be apt to catch Maxwell at this time of night?"
"At home and in bed, I reckon."
"Call him up on the 'phone and state the case briefly. Tell him if he has any nip on Shaw that would warrant us in turning him over to the sheriff, we'd like to know it."
"You're getting the range now," laughed the ex-cow-man, and instead of using the desk set, he went to shut himself into the sound-proof telephone-closet.
When he emerged a few minutes later he was grinning exultantly. "That was sure a smooth one of yours, John. Dick gave me the facts. Shaw's a thief; but he has a sick sister on his hands—or said he had—and the railroad didn't prosecute. Dick says for us to jug him to-night and to-morrow morning he'll swear out the necessary papers."
"Good. We'll do that first; and then we'll go after this fellow Lanterby. I want to get Stanton where I can pinch him, Billy; no, there's nothing personal about it; but when a great corporation like the Escalante Land Company gets down to plain anarchy and dynamiting, it's time to make somebody sweat for it. Let's go and get Shaw."
Together they went across the corridor, and Smith unlocked the door of the disused room. The light switch was on the door-jamb and Starbuck found and pressed the button. The single incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling sprang alive—and showed the two men at the door an empty room and an open window. The bird had flown.
Starbuck was grinning again when he went to look out of the window. The roof of the adjoining building was only a few feet below the sill level, and there was a convenient fire-escape ladder leading to the ground.
"It's us for that road-house out on the Topaz trail before the news gets around to Stanton and Lanterby," he said definitely; and they lost no time in securing an auto for the dash.
But that, too, proved to be a fiasco. When they reached Barton's all-night place on the hill road, the bar was still open and a card game was running in an up-stairs room. Starbuck did the necessary cross-questioning of the dog-faced bartender.
"You know me, Pug, and what I can do to you if I have to. We want Hank Lanterby. Pitch out and show us where."
The barkeeper threw up one hand as if he were warding off a blow.
"You c'd have him in a holy minute, for all o' me, Billy; you sure could," he protested. "But he's gone."
"On the level?" snapped Starbuck.
"That's straight; I wouldn't lie to you, Billy. Telephone call came from town a little spell ago, and I got Hank outa bed t' answer it. He borra'd Barton's mare an' faded inside of a pair o' minutes."
"Which way?" demanded the questioner.
"T' the hills; leastways he ain't headin' f'r town when he breaks from here."
Starbuck turned to Smith with a wry smile.
"Shaw beat us to it and he scores on us," he said. "We may as well hike back, 'phone Williams to keep his eye on things up at the dam, and go to bed. There'll be nothing more doing to-night."
With all things moving favorably for Timanyoni High Line up to the night of fiascos, the battle for the great water-right seemed to take a sudden slant against the local promoters, after the failure to cripple Stanton by the attempt to suppress two of his subordinates. Early the next day there were panicky rumors in the air, all pointing to a possible eleventh-hour failure of the local enterprise, and none of them traceable to any definite starting-point.
One of the stories was to the effect that the Timanyoni dam had faulty foundations and that the haste in building had added to its insecurity. By noon bets were freely offered in the pool-rooms that the dam would never stand its first filling; and on the heels of this came clamorous court petitions from ranch owners below the dam site, setting forth the flood dangers to which they were exposed and praying for an injunction to stop the work.
That this was a new move on Stanton's part, neither Smith nor Stillings questioned for a moment; but they had no sooner got the nervous ranchmen pacified by giving an indemnity bond for any damage that might be done, before it became evident that the rumors were having another and still more serious effect. It was a little past one o'clock when Kinzie sent up-stairs for Smith, and Smith wondered why, with the telephone at his elbow, the banker had sent the summons by the janitor.
When the newly elected secretary had himself shot down the elevator, he was moved to wonder again at the number of people who were waiting to see the president. The anteroom was crowded with them; and when the janitor led him around through the working room of the bank to come at the inside door to Kinzie's room, Smith thought the détour was made merely to dodge the waiting throng.
There was a crude surprise lying in wait for Smith when the door of the president's room swung open to admit him. Sitting at ease on Kinzie's big leather-covered lounge, with a huge book of engraving samples on his knees, was a round-bodied man with a face like a good-natured full moon. Instantly he tossed the book aside and sprang up.
"Why, Montague!" he burst out, "if this doesn't beat the band! Is it really you, or only your remarkably healthy-looking ghost? By George! but I'm glad to see you!"
Smith shook hands with Debritt, and if the salesman's hearty greeting was not returned in kind, the lack was due more to the turmoil of emotions he had stirred up than to any studied coolness on the part of the trapped fugitive. Fortunately, the salesman had finished showing Kinzie his samples and was ready to go, so there was no time for any awkward revelations.
"I'm at the Hophra, for just a little while, Montague, and you must look me up," was Debritt's parting admonition; and Smith was searching the salesman's eyes keenly for the accusation which ought to be in them; searching and failing to find it.
"Yes; I'll look you up, of course, Boswell. I'm at the Hophra, myself," he returned mechanically; and the next moment he was alone with Kinzie.
"You sent for me?" he said to the banker; and Kinzie pointed to a chair.
"Yes; sit down and tell me what has broken loose. I've been trying to get Baldwin or Williams on the wire—they're both at the dam, I understand—but the 'phone seems to be out of service. What has gone wrong with you people?"
Smith spread his hands. "We were never in better shape to win out than we are at this moment, Mr. Kinzie. This little flurry about newer and bigger damage suits to be brought by the valley truck-gardeners doesn't amount to anything."
"I know all about that," said the president, with a touch of impatience. "But there is a screw loose somewhere. How about that time limit in your charter? Are you going to get water into the ditches within your charter restrictions?"
"We shall clear the law, all right, within the limit," was the prompt reply. But the banker was still unsatisfied.
"Did you notice that roomful of people out there waiting to see me?" he asked. "They are High Line investors, a good many of them, and they are waiting for a chance to ask me if they hadn't better get rid of their stock for whatever it will bring. That's why I sent for you. I want to know what's happened. And this time, Mr. Smith, I want the truth."
Smith accepted the implied challenge promptly, though in his heart he knew that a net of some kind was drawing around him.
"Meaning that I haven't been telling you the truth, heretofore?" he asked hardily.
"Meaning just that," responded the banker.
"Name the time and place, if you please."
"It was the first time you came here—with Baldwin."
"No," said Smith. "I gave you nothing but straight facts at that time, Mr. Kinzie. It was your own deductions that were at fault. You jumped to the conclusion that I was here as the representative of Eastern capital, and I neither denied nor affirmed. But that is neither here nor there. We have made good in the financing, and, incidentally, we've helped the bank. You have no kick coming."
Kinzie wheeled in his chair and pointed an accusing finger at Smith.
"Mr. Smith, before we do any more business together, I want to know who you are and where you come from. If you can't answer a few plain questions I shall draw my own inferences."
Smith leaped up and towered over the thick-set elderly man in the pivot-chair.
"Mr. Kinzie, do you want me to tell you what you are? You're a trimmer—a fence-climber! Do you suppose I don't know what has happened? Stanton has started this new scare, and he has been here with you! You've thought it all over, and now you want to welsh and go over to what you think is going to be the winning side! Do it, if you feel like it—and I'll transfer our account to the little Savings concern up-town!"
There was fire in his eye and hot wrath in his tone; and once more Kinzie found his conclusions warping.
"Oh, don't fly off the handle so brashly, young man," he protested. "You've been in the banking business, yourself—you needn't deny it—and you know what a banker's first care should be. Sit down again and let's thresh this thing out. I don't want to have to drop you."
Being fairly at bay, with Debritt in town and Josiah Richlander due to come back to Brewster at any moment, Smith put his back to the wall and ignored the chair.
"You are at liberty to do anything you see fit, so far as I am concerned," he rapped out, "and whatever you do, I'll try to hand it back to you, with interest."
"That is good strong talk," retorted the banker, "but it doesn't tell me who you are, or why you are so evidently anxious to forget your past, Mr. Smith. I'm not asking much, if you'll stop to consider. And you'll give me credit for being fair and aboveboard with you. I might have held that engraving salesman and questioned him; he knows you—knows your other name."
Smith put the entire matter aside with an impatient gesture. "Leave my past record out of it, if you please, Mr. Kinzie. At the present moment I am the financial head of Timanyoni High Line. What I want to know is this: do you continue to stand with us? or do you insist upon the privilege of seesawing every time Stanton turns up with a fresh scare? Let me have it, yes or no; and then I shall know what to do."
The gray-haired man in the big chair took time to think about it, pursing his lips and making a quick-set hedge of his cropped mustache. In the end he capitulated.
"I don't want to break with you—or with Dexter Baldwin," he said, at length. "But I'm going to talk straight to you. Your little local crowd of ranchmen and mining men will never be allowed to hold that dam and your ditch right of way; never in this world, Smith."
"If you are our friend, you'll tell us why," Smith came back smartly.
"Because you have got too big a crowd to fight; a crowd that can spend millions to your hundreds. I didn't know until to-day who was behind Stanton, though I had made my own guess. You mustn't be foolish, and you mustn't pull Dexter Baldwin in over his head—which is what you are doing now."
Smith thrust his hands into his pockets and looked away.
"What do you advise, Mr. Kinzie?" he asked.
"Just this. At the present moment you seem to have a strangle-hold on the New York people that it will take a good bit of money to break. They'll break it, never fear. A Scotch terrier may be the bravest little dog that ever barked, but he can't fight a mastiff with any hope of saving his life. But there is still a chance for a compromise. Turn this muddle of yours over to me and let me make terms with the New Yorkers. I'll come as near to getting par for you as I can."
Smith, still with his hands in his pockets, took a turn across the room. It was a sharp temptation. No one knew better than he what it would mean to be involved in a long fight, with huge capital on one side and only justice and a modest bank balance on the other. To continue would be to leave Colonel Baldwin and Maxwell and Starbuck and their local following a legacy of strife and shrewd battlings. He knew that Kinzie's offer was made in good faith. It was most probably based on a tentative proposal from Stanton, who, in turn, spoke for the great syndicate. By letting go he might get the local investors out whole, or possibly with some small profit.
Against the acceptance of this alternative every fibre of the new-found manhood in him rose up in stubborn protest. Had it indeed come to a pass at which mere money could dominate and dictate, rob, steal, oppress, and ride roughshod over all opposition? Smith asked himself the question, and figured the big Missouri colonel's magnificent anger if it should be asked of him. That thought and another—the thought of what Corona would say and think if he should surrender—turned the scale.
"No, Mr. Kinzie; we'll not compromise while I have anything to say about it; we'll fight it to a finish," he said abruptly; and with that he went out through the crowded anteroom and so back to his desk in the up-stairs offices.
For one day and yet another after the minatory interview with David Kinzie, Smith fought mechanically, developing the machine-like doggedness of the soldier who sees the battle going irresistibly against him and still smites on in sheer desperation.
As if the night of fiascos had been the turning-point, he saw the carefully built reorganization structure, reared by his own efforts upon the foundation laid by Colonel Baldwin and his ranchmen associates, falling to pieces. In spite of all he could do, the panic of stock-selling continued; the city council, alarmed by the persistent story of the unsafety of the dam, was threatening to cancel the lighting contract with Timanyoni High Line; and Kinzie, though he was doing nothing openly, had caused the word about the proposed compromise with the Escalante people to be passed far and wide among the Timanyoni stockholders, together with the intimation that disaster could be averted now only by prompt action and the swift effacement of their rule-or-ruin secretary and treasurer.
"They're after you, John," was the way the colonel put it at the close of the second day of back-slippings. "They say you're fiddlin' while Rome's a-burnin'. Maybe you know what they mean by that; I don't."
Smith did know. During the two days of stress, Miss Verda had been very exacting. There had been another night at the theatre and much time-killing after meals in the parlors of the Hophra House. Worse still, there had been a daylight auto trip about town and up to the dam. The victim was writhing miserably under the price-paying, but there seemed to be no help for it. With Kinzie and Stanton working together, with Debritt gone only as far as Red Butte and promising to return, and with Josiah Richlander still within easy reach at the Topaz mines, he stood in hourly peril of the explosion, and a single written line from Verda to her father would light the match. Smith could find no word bitter enough to fitly characterize the depths into which he had sunk. It was the newest phase of the metamorphosis. Since the night of Verda Richlander's arrival in Brewster, he had not seen Corona; he was telling himself that he had forfeited the right to see her. Out of the chaotic wreck of things but one driving motive had survived, and it had grown to the stature of an obsession: the determination to wring victory out of defeat for Timanyoni High Line; to fall, if he must fall, fighting to the last gasp and with his face to the enemy.
"I know," he said, replying, after the reflective pause, to the charge passed on by Colonel Dexter. "There is a friend of mine here from the East, and I have been obliged to show her some attention, so they say I am neglecting my job. They are also talking it around that I am your Jonah, and saying that your only hope is to pitch me overboard."
"That's Dave Kinzie," growled the Missourian. "He seems to have it in for you, some way. He was trying to tell me this afternoon that I ought not to take you out to the ranch any more until you loosen up and tell us where you came from. I told him to go and soak his addled old head in a bucket of water!"
"Nevertheless, he was right," Smith returned gloomily. Then: "I am about at the end of my rope, Colonel—the rope I warned you about when you brought me here and put me into the saddle; and I'm trying desperately to hang on until my job's done. When it is done, when Timanyoni High Line can stand fairly on its own feet and fight its own battles, I'm gone."
"Oh, no, you're not," denied the ranchman-president in generous protest. "I don't know—you've never told us—what sort of a kettle of hot water you've got into, but you have made a few solid friends here in the Timanyoni, John, and they are going to stand by you. And—just to show Dave Kinzie that nobody cares a whoop for what he says—you come on out home with me to-night and get away from this muddle for a few minutes. It'll do you a heap of good; you know it always does."
Smith shook his head reluctantly but firmly.
"Never again, Colonel. It can only be a matter of a few days now, and I'm not going to pull you, and your wife and daughter, into the limelight if I can help it."
Colonel Dexter got out of his chair and walked to the office window. When he came back it was to say: "Are they sure-enough chasing you, John?—for something that you have done? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
"That is it—and they are nearly here. Now you know at least one of the reasons why I can't go with you to-night."
"I'll be shot if I do!" stormed the generous one. "I promised the Missus I'd bring you."
"You must make my excuses to her; and to Corona you may say that I am once more carrying a gun. She will understand."
"Which means, I take it, that you've been telling Corry more than you've told the rest of us. That brings on more talk, John. I haven't said a word before, have I?"
"No."
"Well, I'm going to say it now: I've got only just one daughter in the wide, wide world, John."
Smith stood up and put his hands behind him, facing the older man squarely.
"Colonel, I'd give ten years of my life, this minute, if I might go with you to Hillcrest this evening and tell Corona what I have been wanting to tell her ever since I have come to know what her love might make of me. The fact that I can't do it is the bitterest thing I have ever had to face, or can ever be made to face."
Colonel Baldwin fell back into his swing-chair and thrust his hands into his pockets.
"It beats the Dutch how things tangle themselves up for us poor mortals every little so-while," he commented, after a frowning pause. And then: "You haven't said anything like that to Corry, have you?"
"No."
"That was white, anyway. And now I suppose the other woman—this Miss Rich-some-thing-or-other over at the hotel—has come and dug you up and got you on the end of her trail-rope. That's the way it goes when a man mixes and mingles too much. You never can tell—"
"Hold on," Smith interposed. "Whatever else I may be, I'm not that kind of a scoundrel. I don't owe Miss Richlander anything that I can't pay without doing injustice to the woman I love. But in another way I am a scoundrel, Colonel. For the past two days I have been contemptible enough to play upon a woman's vanity merely for the sake of keeping her from talking too much."
The grizzled old ranchman shook his head sorrowfully.
"I didn't think that of you, John; I sure didn't. Why, that's what you might call a low-down, tin-horn sort of a game."
"It is just that, and I know it as well as you do. But it's the price I have to pay for my few days of grace. Miss Richlander knows the Stantons; they've made it their business to get acquainted with her. One word from her to Crawford Stanton, and a wire from him to my home town in the Middle West would settle me."
The older man straightened himself in his chair, and his steel-gray eyes blazed suddenly.
"Break away from 'em, John!" he urged. "Break it off short, and let 'em all do their damnedest! Away along at the first, Williams and I both said you wasn't a crooked crook, and I'm believing it yet. When it comes to the show-down, we'll all fight for you, and they'll have to bring a derrick along if they want to snatch you out of the Timanyoni. You go over yonder to the Hophra House and tell that young woman that the bridle's off, and she can talk all she wants to!"
"No," said Smith shortly. "I know what I am doing, and I shall go on as I have begun. It's the only way. Matters are desperate enough with us now, and if I should drop out——"
The telephone-bell was ringing, and Baldwin twisted his chair to bring himself within reach of the desk set. The message was a brief one and at its finish the ranchman-president was frowning heavily.
"By Jupiter! it does seem as if the bad luck all comes in a bunch!" he protested. "Williams was rushing things just a little too fast, and they've lost a whole section of the dam by stripping the forms before the concrete was set. That puts us back another twenty-four hours, at least. Don't that beat the mischief?"
Smith reached for his hat. "It's six o'clock," he said; "and Williams's form-strippers have furnished one more reason why I shouldn't keep Miss Richlander waiting for her dinner." And with that he cut the talk short and went his way.
Brewster being only a one-night stand on the long playing circuit between Denver and the Pacific coast, there was an open date at the opera-house, and with a blank evening before her, the Olympian beauty, making thetête-à-têtedinner count for what it would, tightened her hold upon the one man available, demanding excitement. Nothing else offering, she suggested an evening auto drive, and Smith dutifully telephoned Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, and borrowed a runabout.
Being left to his own choice of routes after the start was made, he headed the machine up the river road, and the drive paused at the dam. Craving a new sensation, Miss Richlander had it in full measure when the machine had been braked to a stop at the construction camp. Williams, hoarse from much shouting and haggard-eyed for want of sleep, was driving his men fiercely in a fight against time. The night rise in the river had already set in, and the slumped section of concrete had left a broad gap through which the water threatened to pour, endangering not only the power-house directly beneath it, but also the main structure of the dam itself.
The stagings were black with men hurrying back and forth under the glare of the electrics, and the concrete gangs were laboring frantically to clear the wreck made by the crumbling mass, to the end that the carpenters might bulkhead the gap with timbers and planks to hold back the rising flood. The mixers had stopped temporarily, but the machinery was held in readiness to go into action the moment the débris should be removed and the new forms locked into place. Every now and then one of Williams's assistants, a red-headed young fellow with a voice like a fog-horn, took readings of the climbing river level from a gauge in the slack water, calling out the figures in a singsong chant: "Nineteensix! Nineteen six and aquarter! Nineteen six and ahalf!"
"Get a move, you fellows there on the stage!" yelled Williams. "She's coming up faster than usual to-night! Double pay if you get that bulkhead in before the tide wets your feet!"
Smith felt as if he ought to get out of the car and help, but there was nothing he could do. Miss Richlander had been silent for the better part of the drive from town, but now she began to talk.
"So this is what you left Lawrenceville for, is it, Montague?" she said, knitting her perfect brows at the hubbub and strife. "If I were not here, I believe you would be down there, struggling with the rest of them."
"I certainly should," he answered briefly, adding: "not that I should be of much use."
"There are a good many easier ways of making money," she offered, including the entire industrial strife in the implied detraction.
"This is a man's way, asking for all—and the best—there is in a man," he asserted. "You can't understand, of course; you have eaten the bread of profits and discount and interest all your life. But here is something really creative. The world will be the richer for what is being done here; more mouths can be filled and more backs clothed. That is the true test of wealth, and the only test."
"And you are willing to live in a raw wilderness for the sake of having a part in these crudities?"
"I may say that I had no choice, at first; it was this or nothing. But I may also say that whatever the future may do to me, I shall always have it to remember that for a little time I was a man, and not a tailor's model."
"Is that the way you are thinking now of your former life?" she gibed.
"It is the truth. The man you knew in Lawrenceville cared more for the set of a coat, for the color of a tie, for conventional ease and the little luxuries, than he did for his soul. And nobody thought enough of him to kick him alive and show him that he was strangling the only part of him that was at all worth saving."
"If your point of view appeals to me, as perhaps it does—as possibly it would to any woman who can appreciate masculinity in a man, even though it be of the crudest—the life that is giving it to you certainly does not," she replied, with a little lip-curling of scorn. Then: "You couldn't bring your wife to such a place as Brewster, Montague."
He had no answer for this, and none was needed. Williams had caught sight of the auto, and he came up, wiping his face with a red handkerchief.
"I thought it must be you," he said to Smith. "Thank the Lord, we're going to escape, this one more time! The bulkhead's in, and we'll be dumping concrete in another fifteen minutes. But it was a narrow squeak—an awful narrow squeak!"
Smith turned to his companion, saw permission in her eyes, and introduced Williams. Somewhat to Smith's surprise, Miss Verda evinced a suddenly awakened interest in the engineer and in his work, making him tell the story of the near-disaster. While he was telling it, the roar of another auto rose above the clamor on the stagings and Colonel Baldwin's gray roadster drew up beside the borrowed runabout. Smith gave one glance at the small, trimly coated figure in the mechanician's seat and ground his teeth in helpless fury.
In what followed he had little part or lot. Miss Richlander wished to see the construction battle at shorter range, and Williams was opening the door of the runabout. The colonel was afoot and was helping his daughter to alight. Smith swore a silent oath to keep his place, and he did it; but Williams was already introducing Baldwin and Corona to Miss Richlander. There was a bit of commonplace talk, and then the quartet walked down the embankment and out upon the finished portion of the dam, Williams explaining the near-disaster as they went.
Smith sat back behind the pilot-wheel of the runabout and waited. Not for a king's ransom would he have joined the group on the dam. He suspected shrewdly that Verda had already heard of Corona through the Stantons; that she was inwardly rejoicing at the new hold upon him which chance had flung in her way. At the end of Williams's fifteen minutes the rattle and grind of the mixers began. When the stream of concrete came pouring through the high-tilted spouts, Smith looked to see the colonel and Williams bringing the two women back to the camp level. What the light of the masthead arcs showed him was the figure of one of the women returning alone, while the two men and the other woman went on across the stagings to the farther river bank where the battery of mixers fed the swiftly moving lift.
Smith did not get out to go and meet the returning figure; his courage was not of that quality. But he could not pretend to be either asleep or dead when Corona came up between the two cars and spoke to him.
"You have nothing whatever to take back," she said, smiling up at him from her seat on the running-board of the roadster. "She is all you said she was—and more. She is gorgeously beautiful!"
Smith flung his freshly lighted cigar away and climbed out to sit beside her.
"What do you think of me?" he demanded bluntly.
"What should I think? Didn't I scold you for running away from her that first evening? I am glad you thought better of it afterward."
"I am not thinking better of it at all—in the way you mean."
"But Miss Richlander is," was the quiet reply.
"You have a right to say anything you please; and after it is all said, to say it again. I am not the man you have been taking me for; not in any respect. Your father knows now, and he will tell you."
"Colonel-daddy has told me one thing—the thing you told him to tell me. And I am sorry—sorry and disappointed."
He smiled morosely. "Billy Starbuck calls the Timanyoni a half-reformed gun-country, and from the very first he has been urging me to 'go heeled,' as he phrases it."
"It isn't the mere carrying of a gun," she protested. "With most men that would be only a prudent precaution for the leader in a fight like this one you are making. But it means more than that to you; it means a complete change of attitude toward your kind. Tell me if I am wrong."
"No; you are right. The time is coming when I shall be obliged to kill somebody. And I think I shall rather welcome it."
"Now you have gone so far away that I can hardly see you," she said softly. "'Once in a blue moon,' you said, the impossible might happen. Itdidhappen in your case, didn't it?—giving you a chance to grow and expand and to break with all the old traditions, whatever they were. And the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose. You have all the abilities; you can reach out and take what other men have to beg for. Once you thought you would take only the best, and then you grew so fast that we could hardly keep you in sight. But now you are meaning to take the worst."
"I don't understand," he said soberly.
"You will understand some day," she asserted, matching his sober tone. "When that time comes, you will know that the only great men are those who love their fellow men; who are too big to be little; who can fight without hatred; who can die, if need be, that others may live."
"My God!" said the man, and though he said it under his breath there was, pent up in the two words, the cry of a soul in travail; a soul to whom its own powers have suddenly been revealed, together with its lost opportunities and its crushing inability to rise to the heights supernal.
"It came too soon—if I could only have had a little more time," he was saying; but at that, the colonel and Williams came up, bringing Miss Richlander, and the heart-mellowing moment was gone.
Smith drove the borrowed runabout back to town in sober silence, and the glorious beauty in the seat beside him did not try to make him talk. Perhaps she, too, was busy with thoughts of her own. At all events, when Smith had helped her out of the car at the hotel entrance and had seen her as far as the elevator, she thanked him half absently and took his excuse, that he must return the runabout to Maxwell's garage, without laying any further commands upon him.
Just as he was turning away, a bell-boy came across from the clerk's desk with a telegram for Miss Richlander. Smith had no excuse for lingering, but with the air thick with threats he made the tipping of the boy answer for a momentary stop-gap. Miss Verda tore the envelope open and read the enclosure with a fine-lined little frown coming and going between her eyes.
"It's from Tucker Jibbey," she said, glancing up at Smith. "Some one has told him where we are, and he is following us. He says he'll be here on the evening train. Will you meet him and tell him I've gone to bed?"
At the mention of Jibbey, the money-spoiled son of the man who stood next to Josiah Richlander in the credit ratings, and Lawrenceville's best imitation of aflâneur, Smith's first emotion was one of relief at the thought that Jibbey would at least divide time with him in the entertainment of the bored beauty; then he remembered that Jibbey had once considered him a rival, and that the sham "rounder's" presence in Brewster would constitute a menace more threatening than all the others put together.
"I can't meet Tucker," he said bluntly. "You know very well I can't."
"That's so," was the quiet reply. "Of course, you can't. What will you do when he comes?—run away?"
"No; I can't do that, either. I shall keep out of his way, if I can. If he finds me and makes any bad breaks, he'll get what's coming to him. If he's worth anything to you, you'll put him on the stage in the morning and send him up into the mountains to join your father."
"The idea!" she laughed. "He's not coming out here to see father. Poor Tucker! If he could only know what he is in for!" Then: "It is beginning to look as if you might have to go still deeper in debt to me, Montague. There is one more thing I'd like to do before I leave Brewster. If I'll promise to keep Tucker away from you, will you drive me out to the Baldwins' to-morrow afternoon? I want to see the colonel's fine horses, and he has invited me, you know."
Smith's eyes darkened.
"There is a limit, Verda, and you've reached it," he said quickly. "If the colonel invited you to Hillcrest, it was because you didn't leave him any chance not to. I resign in favor of Jibbey," and with that he handed her into the waiting elevator and said: "Good night."
Though it was a working man's bedtime when Smith put Miss Richlander into the elevator at the Hophra House and bade her good night, he knew that there would be no sleep for him until he had made sure of the arrival or non-arrival of the young man who, no less certainly than Josiah Richlander or Debritt, could slay him with a word. Returning the borrowed runabout to its garage, he went to the railroad station and learned that the "Flyer" from the East was over four hours late. With thirty minutes to spare, he walked the long train platform, chewing an extinct cigar and growing more and more desperate at each pacing turn.
With time to weigh and measure the probabilities, he saw what would come to pass. Verda Richlander might keep her own counsel, or she might not; but in any event, Stanton would be quick to identify Jibbey as a follower of Verda's, and so, by implication, a man who would be acquainted with Verda's intimates. Smith recalled Jibbey's varied weaknesses. If Verda should get hold of him first, and was still generous enough to warn him against Stanton, the blow might be delayed. But if Stanton should be quick enough, and cunning enough to play upon Jibbey's thirst, the liquor-loosened tongue would tell all that it knew.
In such a crisis the elemental need rises up to thrust all other promptings, ethical or merely prudent, into the background. Smith had been profoundly moved by Corona Baldwin's latest appeal to such survivals of truth and honor and fair-dealing as the strange metamorphosis and the culminating struggle against odds had left him. But in any new birth it is inevitable that the offspring of the man that was shall be at first—like all new-born beings—a pure savage, guided only by instinct. And of the instincts, that of self-preservation easily overtops all others.
Smith saw how suddenly the pit of disaster would yawn for him upon Jibbey's arrival, and the compunctions stirred by Corona's plea for the higher ideals withdrew or were crushed in the turmoil. He had set his hand to the plough and he would not turn back. It was Jibbey's effacement in some way, or his own, he told himself, for he had long since determined that he would never be taken alive to be dragged back to face certain conviction in the Lawrenceville courts and a living death in the home State penitentiary.
With this determination gripping him afresh, he glanced at his watch. In fifteen minutes more his fate would be decided. The station baggage and express handlers were beginning to trundle their loaded trucks out across the platform to be in readiness for the incoming train. There was still time enough, but none to spare. Smith passed through the station quickly and on the town side of the building took a cab. "Benkler's," was his curt order to the driver; and three minutes later he was telling the night man at the garage that he had come back to borrow Maxwell's runabout again, and urging haste in the refilling of the tanks.
The delayed "Flyer" was whistling in when Smith drove the runabout to the station, and he had barely time to back the machine into place in the cab rank and to hurry out to the platform before the train came clattering down over the yard switches. Since all the debarking passengers had to come through the archway exit from the track platform, Smith halted at a point from which he could pass them in review. The day-coach people came first, and after them a smaller contingent from the sleepers. At the tail of the straggling procession Smith saw his man, a thin-faced, hollow-eyed young fellow with an unlighted cigarette hanging from his loose lower lip. Smith marked all the little details: the rakish hat, the flaming-red tie, the russet-leather suitcase with its silver identification tag. Then he placed himself squarely in the young man's way.
Jibbey's stare was only momentary. With a broad-mouthed grin he dropped the suitcase and thrust out a hand.
"Well, well—Monty, old sport! So this is where you ducked to, is it? By Jove, it's no wonder Bart Macauley couldn't get a line on you! How are tricks, anyway?"
Smith was carefully refusing to see the out-stretched hand. And it asked for a sudden tightening of the muscles of self-possession to keep him from looking over his shoulder to see if any of Stanton's shadow men were at hand.
"Verda got your telegram, and she asked me to meet you," he rejoined crisply. "Also, to make her excuses for to-night: she has gone to bed."
"So that's the way the cat's jumping, is it?" said the imitation black sheep, the grin twisting itself into a leer. "Shegot a line on you, even if Macauley couldn't. By Gad! I guess I didn't get out here any too soon."
Smith ignored the half-jealous pleasantry. "Bring your grip," he directed. "I have an auto here and we'll drive."
Being a stranger in a strange city, Jibbey could not know that the hotel was only three squares distant. For the same cause he was entirely unsuspicious when Smith turned the car to the right out of the cab rank and took a street leading to the western suburb. But when the pavements had been left behind, together with all the town lights save an occasional arc-lamp at a crossing, and he was trying for the third time to hold a match to the hanging cigarette, enough ground had been covered to prompt a question.
"Hell of a place to call itself a city, if anybody should ask you," he chattered. "Much of this to worry through?"
Smith bent lower over the tiller-wheel, advancing the spark and opening the throttle for more gas.
"A good bit of it. Didn't you know that Mr. Richlander is out in the hills, buying a mine?"
Tucker Jibbey was rapid only in his attitude toward the world of decency; the rapidity did not extend to his mental processes. The suburb street had become a country road, the bridge over the torrenting Gloria had thundered under the flying wheels, and a great butte, black in its foresting from foot to summit, was rising slowly among the western stars before his small brain had grasped the relation of cause to effect.
"Say, here, Monty—dammit all, you hold on! Verda isn't with Old Moneybags; she's staying at the hotel in town. I wired and found out before I left Denver. Where in Sam Hill are you taking me to?"
Smith made no reply other than to open the cut-out and to put his foot on the accelerator. The small car leaped forward at racing speed and Jibbey clutched wildly at the wheel.
"Stop her—stop her!" he shrilled. "Lemme get out!"
Smith had one hand free and it went swiftly to his hip pocket. A second later Jibbey's shrilling protest died away in a gurgle of terror.
"For—for God's sake, Monty—don't kill me!" he gasped, when he saw the free hand clutching a weapon and uplifted as if to strike. "Wh—what've I done to you?"
"I'll tell you—a little later. Keep quiet and let this wheel alone, if you want to live long enough to find out where you're going. Quiet down, I say, or I'll beat your damned head off!—oh, you would, would you? All right—if youwillhave it!"
It lacked only a few minutes of midnight when Smith returned the borrowed runabout for the second time that night, sending it jerkily through the open door of Benkler's garage and swinging stiffly from behind the steering-wheel to thrust a bank-note into the hand of the waiting night man.
"Wash the car down good, and be sure it's all right before Mr. Maxwell sends around in the morning," he commanded gruffly; and then: "Take your whisk and dust me off."
The night man had seen the figure of his tip and was nothing loath.
"Gosh!" he exclaimed, with large Western freedom; "you sure look as if you'd been drivin' a good ways, and tol'able hard. What's this on your sleeve? Say! it looks like blood!"
"No; it's mud," was the short reply; and after the liberal tipper had gone, the garage man was left to wonder where, on the dust-dry roads in the Timanyoni, the borrower of Mr. Maxwell's car had found mud deep enough to splash him, and, further, why there was no trace of the mud on the dust-covered car itself.
Brewster, drawing its business profit chiefly from the mines in the Topaz and upper Gloria districts, had been only moderately enthusiastic over the original irrigation project organized by Colonel Dexter Baldwin and the group of ranchmen who were to be directly benefited. But when the scope of the plan was enlarged to include a new source of power and light for the city, the scheme had become, in a broader sense, a public utility, and Brewster had promptly awakened to the importance of its success as a local enterprise.
The inclusion of the hydro-electric privilege in the new charter had been a bit of far-sighted business craft on the part of the young man whose name was now in everybody's mouth. As he had pointed out to his new board of directors, there was an abundant excess of water, and a modest profit on the electric plant would pay the operating expenses of the entire system, including the irrigating up-keep and extension work. In addition to this, a reasonable contract price for electric current to be furnished to the city would give the project aquasi-public character, at least to the extent of enlisting public sympathy on the side of the company in the fight with the land trust.
This piece of business foresight found itself amply justified as the race against time was narrowed down to days and hours. Though there was spiteful opposition offered by one of the two daily newspapers—currently charged with being subsidized by the land trust—public sentiment as a whole, led by the other newspaper, was strongly on the side of the local corporation. Baldwin, Maxwell, Starbuck, and a few more of the leading spirits in Timanyoni High Line had many friends, and Crawford Stanton found his task growing increasingly difficult as the climax drew near.
But to a man with an iron jaw difficulties become merely incentives to greater effort. Being between the devil, in the person of an employer who knew no mercy, on the one hand, and the deep blue sea of failure on the other, the promoter left no expedient untried, and the one which was yielding the best results, thus far, was the steady undercurrent of detraction and calamitous rumor which he had contrived to set in motion. As we have seen, it was first whispered, and then openly asserted, that the dam was being built too hurriedly; that its foundations were insecure; that, sooner or later, it would be carried away in high water, and the city and the intervening country would be flood-swept and devastated.
Beyond this, the detractive gossip attacked thepersonnelof the new company. Baldwin was all right as a man, and he knew how to raise fine horses; but what did he, or any of his associates, know about building dams and installing hydro-electric plants? Williams, the chief engineer, was an ex-government man, and—government projects being anathema in the Timanyoni by reason of the restrictive rules and regulations of the Hophra Forest Reserve—everybody knew what that meant: out-of-date methods, red-tape detail, general inefficiency. And Smith, the young plunger who had dropped in from nobody knew where: what could be said of him more than that he had succeeded in temporarily hypnotizing an entire city? Who was he? and where had the colonel found him? Was his name really Smith, or was that only a convenientalias?
Having set these queries afoot in Brewster, Stanton was unwearied in keeping them alive and pressing them home. And since such askings grow by what they feed upon, the questions soon began to lose the interrogatory form and to become assertions of fact. Banker Kinzie was quoted as saying, or at least as intimating, that he had lost faith, not only in the High Line scheme, but particularly in its secretary and treasurer; and to this bit of gossip was added another to the effect that Smith had grossly deceived the bank by claiming to be the representative of Eastern capital when he was nothing more than an adventurer trading upon the credulity and good nature of an entire community.
To these calumniating charges it was admitted on all sides that Smith, himself, was giving some color of truth. To those who had opposed him he had shown no mercy, and there were plenty of defeated litigants, and some few dropped stockholders, among the obstructors to claim that the new High Line promoter was a bully and a browbeater; that a poor man stood no chance in a fight with the Timanyoni Company.
On the sentimental side the charges were still graver—in the Western point of view. In its social aspect Brewster was still in the country-village stage, and Smith's goings and comings at Hillcrest had been quickly marked. From that to assuming the sentimental status, with the colonel's daughter in the title rôle, was a step that had already been taken by the society editress of theBrewster Bannerin a veiled hint of a forthcoming "announcement" in which "the charming daughter of one of our oldest and most respected families" and "a brilliant young business man from the East" were to figure as the parties in interest. Conceive, therefore, the shock that had been given to these kindlier gossips when Smith's visits to the Baldwin ranch ceased abruptly between two days, and the "brilliant young business man" was seen everywhere and always in the company of the beautiful stranger who was stopping at the Hophra House. In its palmier day the Timanyoni had hanged a man for less.
On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smith gave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the business field. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a man suddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial, not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the short space of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities which he had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing and refinancing of the irrigation project.
"We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, at last," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for the bejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra café. "Kinzie is about to throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam is getting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that you can't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up to his office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smith abused him first and then threw him out bodily—hurt him pretty savagely, they say."
The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise.
"Bad temper?" she queried.
"Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take your choice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with Miss Richlander overnight?—or has he?"
The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were at luncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutes ago."
Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But an invisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might have drawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrenceville magnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were not precisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times.
"I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day, Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the little ranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from us and went back to you at the autos?"
"No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say."
"But it, or something else, has changed you—very much for the worse. Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch this afternoon?"
"And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition?—never in this world!"
"More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame of mind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever do you suppose has become of Tucker?"
"How should I know?"
"If he had come in last night, and you had met him—as I asked you to—in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might think you had murdered him."
It was doubtless by sheer accident that Smith, reaching at the moment for the salad-oil, overturned his water-glass. But the small accident by no means accounted for the sudden graying of his face under the Timanyoni wind tan—for that or for the shaking hands with which he seconded the waiter's anxious efforts to repair the damage. When they were alone again, the momentary trepidation had given place to a renewed hardness that lent a biting rasp to his voice.
"Kinzie, the suspicious old banker that I've been telling you about, is determined to run me down," he said, changing the subject abruptly. "I've got it pretty straight that he is planning to send one of his clerks to the Topaz district to try and find your father."
"In the hope that father will tell what he knows about you?"
"Just that."
"Does this Mr. Kinzie know where father is to be found?"
"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."
Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.
"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making, if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell you that Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in trying to make me tell him where father has gone."
"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assure you, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach your father—alive."
"Ooh!" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the rounded shoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a much simpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie in some way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you do that?"
"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"
"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said the young woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, you know. Father left it with me—in case I should want to communicate with him."
Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.
"Youwouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of the ultimate right and wrong, would you?Youwouldn't say that the only great man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"
Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.
"Are you quoting the little ranch person?" she inquired. Then she answered his query: "The only great men worth speaking of are the men who win. For the lack of something better to do, I'm willing to help you win, Montague. Contrive in some way to have that clerk sent to me. It can come about quite casually if it is properly suggested. Most naturally, I am the one who would know where my father is to be found. And I have changed my mind about wanting to drive to the Baldwins'. We'll compromise on the play—if thereisa play."
Two things came of this talk over the luncheon table. Smith went back to his office and shut himself up, without going near the Brewster City National. None the less, the expedient suggested by Verda Richlander must have found its means of communication in some way, since at two o'clock David Kinzie summoned the confidential clerk who had been directed to provide himself with a livery mount and gave him his instructions.