Driven by Starbuck in the brand-new car, Smith reached the dam at half-past ten and was in time to see the swarming carpenters begin the placing of the forms for the pouring of the final section of the great wall. Though the high water was lapping at the foot timbers of the forming, and the weather reports were still portentous, Williams was in fine fettle. There had been no further interferences on the part of the railroad people, every man on the job was spurting for the finish, and the successful end was now fairly in sight.
"We'll be pouring this afternoon," he told Smith, "and with a twenty-four-hour set for the concrete, and the forms left in place for additional security, we can shut the spillway gates and back the water into the main ditch. Instead of being a hindrance then, the flood-tide will help. Under slack-water conditions it would take a day or two to finish filling the reservoir lake, but now we'll get the few feet of rise needed to fill the sluices almost while you wait."
"You have your guards out, as we planned?" Smith inquired.
"Twenty of the best men I could find. They are patrolling on both sides of the river, with instructions to report if they see so much as a rabbit jump up."
"Good. I'm going to let Starbuck drive me around the lake limits to see to it personally that your pickets are on the job. But first, I'd like to use your 'phone for a minute or two," and with that Smith shut himself up in the small field-office and called Martin, the bookkeeper, at the town headquarters.
The result of the brief talk with Martin seemed satisfactory, for when it was concluded, Smith rang off and asked for the Hophra House. Being given the hotel exchange, he called the number of Miss Richlander's suite, and the answer came promptly in the full, throaty voice of the Olympian beauty.
"Is that you, Montague?"
"Yes. I'm out at the dam. Nothing has been done yet. No telegraphing, I mean. You understand?"
"Perfectly. But something is going to be done. Mr. K. has had Colonel B. with him in the bank. I saw the colonel go in while I was at breakfast. When are you coming back to town?"
"Not for some time; I have a drive to make that will keep me out until afternoon."
"Very well; you'd better stay away as long as you can, and then you'd better communicate with me before you show yourself much in public. I'll have Jibbey looking out for you."
Smith said "good-by" and hung up the receiver with a fresh twinge of dissatisfaction. Every step made his dependence upon Verda Richlander more complete. To be sure, he told himself, they had both forsworn sentiment in the old days, but was that any guaranty that it was not now awakening in Josiah Richlander's daughter? And Corona Baldwin: what would she say to this newest alliance? Would she not say again, and this time with greater truth, that he was a coward of the basest sort; of the type that makes no scruple of hiding behind a woman's skirts?
Happily, there was work to do, and he went out and did it. With the new car to cover the longer interspaces, a complete round of Williams's sentries was made, with détours up and down the line of the abandoned Red Butte Southwestern, whose right-of-way claims had been so recently revived. Smith tried to tell himself that he was only making a necessary reconnaissance thoroughly; that he was not delaying his return to town because Verda had told him to. But when the real motive could no longer be denied, he brought himself up with a jerk. If it had come to this, that he was afraid to face whatever might be awaiting him in Brewster, it was time to take counsel once more of the elemental things.
"Back to Brewster, Billy, by way of the camp," he directed, and the overworked car was turned and headed accordingly.
It was some little time before this, between the noon-hour and the one-o'clock Hophra House luncheon, to be exact, that Mr. David Kinzie, still halting between two opinions, left his desk and the bank and crossed the street to the hotel. Inquiry at the lobby counter revealing the fact that Miss Richlander was in her rooms, Kinzie wrote his name on a card and let the clerk send it up. The boy came back almost immediately with word that Miss Richlander was waiting in the mezzanine parlors.
The banker tipped the call-boy and went up alone. He had seen Miss Richlander, once when she was driving with Smith and again at the theatre in the same company. So he knew what to expect when he tramped heavily into the parlor overlooking the street. None the less, the dazzling beauty of the young woman who rose to shake hands with him and call him by name rather took him off his feet. David Kinzie was a hopeless bachelor, from choice, but there are women, and women.
"Do you know, Mr. Kinzie, I have been expecting you all day," she said sweetly, making him sit down beside her on one of the flaming red monstrosities billed in the hotel inventories as "Louis Quinze sofas". "My father sent me a note by one of your young men, and he said that perhaps you would—that perhaps you might want to—" Her rich voice was at its fruitiest, and the hesitation was of exactly the proper shade.
Kinzie, cold-blooded as a fish with despondent debtors, felt himself suddenly warmed and moved to be gentle with this gracious young woman.
"Er—yes, Miss Richlander—er—a disagreeable duty, you know. I wanted to ask about this young man, Smith. We don't know him very well here in Brewster, and as he has considerable business dealings with the bank, we—that is, I thought your father might be able to tell us something about his standing in his home town."
"And my father did tell you?"
"Well—yes; he—er—he says Smith is a—a grand rascal; a fugitive from justice; and we thought—" David Kinzie, well hardened in all the processes of dealing with men, was making difficult weather of it with this all-too-beautiful young woman.
Miss Richlander's laugh was well restrained. She seemed to be struggling earnestly to make it appear so.
"You business gentlemen are so funny!" she commented. "You know, of course, Mr. Kinzie, thatthisMr. Smith and I are old friends; you've probably seen us together enough to be sure of that. Hasn't it occurred to you that however well I might know the Mr. Smith my father has written you about, I should hardly care to be seen in public with him?"
"Then there are two of them?" Kinzie demanded.
The young woman was laughing again. "Would that be so very wonderful?—with so many Smiths in the world?"
"But—er—the middle name, Miss Richlander:thatisn't so infern—so very common, I'm sure."
"It is rather remarkable, isn't it? But there are a good many Montagues in our part of the world, too. The man my father wrote you about always signed himself 'J. Montague', as if he were a little ashamed of the 'John'."
"Then this Brewster Smith isn't the one who is wanted in Lawrenceville for embezzlement and attempted murder?"
"Excuse me," said the beauty, with another very palpable attempt to smother her amusement. "If you could only know this other Smith; the one my father wrote you about, and the one he thinks you were asking about: they are not the least bit alike. J. Montague, as I remember him, was a typical society man; a dancing man who was the pet of the younger girls—and of their mothers, for that matter; you know what I mean—the kind of man who wears dress clothes even when he dines alone, and who wouldn't let his beard grow overnight for a king's ransom. But wait a moment. There is a young gentleman here who came last evening direct from Lawrenceville. Let me send for him."
She rose and pressed the bell-push, and when the floor boy came, he was sent to the lobby to page Jibbey. During the little wait, David Kinzie was skilfully made to talk about other things. Jibbey was easily found, as it appeared, and he came at once. Miss Richlander did the honors graciously.
"Mr. Kinzie, this is Mr. Tucker Jibbey, the son of one of our Lawrenceville bankers. Tucker—Mr. Kinzie; the president of the Brewster City National." Then, before Kinzie could begin: "Tucker, I've sent for you in self-defense. You know both Mr. John Smith, at present of Brewster, and also J. Montague Smith, sometime of Lawrenceville and now of goodness only knows where. Mr. Kinzie is trying to make out that they are one and the same."
Jibbey laughed broadly. He stood in no awe of banks, bankers, or stubbly mustaches.
"I'll tell John, when I see him again—and take a chance on being able to run faster than he can," he chuckled. "Ripping good joke!"
"Then you know both men?" said Kinzie, glancing at his watch and rising.
"Like a book. They're no more alike than black and white. Our man here is from Cincinnati; isn't that where you met him, Verda? Yes, I'm sure it is—that night at the Carsons', if you remember. I believe I was the one who introduced him. And I recollect you didn't like him at first, because he wore a beard. They told me, the last time I was over in Cinci, that he'd gone West somewhere, but they didn't say where. He was the first man I met when I lit down here. Damn' little world, isn't it, Mr. Kinzie?"
David Kinzie was backing away, watch in hand. Business was very pressing, he said, and he must get back to his desk. He was very much obliged to Miss Richlander, and was only sorry that he had troubled her. When her father should return to Brewster he would be glad to meet him, and so on and so on, to and beyond the portières which finally blotted him out, for the two who were left in the Louis Quinze parlor.
"Is that about what you wanted me to say?" queried Jibbey, when the click of the elevator door-latch told them that Mr. Kinzie was descending.
"Tucker, there are times when you are almost lovable," said the beauty softly, with a hand on Jibbey's shoulder.
"I'm glad it's what you wanted, because it's what I was going to say, anyway," returned the ne'er-do-well soberly, thus showing that he, too, had not yet outlived the influence of the overnight hand-grip.
An hour further along in the afternoon, Starbuck's new car, pausing momentarily at the construction camp to give its occupants a chance to witness the rapid fulfilment of Williams's prediction in the swiftly pouring streams of concrete, advertised its shining presence to the engineer, who came up for a word with Smith while Starbuck had his head under the hood of the new-paint-burning motor.
"Somebody's been trying to get you over the wire, John; some woman," he said, in tones as low as the thunderings of the rock-crushers would sanction. "She wouldn't give me her number, but she wanted me to tell you, if you came back here, that it was all right; that you had nothing to be afraid of. She said you'd understand."
Since Brewster was a full-fledged city, its banks closed at three o'clock. Ten minutes after the hour, which happened also to be about the same length of time after Starbuck and Smith had reached town, Mr. Crawford Stanton got himself admitted by the janitor at the side door of the Brewster City National. President Kinzie was still at his desk in his private room, and the promoter entered unannounced.
"I thought I'd hang off and give you the limit—all the time there was," he said, dropping into the debtor's chair at the desk-end. And then, with a quarrelsome rasp in his tone: "Are you getting ready to switch again?"
Though his victims often cursed the banker for his shrewd caution and his ruthless profit-takings, no one had ever accused him of timidity in a stand-up encounter.
"You've taken that tone with me before, Stanton, and I don't like it," he returned brusquely. "I've been willing to serve you, as I could, in a business matter, and I am still willing to serve you; but you may as well keep it in mind that neither you, nor the people you represent, own the Brewster City National, or any part of it, in fee simple."
"We can buy you out any minute we think we need you," retorted Stanton. "But never mind about that. Your man came back from the Topaz last night; I know, because I make it my business to keep cases on you and everybody else. You've let the better part of the day go by without saying a word, and I've drawn the only conclusion there is to draw: you're getting ready to swap sides again."
Kinzie frowned his impatience. "If I have to do business with your people much longer, Mr. Stanton, I shall certainly suggest that they put a man in charge out here who can control his temper. I have acted in perfect good faith with you from the beginning. What you say is true; our man did return from the Topaz last night. But I thought it wise to make a few investigations on my own account before we should be committed to the course you advocated, and it is fortunate for us that I did. Here is Mr. Richlander's letter."
Stanton read the letter through hastily, punctuating its final sentence with a brittle oath.
"And you've muddled over this all day, when every hour is worth more to us than your one-horse bank could earn in a year?" he rapped out. "What have you done? Have you telegraphed this sheriff?"
"No; and neither will you when I tell you the facts. I was afraid you might go off at half-cock, as usual, if I turned the matter over to you. You see what Mr. Richlander says, and you will note his description of the man Smith who is wanted in Lawrenceville. It doesn't tally in any respect with Baldwin's treasurer, and the common name aroused my suspicions at once. We had nothing to go on unless we could identify our man definitely, so I took the straightforward course and went to Miss Richlander."
Stanton's laugh was a derisive shout.
"You need a guardian, Kinzie; you do, for a fact!" he sneered. "You sit here, day in and day out, like a greedy old spider in the middle of a web, clawing in a man-fly every time the door opens, but what you don't know about women—Bah! you make my back ache! Of course, the girl pulled the wool over your eyes; any woman could do that!"
"You are not gaining anything by being abusive, Stanton. As I have said, it is fortunate for all of us that I took the matter into my own hands and used a little ordinary common sense. There are two Smiths, just as I suspected when I read Mr. Richlander's letter. Miss Richlander didn't ask me to take her word for it. She called in a young man named Jibbey, who arrived here, direct from Lawrenceville, as I understand, last evening. He is a banker's son, and he knows both Smiths. This man of Baldwin's is not the one Mr. Richlander is trying to describe in that letter."
Stanton bit the tip from a cigar and struck a light.
"Kinzie," he said, "you've got me guessing. If you are really the easy mark you are trying to tell me you are, you have no business running a bank. I'm going to be charitable and put it the other way around. You think we're going to lose out, and you are trying to throw me off the scent. You had a long talk with Colonel Baldwin this morning—I kept cases on that, too—and you figured that you'd make money by seesawing again. I'm glad to be able to tell you that you are just about twenty-four hours too late."
The round-bodied banker righted his pivot-chair with a snap and his lips were puffed out like the lips of a swimmer who sees the saving plank drifting out of reach.
"You are wrong, Stanton; altogether wrong!" he protested. "Baldwin was here because I sent for him to make a final attempt to swing him over to the compromise. You are doing me the greatest possible injustice!"
Stanton rose and made ready to go.
"I think that would be rather hard to do, Kinzie," he flung back. "Nobody loves a trimmmer. But in the present case you are not going to lose anything. We'll take your stock at par, as I promised you we would."
It was at this crisis that David Kinzie showed himself as the exponent of the saying that every man has his modicum of saving grace, by smiting upon the arm of his chair and glaring up at the promoter.
"There's another promise of yours that you've got to remember, too, Stanton," he argued hoarsely. "You've got to hold Dexter Baldwin harmless!"
Stanton's smile was a mask of pure malice. "I've made you no definite promise as to that; but you shall have one now. I'll promise to break Baldwin in two and throw him and his ranchmen backers out of the Timanyoni. That's what you get for playing fast and loose with two people at the same time. When you look over your paying teller's statement for the day, you'll see that I have withdrawn our account from your tin-horn money shop. Good-day."
Five minutes later the promoter was squared before his own desk in the office across the street and was hastily scribbling a telegram while a messenger boy waited. It was addressed to Sheriff Macauley, at Lawrenceville, and the wording of it showed how completely Stanton was ignoring Banker Kinzie's investigations.
Your man Montague Smith is here, known as John Smith, secretary and treasurer Timanyoni High Line Company. Wire authority quick to chief police Brewster for his arrest and send deputy with requisition. Rush or you lose him.Crawford Stanton.
Your man Montague Smith is here, known as John Smith, secretary and treasurer Timanyoni High Line Company. Wire authority quick to chief police Brewster for his arrest and send deputy with requisition. Rush or you lose him.
Crawford Stanton.
He let the boy go with this, but immediately set to work on another which was addressed to the great man whose private car, returning from the Pacific Coast, was due to reach Denver by the evening Union Pacific train. This second message he translated laboriously into cipher, working it out word by word from a worn code book taken from the safe. But the copy from which he translated, and which, after the cipher was made, he carefully destroyed, read thus:
The obstacle is removed. M'Graw and his men will take possession to-night and hold until we can make the turn.Stanton.
The obstacle is removed. M'Graw and his men will take possession to-night and hold until we can make the turn.
Stanton.
Convinced by Verda Richlander's telephone message to the construction camp that he stood in no immediate danger, Smith spent the heel of the afternoon in the High Line offices, keeping in wire touch with Stillings, whom he had sent on a secret mission to Red Butte, and with Williams at the dam.
Colonel Baldwin, as he learned from Martin, had gone to attend the funeral of one of his neighbors, and was thus, for the moment, out of reach. Smith told himself that the colonel's presence or absence made little difference. The High Line enterprise was on the knees of the gods. If Williams could pull through in time, if the river-swelling storms should hold off, if Stanton should delay his final raid past the critical hour—and there was now good reason to hope that all of these contingencies were probable—the victory was practically won.
But in another field the fighting secretary, denying himself in the privacy of his office to everybody but Martin, found small matter for rejoicing. It was one of life's ironies that the metamorphosis which had shown him, among other things, the heights and depths of a pure sentiment had apparently deprived him of the power to awaken it in the woman he loved.
It was thus that he was interpreting Corona Baldwin's attitude. She had recognized the transformation as a thing in process, and had been interested in it as a human experiment. Though it was chiefly owing to her beckoning that he had stepped out of the working ranks at the construction camp, he felt that he had never measured up to her ideals, and that her influence over him, so far as it was exerted consciously, was as impersonal as that of the sun on a growing plant. She had wished objectively to see the experiment succeed, and had been willing to use such means as had come to hand to make it succeed. For this cause, he concluded, with a curiously bitter taste in his mouth, her interest in the human experiment was his best warrant for shutting the door upon his love dream. Sentiment, the world over, has little sympathy with laboratory processes, and the woman who loves does not apply acid tests and call the object of her love a coward.
Letting the sting of the epithet have its full effect, he admitted that he was a coward. He had lacked the finer quality of courage when he had spirited Jibbey away, and he was lacking it again, now, in accepting the defensive alliance with Verda Richlander. He had not shown himself at the hotel since his return from the long drive with Starbuck, and the reason for it was that he knew his relations with Verda had now become an entanglement from which he was going to find it exceedingly difficult to release himself. She had served him, had most probably lied for him; and he assured himself, again with the bitter taste in his mouth, that there would be a price to pay.
It is through such doors of disheartenment that temptation finds its easiest entrance. For a dismal hour the old life, with its conventional enjoyments and limitations, its banalities, its entire freedom from the prickings of the larger ambitions and its total blindness on the side of broadening horizons and higher ideals, became a thing most ardently to be desired, a welcome avenue of escape from the toils and turmoils and the growing-pains of all the metamorphoses. What if a return to it should still be possible? What if, surrendering himself voluntarily, he should go back to Lawrenceville and fight it out with Watrous Dunham in the courts? Was there not more than an even chance that Dunham had offered the large reward for his apprehension merely to make sure that he would not return? Was it not possible that the thing the crooked president least desired was an airing of his iniquitous business methods in the courts?
Smith closed his desk at six o'clock and went across to the hotel to dress for dinner. The day of suspense was practically at an end and disaster still held aloof; was fairly outdistanced in the race, as it seemed. Williams's final report had been to the effect that the concrete-pouring was completed, and the long strain was off. Smith went to his rooms, and, as once before and for a similar reason, he laid his dress clothes out on the bed. He made sure that he would be required to dine with Verda Richlander, and he was stripping his coat when he heard a tap at the door and Jibbey came in.
"Glad rags, eh?" said theblaséone, with a glance at the array on the bed. "I've just run up to tell you that you needn't. Verda's dining with the Stantons, and she wants me to keep you out of sight until afterward. By and by, when she's foot-loose, she wants to see you in the mezzanine. Isn't there some quiet little joint where we two can go for a bite? You know the town, and I don't."
Smith put his coat on and together they circled the square to Frascati's, taking a table in the main café. While they were giving their dinner order, Starbuck came in and joined them, and Smith was glad. For reasons which he could scarcely have defined, he was relieved not to have to talk to Jibbey alone, and Starbuck played third hand admirably, taking kindly to the sham black sheep, and filling him up, in quiet, straight-faced humor, with many and most marvellous tales of the earlier frontier.
At the end of the meal, while Jibbey was still content to linger, listening open-mouthed to Starbuck's romancings, Smith excused himself and returned to the hotel. He had scarcely chosen his lounging-chair in a quiet corner of the mezzanine before Miss Richlander came to join him.
"It has been a long day, hasn't it?" she began evenly. "You have been busy with your dam, I suppose, but I—I have had nothing to do but to think, and that is something that I don't often allow myself to do. You have gone far since that night last May when you telephoned me that you would come up to the house later—and then broke your promise, Montague."
"In a way, I suppose I have," he admitted.
"You have, indeed. You are a totally different man."
"In what way, particularly?"
"In every conceivable way. If one could believe in transmigration, one would say that you had changed souls with some old, hard-hitting, rough-riding ancestor. Mr. Stanton has just been telling me the story of how, when you first came here, you fought barehanded with three miners somewhere back in the hills."
A bleak little smile of reminiscence wrinkled at the corners of the fighter's eyes.
"Did he tell you that I knocked them out—all three of them?" he asked.
"He said you beat them shamefully; and I tried to imagine you doing such a thing, and couldn't. Have your ambitions changed, too?"
"I am not sure now that I had any ambitions in that other life."
"Oh, yes, you had," she went on smoothly. "In the 'other life', as you call it, you would have been quite willing to marry a woman who could assure you a firm social standing and money enough to put you on a footing with other men of your capabilities. You wouldn't be willing to do that now, would you?—leaving the sentiment out as you used to leave it out then?"
"No, I hardly think I should."
Her laugh was musically low and sweet, and only mildly derisive.
"You are thinking that it is change of environment, wider horizons, and all that, which has changed you, Montague; but I know better. It is a woman, and, as you may remember, I have met her—twice." Then, with a faint glow of spiteful fire in the magnificent eyes: "How can you make yourself believe that she is pretty?"
He shrugged one shoulder in token of the utter uselessness of discussion in that direction.
"Sentiment?" he queried. "I think we needn't go into that, at this late day, Verda. It is a field that neither of us entered, or cared to enter, in the days that are gone. If I say that Corona Baldwin has—quite unconsciously on her part, I must ask you to believe—taught me what love means, that ought to be enough."
Again she was laughing softly.
"You seem to have broadly forgotten the old proverb about a woman scorned. What have you to expect from me after making such an admission as that?"
Smith pulled himself together and stood the argument firmly upon its unquestionable footing.
"Let us put all these indirections aside and be for the moment merely a man and a woman, as God made us, Verda," he said soberly. "You know, and I know, that there was never any question of love involved in our relations past and gone. We might have married, but in that case neither of us would have gotten or exacted anything more than the conventional decencies and amenities. We mustn't try to make believe at this late day. You had no illusions about me when I was Watrous Dunham's hired man; you haven't any illusions about me now."
"Perhaps not," was the calm rejoinder. "And yet to-day I have lied to save you from those who are trying to crush you."
"I told you not to do that," he rejoined quickly.
"I know you did; and yet, when you went away this morning you knew perfectly well that I was going to do it if I should get the opportunity. Didn't you, Montague?"
He nodded slowly; common honesty demanded that much.
"Very well; you accepted the service, and I gave it freely. Mr. Kinzie believes now that you are another Smith—not the one who ran away from Lawrenceville last May. Tell me: would the other woman have done as much if the chance had fallen to her?"
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I hope not," but he did not say it. Instead, he said: "But you don't really care, Verda; in the way you are trying to make me believe you do."
"Possibly not; possibly I am wholly selfish in the matter and am only looking for some loophole of escape."
"Escape? From whom?"
She looked away and shook her head. "From Watrous Dunham, let us say. You didn't suspect that, did you? It is so, nevertheless. My father desires it; and I suppose Watrous Dunham would like to have my money—you know I have something in my own right. Perhaps this may help to account for some other things—for your trouble, for one. You were in his way, you see. But never mind that: there are other matters to be considered now. Though Mr. Kinzie has been put off the track, Mr. Stanton hasn't. I have earned Mr. Stanton's ill-will because I wouldn't tell him about you, and this evening, at table, he took it out on me."
"In what way?"
"He gave me to understand, very plainly, that he had done something; that there was a sensation in prospect for all Brewster. He was so exultantly triumphant that it fairly frightened me. The fact that he wasn't afraid to show some part of his hand to me—knowing that I would be sure to tell you—makes me afraid that the trap has already been set for you."
"In other words, you think he has gone over Kinzie's head and has telegraphed to Lawrenceville?"
"Montague, I'm almost certain of it!"
Smith stood up and put his hands behind him.
"Which means that I have only a few hours, at the longest," he said quietly. And then: "There is a good bit to be done, turning over the business of the office, and all that: I've been putting it off from day to day, saying that there would be time enough to set my house in order after the trap had been sprung. Now I am like the man who has put off the making of his will until it is too late. Will you let me thank you very heartily and vanish?"
"What shall you do?" she asked.
"Set my house in order, as I say—as well as I can in the time that remains. There are others to be considered, you know."
"Oh; the plain-faced little ranch girl among them, I suppose?"
"No; thank God, she is out of it entirely—in the way you mean," he broke out fervently.
"You mean that you haven't spoken to her—yet?"
"Of course I haven't. Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?"
"But you are not really guilty."
"That doesn't make any difference: Watrous Dunham will see to it that I get what he has planned to give me."
She was tapping an impatient tattoo on the carpet with one shapely foot.
"Why don't you turn this new leaf of yours back and go home and fight it out with Watrous Dunham, once for all?" she suggested.
"I shall probably go, fast enough, when Macauley or one of his deputies gets here with the extradition papers," he returned. "But as to fighting Dunham, without money——"
She looked up quickly, and this time there was no mistaking the meaning of the glow in the magnificent brown eyes.
"Your friends have money, Montague—plenty of it. All you have to do is to say that you will defend yourself. I am not sure that Watrous Dunham couldn't be made to take your place in the prisoner's dock, or that you couldn't be put in his place in the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. You have captured Tucker Jibbey, and that means Tucker's father; and my father—well, when it comes to the worst, my father always does what I want him to. It's his one weakness."
For one little instant Smith felt the solid ground slipping from beneath his feet. Here was a way out, and his quick mentality was showing him that it was a perfectly feasible way. As Verda Richlander's husband and Josiah Richlander's son-in-law, he could fight Dunham and win. And the reward: once more he could take his place in the small Lawrenceville world, and settle down to the life of conventional good report and ease which he had once thought the acme of any reasonable man's aspirations. But at the half-yielding moment a word of Corona Baldwin's flashed into his brain and turned the scale: "Itdidhappen in your case ... giving you a chance to grow and expand, and to break with all the old traditions ... and the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose." It was the reincarnated Smith who met the look in the beautiful eyes and made answer.
"No," was the sober decision; and then he gave his reasons. "If I could do what you propose, I shouldn't be worth the powder it would take to drive a bullet through me, Verda, for now, you see, I know what love means. You say I have changed, and Ihavechanged: I can imagine the past-and-gone J. Montague jumping at the chance you are offering. But the mill will never grind with the water that is past: I'll take what is coming to me, and try to take it like a man. Good-night—and good-by." And he turned his back upon the temptation and went away.
Fifteen minutes later he was in his office in the Kinzie Building, trying in vain to get Colonel Baldwin on the distance wire; trying also—and also in vain—to forget the recent clash and break with Verda Richlander. He had called it a temptation at the moment, but perhaps it was scarcely that. It was more like a final effort of the man who had been to retransform the man who was. For a single instant the doors of all his former ambitions had stood open. He saw how Josiah Richlander's money and influence, directed by Verda's compelling demands, could be used to break Dunham; and that done, all the rest would be easy, all the paths to the success he had once craved would be made smooth.
On the other hand, there was everything to lose, and nothing, as the world measures results, to be gained. In a few hours at the furthest the good name he had earned in Brewster would be hopelessly lost, and, so far as human foresight could prefigure, there was nothing ahead but loss and bitter disgrace. In spite of all this, while the long-distance "central" was still assuring him that the Hillcrest wire was busy, he found time to be fiercely glad that the choice had been only a choice offered and not a choice accepted. For love's sake, if for no higher motive, he would go down like a man, fighting to the end for the right to live and think and love as a man.
He was jiggling the switch of the desk 'phone for the twentieth time in the effort to secure the desired line of communication with Baldwin when a nervous step echoed in the corridor and the door opened to admit William Starbuck. There was red wrath in the mine owner's ordinarily cold eyes when he flung himself into a chair and eased the nausea of his soul in an outburst of picturesque profanity.
"The jig's up—definitely up, John," he was saying, when his speech became lucid enough to be understood. "We know now what Stanton's 'other string' was. A half-hour ago, a deputy United States marshal, with a posse big enough to capture a town, took possession of the dam and stopped the work. He says it's a court order from Judge Lorching at Red Butte, based on the claims of that infernal paper railroad!"
Smith pushed the telephone aside.
"But it's too late!" he protested. "The dam is completed; Williams 'phoned me before I went to dinner. All that remains to be done to save the charter is to shut the spillways and let the water back up so that it will flow into the main ditch!"
"Right there's where they've got us!" was the rasping reply. "They won't let Williams touch the spillway gates, and they're not going to let him touch them until after we have lost out on the time limit! Williams's man says they've put the seal of the court on the machinery and have posted armed guards everywhere. Wouldn't that make you run around in circles and yelp like a scalded dog?"
When the full meaning of Stanton'scouphad thus set itself forth in terms unmistakable, Smith put his elbows on the desk and propped his head in his hands. It was not the attitude of dejection; it was rather a trance-like rigor of concentration, with each and all of the newly emergent powers once more springing alive to answer the battle-call. At the desk-end Starbuck sat with his hands locked over one knee, too disheartened to roll a cigarette, normal solace for all woundings less than mortal. After a minute or two Smith jerked himself around to face the news-bringer.
"Does Colonel Baldwin know?" he asked.
"Sure! That's the worst of it. Didn't I tell you? After he got back from Stuart's funeral he drove out to the dam, reaching the works just ahead of the trouble. When M'Graw and the posse outfit showed up, the colonel got it into his head that the whole thing was merely another trick of Stanton's—a fake. Ginty, the quarry boss, brought the news to town. He says there was a bloody mix-up, and at the end of it the colonel and Williams were both under arrest for resisting the officers."
Smith nodded thoughtfully. "Of course; that was just what was needed. With the president and the chief of construction locked up, and the wheels blocked for the next twenty-four hours, our charter will be gone."
"This world and another, and then the fireworks," Starbuck threw in. "With the property all roped up in a law tangle, and those stock options of yours due to fall in, it looks as if a few prominent citizens of the Timanyoni would have to take to the high grass and the tall timber. It sure does, John."
"The colonel was not entirely without his warrant for putting up a fight," Smith went on, after another reflective minute. "Do you know, Billy, I have been expecting something of this kind—and expecting it to be a fake. That's why I sent Stillings to Red Butte; to keep watch of Judge Lorching's court. Stillings was to 'phone me if Lorching issued an order."
"And he hasn't phoned you?"
"No; but that doesn't prove anything. The order may have been issued, and Stillings may have tried to let us know. There are a good many ways in which a man's mouth may be stopped—when there are no scruples on the other side."
"Then you think there is no doubt that the court order is straight, and that this man M'Graw is really a deputy marshal and has the law for what he is doing?"
"In the absence of any proof to the contrary, we are obliged to believe it—or at least to accept it. But we're not dead yet.... Billy, it's running in my mind that we've got to go out there and clean up Mr. M'Graw and his crowd."
Starbuck threw up his hands and made a noise like a dry wagon-wheel.
"Holy smoke!—go up against the whole United States?" he gasped.
Smith's grin showed his strong, even teeth.
"Starbuck, you remember what I told you one night?—the night I dragged you up to my rooms in the hotel and gave you a hint of the reason why I had no business to make love to Corona Baldwin?"
"Yep."
"Well, the time has come when I may as well fill out the blanks in the story for you. The night I left my home city in the Middle West I was called down to the bank of which I was the cashier and was shown how I was going to be dropped into a hole for a hundred thousand dollars of the bank's money; a loan which I had made as cashier in the absence of the president, but which had been authorized, verbally, by the president before he went away."
"A scapegoat, eh? There have been others. Go on."
"It was a frame-up, all around. The loan had been made to a friend of mine for the express purpose of smashing him—that was the president's object in letting it go through. Unluckily, I held a few shares of stock in my friend's company: and there you have it. Unless the president would admit that he had authorized the loan, I was in for an offense that could be easily twisted into embezzlement."
"The president stacked the cards on you?"
"He did. It was nine o'clock at night and we were alone together in the bank. He wanted me to shoulder the blame and run away; offered me money to go with. One word brought on another; and finally, when I dared him to press the police-alarm button, he pulled a gun on me. I hit him, just once, Billy, and he dropped like a stone."
"Great Moses!—dead?"
"I thought he was. His heart had stopped, and I couldn't get him up. Picture it, if you can—but you can't. I had never struck a man in anger before in all my life. My first thought was to go straight to the police station and make a clean breast of it. Then I saw how impossible it was going to be to dodge the penitentiary, and I bolted; jumped a freight-train and hoboed my way out of town. Two days later I got hold of a newspaper and found that I hadn't killed Dunham; but I was outlawed, just the same, and there was a reward offered."
Starbuck was nodding soberly. "You sure have been carrying a back-load all these weeks, John, never knowing what minute was going to be the next. Now I know what you meant when you hinted around about this Miss Rich-pastures. She knows you and she could give you away if she wanted to. Has she done it, John?"
"No; but her father has. Kinzie sent one of his clerks out to the Topaz to hunt up the old man. Kinzie hasn't done anything, himself, I guess; Miss Richlander told me that much; but Stanton has got hold of the end of the thread, and, while I don't know it definitely, it is practically certain he has sent a wire. If the Brewster police are not looking for me at this moment, they will be shortly. That brings us back to this High Line knock-out. As the matter stands, I'm the one man in our outfit who has absolutely nothing to lose. I am an officer of the company, and no legal notice has been served upon me. Can you fill out the remainder of the order?"
"No, I'll be switched if I can!"
"Then I'll fill it for you. So far as I know—legally, you understand—this raid has never been authorized by the courts; at least, that is what I'm going to assume until the proper papers have been served on me. Therefore I am free to strike one final blow for the colonel and his friends, and I'm going to do it, if I can dodge the police long enough to get action."
Starbuck's tilting chair righted itself with a crash.
"You've thought it all out?—just how to go at it?"
"Every move; and every one of them a straight bid for a second penitentiary sentence."
"All right," said the mine owner briefly. "Count me in."
"For information only," was the brusque reply. "You have a stake in the country and a good name to maintain. I have nothing. But you can tell me a few things. Are our workmen still on the ground?"
"Yes. Ginty said there were only a few stragglers who came to town with him. Most of the two shifts are staying on to get their pay—or until they find out that they aren't going to get it."
"And the colonel and Williams: the marshal is holding them out at the dam?"
"Uh-huh; locked up in the office shack, Ginty says."
"Good. I shan't need the colonel, but I shall need Williams. Now another question: you know Sheriff Harding fairly well, don't you? What sort of a man is he?"
"Square as a die, and as nervy as they make 'em. When he gets a warrant to serve, he'll bring in his man, dead or alive."
"That's all I'll ask of him. Now go and find me an auto, and then you can fade away and get ready to prove a good, stoutalibi."
"Yes—like fits I will!" retorted the mine owner. "I told you once, John, that I was in this thing to a finish, and I meant it. Go on giving your orders."
"Very well; you've had your warning. The next thing is the auto. I want to catch Judge Warner before he goes to bed. I'll telephone while you're getting a car."
Starbuck had no farther to go than to the garage where he had put up his new car, and when he got it and drove to the Kinzie Building, Smith came out of the shadow of the entrance to mount beside him.
"Drive around to the garage again and let me try another 'phone," was the low-spoken request. "My wire isn't working."
The short run was quickly made, and Smith went to the garage office. A moment later a two-hundred-pound policeman strolled up to put a huge foot on the running-board of the waiting auto. Starbuck greeted him as a friend.
"Hello, Mac. How's tricks with you to-night?"
"Th' tricks are even, an' I'm tryin' to take th' odd wan," said the big Irishman. "'Tis a man named Smith I'm lookin' for, Misther Starbuck—J. Mon-tay-gue Smith; th' fi-nanshal boss av th' big ditch comp'ny. Have ye seen 'um?"
Starbuck, looking over the policeman's shoulder, could see Smith at the telephone in the garage office. Another man might have lost his head, but the ex-cow-puncher was of the chosen few whose wits sharpen handily in an emergency.
"He hangs out at the Hophra House a good part of the time in the evenings," he replied coolly. "Hop in and I'll drive you around."
Three minutes later the threatening danger was a danger pushed a little way into the future, and Starbuck was back at the garage curb waiting for Smith to come out. Through the window he saw Smith replacing the receiver on its hook, and a moment afterward he was opening the car door for his passenger.
"Did you make out to raise the judge?" he inquired, as Smith climbed in.
"Yes. He will meet me at his chambers in the court-house as soon as he can drive down from his house."
"What are you hoping to do, John? Judge Warner is only a circuit judge; he can't set an order of the United States court aside, can he?"
"No; but there is one thing that he can do. You may remember that I had a talk with him this morning at his house. I was trying then to cover all the chances, among them the possibility that Stanton would jump in with a gang of armed thugs at the last minute. We are going to assume that this is what has been done."
Starbuck set the car in motion and sent it spinning out of the side street, around the plaza, and beyond to the less brilliantly illuminated residence district—which was not the shortest way to the court-house.
"You mustn't pull Judge Warner's leg, John," he protested, breaking the purring silence after the business quarter had been left behind; "he's too good a man for that."
"I shall tell him the exact truth, so far as we know it," was the quick reply. "There is one chance in a thousand that we shall come out of this with the law—as well as the equities—on our side. I shall tell the judge that no papers have been served on us, and, so far as I know, they haven't. What are you driving all the way around here for?"
"This is one of the times when the longest way round is the shortest way home," Starbuck explained. "The bad news you were looking for 'has came'. While you were 'phoning in the garage I put one policeman wise—to nothing."
"He was looking for me?"
"Sure thing—and by name. We'll fool around here in the back streets until the judge has had time to show up. Then I'll drop you at the court-house and go hustle the sheriff for you. You'll want Harding, I take it?"
"Yes. I'm taking the chance that only the city authorities have been notified in my personal affair—not the county officers. It's a long chance, of course; I may be running my neck squarely into the noose. But it's all risk, Billy; every move in this night's game. Head up for the court-house. The judge will be there by this time."
Two minutes beyond this the car was drawing up to the curb on the mesa-facing side of the court-house square. There were two lighted windows in the second story of the otherwise darkened building, and Smith sprang to the sidewalk.
"Go now and find Harding, and have him bring one trusty deputy with him: I'll be ready by the time you get back," he directed; but Starbuck waited until he had seen Smith safely lost in the shadows of the pillared court-house entrance before he drove away.
Since Sheriff Harding had left his office in the county jail and had gone home to his ranch on the north side of the river some hours earlier, not a little precious time was consumed in hunting him up. Beyond this, there was another delay in securing the deputy. When Starbuck's car came to a stand for a second time before the mesa-fronting entrance of the court-house, Smith came quickly across the walk from the portal.
"Mr. Harding," he began abruptly, "Judge Warner has gone home and he has made me his messenger. There is a bit of sharp work to be done, and you'll need a strong posse. Can you deputize fifteen or twenty good men who can be depended upon in a fight and rendezvous them on the north-side river road in two hours from now?"
The sheriff, a big, bearded man who might have sat for the model of one of Frederic Remington's frontiersmen, took time to consider. "Is it a scrap?" he asked.
"It is likely to be. There are warrants to be served, and there will most probably be resistance. Your posse should be well armed."
"We'll try for it," was the decision. "On the north-side river road, you say? You'll want us mounted?"
"It will be better to take horses. We could get autos, but Judge Warner agrees with me that the thing had better be done quietly and without making too much of a stir in town."
"All right," said the man of the law. "Is that all?"
"No, not quite all. The first of the warrants is to be served here in Brewster—upon Mr. Crawford Stanton. Your deputy will probably find him at the Hophra House. Here is the paper: it is a bench warrant of commitment on a charge of conspiracy, and Stanton is to be locked up. Also you are to see to it that your jail telephone is out of order; so that Stanton won't be able to make any attempt to get a hearing and bail before to-morrow."
"That part of it is mighty risky," said Harding. "Does the judge know about that, too?"
"He does; and for the ends of pure justice, he concurs with me—though, of course, he couldn't give a mandatory order."
The sheriff turned to his jail deputy, who had descended from the rumble seat in the rear.
"You've heard the dope, Jimmie," he said shortly. "Go and get His Nobs and lock him up. And if he wants to be yelling 'Help!' and sending for his lawyer or somebody, why, the telephone's takin' a lay-off.Savvy?"
The deputy nodded and turned upon his heel, stuffing the warrant for Stanton's arrest into his pocket as he went. Smith swung up beside Starbuck, saying: "In a couple of hours, then, Mr. Harding; somewhere near the bridge approach on the other side of the river."
Starbuck had started the motor and was bending forward to adjust the oil feed when the sheriff left them.
"You seem to have made a ten-strike with Judge Warner," the ex-cow-puncher remarked, replacing the flash-lamp in its seat pocket.
"Judge Warner is a man in every inch of him; but there is something behind this night's work that I don't quite understand," was the quick reply. "I had hardly begun to state the case when the judge interrupted me. 'I know,' he said. 'I have been waiting for you people to come and ask for relief.' What do you make of that, Billy?"
"I don't know; unless somebody in Stanton's outfit has welshed. Shaw might have done it. He has been to Bob Stillings, and Stillings says he is sore at Stanton for some reason. Shaw was trying to get Stillings to agree to drop the railroad case against him, and Bob says he made some vague promise of help in the High Line business if the railroad people would agree not to prosecute."
"There is a screw loose somewhere; I know by the way Judge Warner took hold. When I proposed to swear out the warrant for Stanton's arrest, he said, 'I can't understand, Mr. Smith, why you haven't done this before,' and he sat down and filled out the blank. But we can let that go for the present. How are you going to get me across the river without taking me through the heart of the town and giving the Brewster police a shy at me?"
Starbuck's answer was wordless. With a quick twist of the pilot wheel he sent the car skidding around the corner, using undue haste, as it seemed, since they had two hours before them. A few minutes farther along the lights of the town had been left behind and the car was speeding swiftly westward on a country road paralleling the railway track; the road over which Smith had twice driven with the kidnapped Jibbey.
"I'm still guessing," the passenger ventured, when the last of the railroad distance signals had flashed to the rear. And then: "What's the frantic hurry, Billy?"
Starbuck was running with the muffler cut out, but now he cut it in and the roar of the motor sank to a humming murmur.
"I thought so," he remarked, turning his head to listen. "You didn't notice that police whistle just as we were leaving the court-house, did you?—nor the answers to it while we were dodging through the suburbs? Somebody has marked us down and passed the word, and now they're chasing us with a buzz-wagon. Don't you hear it?"
By this time Smith could hear the sputtering roar of the following car only too plainly.
"It's a big one," he commented. "You can't outrun it, Billy; and, besides, there is nowhere to run to in this direction."
Again Starbuck's reply translated itself into action. With a skilful touch of the controls he sent the car ahead at top speed, and for a matter of ten miles or more held a diminishing lead in the race through sheer good driving and an accurate knowledge of the road and its twistings and turnings. Smith knew little of the westward half of the Park which they were approaching, and the little was not encouraging. Beyond Little Butte and the old Wire Silver mine the road they were traversing would become a cart track in the mountains; and there was no outlet to the north save by means of the railroad bridge at Little Butte station.
Throughout the race the pursuers had been gradually gaining, and by the time the forested bulk of Little Butte was outlining itself against the clouded sky on the left, the headlights of the oncoming police car were in plain view to the rear. Worse still, there were three grade crossings of the railroad track just ahead in the stretch of road which rounded the toe of the mountain; and from somewhere up the valley and beyond the railroad bridge came the distance-softened whistle of a train.
Starbuck set a high mark for himself as a courageous driver of motor-cars when he came to the last of the three road crossings. Jerking the car around sharply at the instant of track-crossing, he headed straight out over the ties for the railroad bridge. It was a courting of death. To drive the bridge at racing speed was hazardous enough, but to drive it thus in the face of a down-coming train seemed nothing less than madness.
It was after the car had shot into the first of the three bridge spans that the pursuers pulled up and opened fire. Starbuck bent lower over his wheel, and Smith clutched for handholds. Far up the track on the north side of the river a headlight flashed in the darkness, and the hoarse blast of a locomotive, whistling for the bridge, echoed and re-echoed among the hills.
Starbuck, tortured because he could not remember what sort of an approach the railway track made to the bridge on the farther side, drove for his life. With the bridge fairly crossed he found himself on a high embankment; and the oncoming train was now less than half a mile away. To turn out on the embankment was to hurl the car to certain destruction. To hold on was to take a hazardous chance of colliding with the train. Somewhere beyond the bridge approach there was a road; so much Starbuck could recall. If they could reach its crossing before the collision should come——
They did reach it, by what seemed to Smith a margin of no more than the length of the heavy freight train which went jangling past them a scant second or so after the car had been wrenched aside into the obscure mesa road. They had gone a mile or more on the reverse leg of the long down-river détour before Starbuck cut the speed and turned the wheel over to his seat-mate.
"Take her a minute while I get the makings," he said, dry-lipped, feeling in his pockets for tobacco and the rice-paper. Then he added: "Holy Solomon! I never wanted a smoke so bad in all my life!"
Smith's laugh was a chuckle.
"Gets next to you—after the fact—doesn't it? That's where we split. I had my scare before we hit the bridge, and it tasted like a mouthful of bitter aloes. Does this road take us back up the river?"
"It takes us twenty miles around through the Park and comes in at the head of Little Creek. But we have plenty of time. You told Harding two hours, didn't you?"
"Yes; but I must have a few minutes at Hillcrest before we get action, Billy."
Starbuck took the wheel again and said nothing until the roundabout race had been fully run and he was easing the car down the last of the hills into the Little Creek road. There had been three-quarters of an hour of skilful driving over a bad road to come between Smith's remark and its reply, but Starbuck apparently made no account of the length of the interval.
"You're aiming to go and see Corry?" he asked, while the car was coasting to the hill bottom.
"Yes."
With a sudden flick of the controls and a quick jamming of the brakes, Starbuck brought the car to a stand just as it came into the level road.
"We're man to man here under the canopy, John; and Corry Baldwin hasn't got any brother," he offered gravely. "I'm backing you in this business fight for all I'm worth—for Dick Maxwell's sake and the colonel's, and maybe a little bit for the sake of my own ante of twenty thousand. And I'm ready to back you in this old-home scrap with all the money you'll need to make your fight. But when it comes to the little girl it's different. Have you any good and fair right to hunt up Corry Baldwin while things are shaping themselves up as they are?"
Since Smith had made the acquaintance of the absolute ego he had acquired many things new and strange, among them a great ruthlessness in the pursuit of the desired object, and an equally large carelessness for consequences past the instant of attainment. None the less, he met the shrewd inquisition fairly.
"Give it a name," he said shortly.
"I will: I'll give it the one you gave it a while back. You said you were an outlaw, on two charges: embezzlement and assault. We'll let the assault part of it go. Even a pretty humane sort of fellow may have to kill somebody now and then and call it all in the day's work. But the other thing doesn't taste good."
"I didn't embezzle anything, Billy. I thought I made that plain."
"So you did. But you also made it plain that the home court would be likely to send you up for it, guilty or not guilty. And with a thing like that hanging over you ... you see, I know Corry Baldwin, John. If you put it up to her to-night, and she happens to fall in with your side of it—which is what you're aiming to make her do—all hell won't keep her from going back home with you and seeing you through!"
"Good God, Billy! If I thought she loved me well enough to do that! But think a minute. It may easily happen that this is my last chance. I may never see her again. I said I wouldn't tell her—that I loved her too well to tell her ... but now the final pinch has come, and I——"
"And that isn't all," Starbuck went on relentlessly. "There's this Miss Rich-acres. You say there's nothing to it, there, but you've as good as admitted that she's been lying to Dave Kinzie for you. Your hands ain't clean, John; not clean enough to let you go to Hillcrest to-night."
Smith groped in his pockets, found a cigar and lighted it. Perhaps he was recalling his own words spoken to Verda Richlander only a few hours earlier: "Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?" And yet that was just what he was about to do—or had been about to do.
"Pull out to the side of the road and we'll kill what time there is to kill right here," he directed soberly. And then: "What you say is right as right, Billy. Once more, I guess, I was locoed for the minute. Forget it; and while you're about it, forget Miss Richlander, too. Luckily for her, she is out of it—as far out of it as I am."
The Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its upper and lower reaches, becomes a placid river of the plain at Brewster, dividing its flow among sandy islets, and broadening in its bed to make the long bridge connecting the city with the grass-land mesas a low, trestled causeway. On the northern bank of the river the Brewster street, of which the bridge is a prolongation, becomes a country road, forking a few hundred yards from the bridge approach to send one of its branchings northward among the Little Creek ranches and another westward up the right bank of the stream.
At this fork of the road, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the night of alarms, Sheriff Harding's party of special deputies began to assemble; mounted ranchmen for the greater part, summoned by the rural telephones and drifting in by twos and threes from the outlying grass-lands. Under each man's saddle-flap was slung the regulation weapon of the West—a scabbarded repeating rifle; and the small troop bunching itself in the river road looked serviceably militant and businesslike.
While Harding was counting his men and appointing his lieutenants an automobile rolled silently down the mesa road from the north and came to a stand among the horses. The sheriff drew rein beside the car and spoke to one of the two occupants of the double seat, saying:
"Well, Mr. Smith, we're all here."
"How many?" was the curt question.
"Twenty."
"Good. Here is your authority"—handing the legal papers to the officer. "Before we go in you ought to know the facts. A few hours ago a man named M'Graw, calling himself a deputy United States marshal and claiming to be acting under instructions from Judge Lorching's court in Red Butte, took possession of our dam and camp. On the even chance that he isn't what he claims to be, we are going to arrest him and every man in his crowd. Are you game for it?"
"I'm game to serve any papers that Judge Warner's got the nerve to issue," was the big man's reply.
"That's the talk; that's what I hoped to hear you say. We may have the law on our side, and we may not; but we certainly have the equities. Was Stanton arrested?"
"He sure was. Strothers found him in the Hophra House bar, and the line of talk he turned loose would have set a wet blanket afire. Just the same, he had to go along with Jimmie and get himself locked up."
"That is the first step; now if you're ready, we'll take the next."
Harding rode forward to marshal his troop, and when the advance began Starbuck shut off his car lamps and held his place at the rear of the straggling column, juggling throttle and spark until the car kept even pace with the horses and the low humming of the motor was indistinguishable above the muffled drumming of hoof-beats.
For the first mile or so the midnight silence was unbroken save by the subdued progress noises and the murmurings of the near-by river in its bed. Once Smith took the wheel while Starbuck rolled and lighted a cigarette, and once again, in obedience to a word from the mine owner, he turned the flash-light upon the gasolene pressure-gauge. In the fulness of time it was Starbuck who harked back to the talk which had been so abruptly broken off at the waiting halt in the Little Creek road.
"Let's not head into this ruction with an unpicked bone betwixt us, John," he began gently. "Maybe I said too much, back yonder at the foot of the hill."
"No; you didn't say too much," was the low-toned reply. And then: "Billy, I've had a strange experience this summer; the strangest a man ever lived through, I believe. A few months ago I was jerked out of my place in life and set down in another place where practically everything I had learned as a boy and man had to be forgotten. It was as if my life had been swept clean of everything that I knew how to use—like a house gutted of its well-worn and familiar furniture, and handed back to its tenant to be refitted with whatever could be found and made to serve. I don't know that I'm making it understandable to you, but——"
"Yes, you are," broke in the man at the wheel. "I've had to turn two or three little double somersaults myself in the years that are gone."
"They used to call me 'Monty-Boy,' back there in Lawrenceville, and I fitted the name," Smith went on. "I was neither better nor worse than thousands of other home-bred young fellows just like me, nor different from them in any essential way. I had my little tin-basin round of work and play, and I lived in it. I've spent half an hour, many a time, in a shop picking out the exactly right shade in a tie to wear with the socks that I had, perhaps, spent another half-hour in selecting."
"I'm getting you," said Starbuck, not without friendly sympathy. "Go on."
"Then, suddenly, as I have said, the house was looted. And, quite as suddenly, it grew and expanded and took on added rooms and spaces that I'd never dreamed of. I've had to fill it up as best I could, Billy: I couldn't put back any of the old things; they were so little and trivial and childish. And some of the things I've been putting in are fearfully raw and crude. I've just had to do the best I could—with an empty house. I found that I had a body that could stand man-sized hardship, and a kind of savage nerve that could give and take punishment, and a soul that could drive both body and nerve to the limit. Also, I've found out what it means to love a woman."
Starbuck checked the car's speed a little more to keep it well in the rear of the ambling cavalcade.
"That's your one best bet, John," he said soberly.
"It is. I've cleaned out another room since you called me down back yonder in the Little Creek road, Starbuck. I can't trust my own leadings any more; they are altogether too primitive and brutal; so I'm going to take hers. She'd send me into this fight that is just ahead of us, and all the other fights that are coming, with a heart big enough to take in the whole world. She said I'd understand, some day; that I'd know that the only great man is one who is too big to be little; who can fight without hating; who can die to make good, if that is the only way that offers."
"That's Corry Baldwin, every day in the week, John. They don't make 'em any finer than she is," was Starbuck's comment. And then: "I'm beginning to kick myself for not letting you go and have one more round-up with her. She's doing you good, right along."
"You didn't stop me," Smith affirmed; "you merely gave me a chance to stop myself. It's all over now, Billy, and my little race is about run. But whatever happens to me, either this night, or beyond it, I shall be a free man. You can't put handcuffs on a soul and send it to prison, you know. That is what Corona was trying to make me understand; and I couldn't—or wouldn't."
Harding had stopped to let the auto come up. Over a low hill just ahead the pole-bracketed lights at the dam were starring themselves against the sky, and the group of horsemen was halting at the head of the railroad trestle which marked the location of the north side unloading station.
From the halt at the trestle head, Harding sent two of his men forward to spy out the ground. Returning speedily, these two men reported that there were no guards on the north bank of the river, and that the stagings, which still remained in place on the down-stream face of the dam, were also unguarded. Thereupon Harding made his dispositions. Half of the posse was to go up the northern bank, dismounted, and rush the camp by way of the stagings. The remaining half, also on foot, was to cross at once on the railroad trestle, and to make its approach by way of the wagon road skirting the mesa foot. At an agreed-upon signal, the two detachments were to close in upon the company buildings in the construction camp, trusting to the surprise and the attack from opposite directions to overcome any disparity in numbers.
At Smith's urgings, Starbuck went with the party which crossed by way of the railroad trestle, Smith himself accompanying the sheriff's detachment. With the horses left behind under guard at the trestle head, the up-river approach was made by both parties simultaneously, though in the darkness, and with the breadth of the river intervening, neither could see the movements of the other. Smith kept his place beside Harding, and to the sheriff's query he answered that he was unarmed.
"You've got a nerve," was all the comment Harding made, and at that they topped the slight elevation and came among the stone débris in the north-side quarries.
From the quarry cutting the view struck out by the camp mastheads was unobstructed. The dam and the uncompleted power-house, still figuring to the eye as skeleton masses of form timbering, lay just below them, and on the hither side the flooding torrent thundered through the spillway gates, which had been opened to their fullest capacity. Between the quarry and the northern dam-head ran the smooth concreted channel of the main ditch canal, with the water in the reservoir lake still lapping several feet below the level of its entrance to give assurance that, until the spillways should be closed, the charter-saving stream would never pour through the canal.
On the opposite side of the river the dam-head and the camp street were deserted, but there were lights in the commissary, in the office shack, and in Blue Pete Simms's canteen doggery. From the latter quarter sounds of revelry rose above the spillway thunderings, and now and again a drunken figure lurched through the open door to make its way uncertainly toward the rank of bunk-houses.