Chapter VII: Part 7

"Nevertheless, he was right," Smith returned gloomily. Then: "I am about at the end of my rope, Colonel--the rope I warned you about when you brought me here and put me into the saddle; and I'm trying desperately to hang on until my job's done. When it is done, when Timanyoni High Line can stand fairly on its own feet and fight its own battles, I'm gone."

"Oh, no, you're not," denied the ranchman-president in generous protest. "I don't know--you've never told us--what sort of a kettle of hot water you've got into, but you have made a few solid friends here in the Timanyoni, John, and they are going to stand by you. And--just to show Dave Kinzie that nobody cares a whoop for what he says--you come on out home with me to-night and get away from this muddle for a few minutes. It'll do you a heap of good; you know it always does."

Smith shook his head reluctantly but firmly.

"Never again, Colonel. It can only be a matter of a few days now, and I'm not going to pull you, and your wife and daughter, into the limelight if I can help it."

Colonel Dexter got out of his chair and walked to the office window. When he came back it was to say: "Are they sure-enough chasing you, John?--for something that you have done? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"That is it--and they are nearly here. Now you know at least one of the reasons why I can't go with you to-night."

"I'll be shot if I do!" stormed the generous one. "I promised the Missus I'd bring you."

"You must make my excuses to her; and to Corona you may say that I am once more carrying a gun. She will understand."

"Which means, I take it, that you've been telling Corry more than you've told the rest of us. That brings on more talk, John. I haven't said a word before, have I?"

"No."

"Well, I'm going to say it now: I've got only just one daughter in the wide, wide world, John."

Smith stood up and put his hands behind him, facing the older man squarely.

"Colonel, I'd give ten years of my life, this minute, if I might go with you to Hillcrest this evening and tell Corona what I have been wanting to tell her ever since I have come to know what her love might make of me. The fact that I can't do it is the bitterest thing I have ever had to face, or can ever be made to face."

Colonel Baldwin fell back into his swing-chair and thrust his hands into his pockets.

"It beats the Dutch how things tangle themselves up for us poor mortals every little so-while," he commented, after a frowning pause. And then: "You haven't said anything like that to Corry, have you?"

"No."

"That was white, anyway. And now I suppose the other woman--this Miss Rich-some-thing-or-other over at the hotel--has come and dug you up and got you on the end of her trail-rope. That's the way it goes when a man mixes and mingles too much. You never can tell--"

"Hold on," Smith interposed. "Whatever else I may be, I'm not that kind of a scoundrel. I don't owe Miss Richlander anything that I can't pay without doing injustice to the woman I love. But in another way I am a scoundrel, Colonel. For the past two days I have been contemptible enough to play upon a woman's vanity merely for the sake of keeping her from talking too much."

The grizzled old ranchman shook his head sorrowfully.

"I didn't think that of you, John; I sure didn't. Why, that's what you might call a low-down, tin-horn sort of a game."

"It is just that, and I know it as well as you do. But it's the price I have to pay for my few days of grace. Miss Richlander knows the Stantons; they've made it their business to get acquainted with her. One word from her to Crawford Stanton, and a wire from him to my home town in the Middle West would settle me."

The older man straightened himself in his chair, and his steel-gray eyes blazed suddenly.

"Break away from 'em, John!" he urged. "Break it off short, and let 'em all do their damnedest! Away along at the first, Williams and I both said you wasn't a crooked crook, and I'm believing it yet. When it comes to the show-down, we'll all fight for you, and they'll have to bring a derrick along if they want to snatch you out of the Timanyoni. You go over yonder to the Hophra House and tell that young woman that the bridle's off, and she can talk all she wants to!"

"No," said Smith shortly. "I know what I am doing, and I shall go on as I have begun. It's the only way. Matters are desperate enough with us now, and if I should drop out----"

The telephone-bell was ringing, and Baldwin twisted his chair to bring himself within reach of the desk set. The message was a brief one and at its finish the ranchman-president was frowning heavily.

"By Jupiter! it does seem as if the bad luck all comes in a bunch!" he protested. "Williams was rushing things just a little too fast, and they've lost a whole section of the dam by stripping the forms before the concrete was set. That puts us back another twenty-four hours, at least. Don't that beat the mischief?"

Smith reached for his hat. "It's six o'clock," he said; "and Williams's form-strippers have furnished one more reason why I shouldn't keep Miss Richlander waiting for her dinner." And with that he cut the talk short and went his way.

Brewster being only a one-night stand on the long playing circuit between Denver and the Pacific coast, there was an open date at the opera-house, and with a blank evening before her, the Olympian beauty, making the _tete-a-tete_ dinner count for what it would, tightened her hold upon the one man available, demanding excitement. Nothing else offering, she suggested an evening auto drive, and Smith dutifully telephoned Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, and borrowed a runabout.

Being left to his own choice of routes after the start was made, he headed the machine up the river road, and the drive paused at the dam. Craving a new sensation, Miss Richlander had it in full measure when the machine had been braked to a stop at the construction camp. Williams, hoarse from much shouting and haggard-eyed for want of sleep, was driving his men fiercely in a fight against time. The night rise in the river had already set in, and the slumped section of concrete had left a broad gap through which the water threatened to pour, endangering not only the power-house directly beneath it, but also the main structure of the dam itself.

The stagings were black with men hurrying back and forth under the glare of the electrics, and the concrete gangs were laboring frantically to clear the wreck made by the crumbling mass, to the end that the carpenters might bulkhead the gap with timbers and planks to hold back the rising flood. The mixers had stopped temporarily, but the machinery was held in readiness to go into action the moment the debris should be removed and the new forms locked into place. Every now and then one of Williams's assistants, a red-headed young fellow with a voice like a fog-horn, took readings of the climbing river level from a gauge in the slack water, calling out the figures in a singsong chant: "Nineteen _six_! Nineteen six and a _quarter_! Nineteen six and a _half_!"

"Get a move, you fellows there on the stage!" yelled Williams. "She's coming up faster than usual to-night! Double pay if you get that bulkhead in before the tide wets your feet!"

Smith felt as if he ought to get out of the car and help, but there was nothing he could do. Miss Richlander had been silent for the better part of the drive from town, but now she began to talk.

"So this is what you left Lawrenceville for, is it, Montague?" she said, knitting her perfect brows at the hubbub and strife. "If I were not here, I believe you would be down there, struggling with the rest of them."

"I certainly should," he answered briefly, adding: "not that I should be of much use."

"There are a good many easier ways of making money," she offered, including the entire industrial strife in the implied detraction.

"This is a man's way, asking for all--and the best--there is in a man," he asserted. "You can't understand, of course; you have eaten the bread of profits and discount and interest all your life. But here is something really creative. The world will be the richer for what is being done here; more mouths can be filled and more backs clothed. That is the true test of wealth, and the only test."

"And you are willing to live in a raw wilderness for the sake of having a part in these crudities?"

"I may say that I had no choice, at first; it was this or nothing. But I may also say that whatever the future may do to me, I shall always have it to remember that for a little time I was a man, and not a tailor's model."

"Is that the way you are thinking now of your former life?" she gibed.

"It is the truth. The man you knew in Lawrenceville cared more for the set of a coat, for the color of a tie, for conventional ease and the little luxuries, than he did for his soul. And nobody thought enough of him to kick him alive and show him that he was strangling the only part of him that was at all worth saving."

"If your point of view appeals to me, as perhaps it does--as possibly it would to any woman who can appreciate masculinity in a man, even though it be of the crudest--the life that is giving it to you certainly does not," she replied, with a little lip-curling of scorn. Then: "You couldn't bring your wife to such a place as Brewster, Montague."

He had no answer for this, and none was needed. Williams had caught sight of the auto, and he came up, wiping his face with a red handkerchief.

"I thought it must be you," he said to Smith. "Thank the Lord, we're going to escape, this one more time! The bulkhead's in, and we'll be dumping concrete in another fifteen minutes. But it was a narrow squeak--an awful narrow squeak!"

Smith turned to his companion, saw permission in her eyes, and introduced Williams. Somewhat to Smith's surprise, Miss Verda evinced a suddenly awakened interest in the engineer and in his work, making him tell the story of the near-disaster. While he was telling it, the roar of another auto rose above the clamor on the stagings and Colonel Baldwin's gray roadster drew up beside the borrowed runabout. Smith gave one glance at the small, trimly coated figure in the mechanician's seat and ground his teeth in helpless fury.

In what followed he had little part or lot. Miss Richlander wished to see the construction battle at shorter range, and Williams was opening the door of the runabout. The colonel was afoot and was helping his daughter to alight. Smith swore a silent oath to keep his place, and he did it; but Williams was already introducing Baldwin and Corona to Miss Richlander. There was a bit of commonplace talk, and then the quartet walked down the embankment and out upon the finished portion of the dam, Williams explaining the near-disaster as they went.

Smith sat back behind the pilot-wheel of the runabout and waited. Not for a king's ransom would he have joined the group on the dam. He suspected shrewdly that Verda had already heard of Corona through the Stantons; that she was inwardly rejoicing at the new hold upon him which chance had flung in her way. At the end of Williams's fifteen minutes the rattle and grind of the mixers began. When the stream of concrete came pouring through the high-tilted spouts, Smith looked to see the colonel and Williams bringing the two women back to the camp level. What the light of the masthead arcs showed him was the figure of one of the women returning alone, while the two men and the other woman went on across the stagings to the farther river bank where the battery of mixers fed the swiftly moving lift.

Smith did not get out to go and meet the returning figure; his courage was not of that quality. But he could not pretend to be either asleep or dead when Corona came up between the two cars and spoke to him.

"You have nothing whatever to take back," she said, smiling up at him from her seat on the running-board of the roadster. "She is all you said she was--and more. She is gorgeously beautiful!"

Smith flung his freshly lighted cigar away and climbed out to sit beside her.

"What do you think of me?" he demanded bluntly.

"What should I think? Didn't I scold you for running away from her that first evening? I am glad you thought better of it afterward."

"I am not thinking better of it at all--in the way you mean."

"But Miss Richlander is," was the quiet reply.

"You have a right to say anything you please; and after it is all said, to say it again. I am not the man you have been taking me for; not in any respect. Your father knows now, and he will tell you."

"Colonel-daddy has told me one thing--the thing you told him to tell me. And I am sorry--sorry and disappointed."

He smiled morosely. "Billy Starbuck calls the Timanyoni a half-reformed gun-country, and from the very first he has been urging me to 'go heeled,' as he phrases it."

"It isn't the mere carrying of a gun," she protested. "With most men that would be only a prudent precaution for the leader in a fight like this one you are making. But it means more than that to you; it means a complete change of attitude toward your kind. Tell me if I am wrong."

"No; you are right. The time is coming when I shall be obliged to kill somebody. And I think I shall rather welcome it."

"Now you have gone so far away that I can hardly see you," she said softly. "'Once in a blue moon,' you said, the impossible might happen. It _did_ happen in your case, didn't it?--giving you a chance to grow and expand and to break with all the old traditions, whatever they were. And the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose. You have all the abilities; you can reach out and take what other men have to beg for. Once you thought you would take only the best, and then you grew so fast that we could hardly keep you in sight. But now you are meaning to take the worst."

"I don't understand," he said soberly.

"You will understand some day," she asserted, matching his sober tone. "When that time comes, you will know that the only great men are those who love their fellow men; who are too big to be little; who can fight without hatred; who can die, if need be, that others may live."

"My God!" said the man, and though he said it under his breath there was, pent up in the two words, the cry of a soul in travail; a soul to whom its own powers have suddenly been revealed, together with its lost opportunities and its crushing inability to rise to the heights supernal.

"It came too soon--if I could only have had a little more time," he was saying; but at that, the colonel and Williams came up, bringing Miss Richlander, and the heart-mellowing moment was gone.

Smith drove the borrowed runabout back to town in sober silence, and the glorious beauty in the seat beside him did not try to make him talk. Perhaps she, too, was busy with thoughts of her own. At all events, when Smith had helped her out of the car at the hotel entrance and had seen her as far as the elevator, she thanked him half absently and took his excuse, that he must return the runabout to Maxwell's garage, without laying any further commands upon him.

Just as he was turning away, a bell-boy came across from the clerk's desk with a telegram for Miss Richlander. Smith had no excuse for lingering, but with the air thick with threats he made the tipping of the boy answer for a momentary stop-gap. Miss Verda tore the envelope open and read the enclosure with a fine-lined little frown coming and going between her eyes.

"It's from Tucker Jibbey," she said, glancing up at Smith. "Some one has told him where we are, and he is following us. He says he'll be here on the evening train. Will you meet him and tell him I've gone to bed?"

At the mention of Jibbey, the money-spoiled son of the man who stood next to Josiah Richlander in the credit ratings, and Lawrenceville's best imitation of a _flaneur_, Smith's first emotion was one of relief at the thought that Jibbey would at least divide time with him in the entertainment of the bored beauty; then he remembered that Jibbey had once considered him a rival, and that the sham "rounder's" presence in Brewster would constitute a menace more threatening than all the others put together.

"I can't meet Tucker," he said bluntly. "You know very well I can't."

"That's so," was the quiet reply. "Of course, you can't. What will you do when he comes?--run away?"

"No; I can't do that, either. I shall keep out of his way, if I can. If he finds me and makes any bad breaks, he'll get what's coming to him. If he's worth anything to you, you'll put him on the stage in the morning and send him up into the mountains to join your father."

"The idea!" she laughed. "He's not coming out here to see father. Poor Tucker! If he could only know what he is in for!" Then: "It is beginning to look as if you might have to go still deeper in debt to me, Montague. There is one more thing I'd like to do before I leave Brewster. If I'll promise to keep Tucker away from you, will you drive me out to the Baldwins' to-morrow afternoon? I want to see the colonel's fine horses, and he has invited me, you know."

Smith's eyes darkened.

"There is a limit, Verda, and you've reached it," he said quickly. "If the colonel invited you to Hillcrest, it was because you didn't leave him any chance not to. I resign in favor of Jibbey," and with that he handed her into the waiting elevator and said: "Good night."

XX

Tucker Jibbey

Though it was a working man's bedtime when Smith put Miss Richlander into the elevator at the Hophra House and bade her good night, he knew that there would be no sleep for him until he had made sure of the arrival or non-arrival of the young man who, no less certainly than Josiah Richlander or Debritt, could slay him with a word. Returning the borrowed runabout to its garage, he went to the railroad station and learned that the "Flyer" from the East was over four hours late. With thirty minutes to spare, he walked the long train platform, chewing an extinct cigar and growing more and more desperate at each pacing turn.

With time to weigh and measure the probabilities, he saw what would come to pass. Verda Richlander might keep her own counsel, or she might not; but in any event, Stanton would be quick to identify Jibbey as a follower of Verda's, and so, by implication, a man who would be acquainted with Verda's intimates. Smith recalled Jibbey's varied weaknesses. If Verda should get hold of him first, and was still generous enough to warn him against Stanton, the blow might be delayed. But if Stanton should be quick enough, and cunning enough to play upon Jibbey's thirst, the liquor-loosened tongue would tell all that it knew.

In such a crisis the elemental need rises up to thrust all other promptings, ethical or merely prudent, into the background. Smith had been profoundly moved by Corona Baldwin's latest appeal to such survivals of truth and honor and fair-dealing as the strange metamorphosis and the culminating struggle against odds had left him. But in any new birth it is inevitable that the offspring of the man that was shall be at first--like all new-born beings--a pure savage, guided only by instinct. And of the instincts, that of self-preservation easily overtops all others.

Smith saw how suddenly the pit of disaster would yawn for him upon Jibbey's arrival, and the compunctions stirred by Corona's plea for the higher ideals withdrew or were crushed in the turmoil. He had set his hand to the plough and he would not turn back. It was Jibbey's effacement in some way, or his own, he told himself, for he had long since determined that he would never be taken alive to be dragged back to face certain conviction in the Lawrenceville courts and a living death in the home State penitentiary.

With this determination gripping him afresh, he glanced at his watch. In fifteen minutes more his fate would be decided. The station baggage and express handlers were beginning to trundle their loaded trucks out across the platform to be in readiness for the incoming train. There was still time enough, but none to spare. Smith passed through the station quickly and on the town side of the building took a cab. "Benkler's," was his curt order to the driver; and three minutes later he was telling the night man at the garage that he had come back to borrow Maxwell's runabout again, and urging haste in the refilling of the tanks.

The delayed "Flyer" was whistling in when Smith drove the runabout to the station, and he had barely time to back the machine into place in the cab rank and to hurry out to the platform before the train came clattering down over the yard switches. Since all the debarking passengers had to come through the archway exit from the track platform, Smith halted at a point from which he could pass them in review. The day-coach people came first, and after them a smaller contingent from the sleepers. At the tail of the straggling procession Smith saw his man, a thin-faced, hollow-eyed young fellow with an unlighted cigarette hanging from his loose lower lip. Smith marked all the little details: the rakish hat, the flaming-red tie, the russet-leather suitcase with its silver identification tag. Then he placed himself squarely in the young man's way.

Jibbey's stare was only momentary. With a broad-mouthed grin he dropped the suitcase and thrust out a hand.

"Well, well--Monty, old sport! So this is where you ducked to, is it? By Jove, it's no wonder Bart Macauley couldn't get a line on you! How are tricks, anyway?"

Smith was carefully refusing to see the out-stretched hand. And it asked for a sudden tightening of the muscles of self-possession to keep him from looking over his shoulder to see if any of Stanton's shadow men were at hand.

"Verda got your telegram, and she asked me to meet you," he rejoined crisply. "Also, to make her excuses for to-night: she has gone to bed."

"So that's the way the cat's jumping, is it?" said the imitation black sheep, the grin twisting itself into a leer. "_She_ got a line on you, even if Macauley couldn't. By Gad! I guess I didn't get out here any too soon."

Smith ignored the half-jealous pleasantry. "Bring your grip," he directed. "I have an auto here and we'll drive."

Being a stranger in a strange city, Jibbey could not know that the hotel was only three squares distant. For the same cause he was entirely unsuspicious when Smith turned the car to the right out of the cab rank and took a street leading to the western suburb. But when the pavements had been left behind, together with all the town lights save an occasional arc-lamp at a crossing, and he was trying for the third time to hold a match to the hanging cigarette, enough ground had been covered to prompt a question.

"Hell of a place to call itself a city, if anybody should ask you," he chattered. "Much of this to worry through?"

Smith bent lower over the tiller-wheel, advancing the spark and opening the throttle for more gas.

"A good bit of it. Didn't you know that Mr. Richlander is out in the hills, buying a mine?"

Tucker Jibbey was rapid only in his attitude toward the world of decency; the rapidity did not extend to his mental processes. The suburb street had become a country road, the bridge over the torrenting Gloria had thundered under the flying wheels, and a great butte, black in its foresting from foot to summit, was rising slowly among the western stars before his small brain had grasped the relation of cause to effect.

"Say, here, Monty--dammit all, you hold on! Verda isn't with Old Moneybags; she's staying at the hotel in town. I wired and found out before I left Denver. Where in Sam Hill are you taking me to?"

Smith made no reply other than to open the cut-out and to put his foot on the accelerator. The small car leaped forward at racing speed and Jibbey clutched wildly at the wheel.

"Stop her--stop her!" he shrilled. "Lemme get out!"

Smith had one hand free and it went swiftly to his hip pocket. A second later Jibbey's shrilling protest died away in a gurgle of terror.

"For--for God's sake, Monty--don't kill me!" he gasped, when he saw the free hand clutching a weapon and uplifted as if to strike. "Wh--what've I done to you?"

"I'll tell you--a little later. Keep quiet and let this wheel alone, if you want to live long enough to find out where you're going. Quiet down, I say, or I'll beat your damned head off!--oh, you would, would you? All right--if you _will_ have it!"

* * * * *

It lacked only a few minutes of midnight when Smith returned the borrowed runabout for the second time that night, sending it jerkily through the open door of Benkler's garage and swinging stiffly from behind the steering-wheel to thrust a bank-note into the hand of the waiting night man.

"Wash the car down good, and be sure it's all right before Mr. Maxwell sends around in the morning," he commanded gruffly; and then: "Take your whisk and dust me off."

The night man had seen the figure of his tip and was nothing loath.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed, with large Western freedom; "you sure look as if you'd been drivin' a good ways, and tol'able hard. What's this on your sleeve? Say! it looks like blood!"

"No; it's mud," was the short reply; and after the liberal tipper had gone, the garage man was left to wonder where, on the dust-dry roads in the Timanyoni, the borrower of Mr. Maxwell's car had found mud deep enough to splash him, and, further, why there was no trace of the mud on the dust-covered car itself.

XXI

At Any Cost

Brewster, drawing its business profit chiefly from the mines in the Topaz and upper Gloria districts, had been only moderately enthusiastic over the original irrigation project organized by Colonel Dexter Baldwin and the group of ranchmen who were to be directly benefited. But when the scope of the plan was enlarged to include a new source of power and light for the city, the scheme had become, in a broader sense, a public utility, and Brewster had promptly awakened to the importance of its success as a local enterprise.

The inclusion of the hydro-electric privilege in the new charter had been a bit of far-sighted business craft on the part of the young man whose name was now in everybody's mouth. As he had pointed out to his new board of directors, there was an abundant excess of water, and a modest profit on the electric plant would pay the operating expenses of the entire system, including the irrigating up-keep and extension work. In addition to this, a reasonable contract price for electric current to be furnished to the city would give the project a _quasi_-public character, at least to the extent of enlisting public sympathy on the side of the company in the fight with the land trust.

This piece of business foresight found itself amply justified as the race against time was narrowed down to days and hours. Though there was spiteful opposition offered by one of the two daily newspapers--currently charged with being subsidized by the land trust--public sentiment as a whole, led by the other newspaper, was strongly on the side of the local corporation. Baldwin, Maxwell, Starbuck, and a few more of the leading spirits in Timanyoni High Line had many friends, and Crawford Stanton found his task growing increasingly difficult as the climax drew near.

But to a man with an iron jaw difficulties become merely incentives to greater effort. Being between the devil, in the person of an employer who knew no mercy, on the one hand, and the deep blue sea of failure on the other, the promoter left no expedient untried, and the one which was yielding the best results, thus far, was the steady undercurrent of detraction and calamitous rumor which he had contrived to set in motion. As we have seen, it was first whispered, and then openly asserted, that the dam was being built too hurriedly; that its foundations were insecure; that, sooner or later, it would be carried away in high water, and the city and the intervening country would be flood-swept and devastated.

Beyond this, the detractive gossip attacked the _personnel_ of the new company. Baldwin was all right as a man, and he knew how to raise fine horses; but what did he, or any of his associates, know about building dams and installing hydro-electric plants? Williams, the chief engineer, was an ex-government man, and--government projects being anathema in the Timanyoni by reason of the restrictive rules and regulations of the Hophra Forest Reserve--everybody knew what that meant: out-of-date methods, red-tape detail, general inefficiency. And Smith, the young plunger who had dropped in from nobody knew where: what could be said of him more than that he had succeeded in temporarily hypnotizing an entire city? Who was he? and where had the colonel found him? Was his name really Smith, or was that only a convenient _alias_?

Having set these queries afoot in Brewster, Stanton was unwearied in keeping them alive and pressing them home. And since such askings grow by what they feed upon, the questions soon began to lose the interrogatory form and to become assertions of fact. Banker Kinzie was quoted as saying, or at least as intimating, that he had lost faith, not only in the High Line scheme, but particularly in its secretary and treasurer; and to this bit of gossip was added another to the effect that Smith had grossly deceived the bank by claiming to be the representative of Eastern capital when he was nothing more than an adventurer trading upon the credulity and good nature of an entire community.

To these calumniating charges it was admitted on all sides that Smith, himself, was giving some color of truth. To those who had opposed him he had shown no mercy, and there were plenty of defeated litigants, and some few dropped stockholders, among the obstructors to claim that the new High Line promoter was a bully and a browbeater; that a poor man stood no chance in a fight with the Timanyoni Company.

On the sentimental side the charges were still graver--in the Western point of view. In its social aspect Brewster was still in the country-village stage, and Smith's goings and comings at Hillcrest had been quickly marked. From that to assuming the sentimental status, with the colonel's daughter in the title role, was a step that had already been taken by the society editress of the _Brewster Banner_ in a veiled hint of a forthcoming "announcement" in which "the charming daughter of one of our oldest and most respected families" and "a brilliant young business man from the East" were to figure as the parties in interest. Conceive, therefore, the shock that had been given to these kindlier gossips when Smith's visits to the Baldwin ranch ceased abruptly between two days, and the "brilliant young business man" was seen everywhere and always in the company of the beautiful stranger who was stopping at the Hophra House. In its palmier day the Timanyoni had hanged a man for less.

On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smith gave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the business field. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a man suddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial, not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the short space of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities which he had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing and refinancing of the irrigation project.

"We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, at last," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for the bejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra cafe. "Kinzie is about to throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam is getting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that you can't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up to his office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smith abused him first and then threw him out bodily--hurt him pretty savagely, they say."

The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise.

"Bad temper?" she queried.

"Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take your choice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with Miss Richlander overnight?--or has he?"

The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were at luncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutes ago."

Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But an invisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might have drawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrenceville magnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were not precisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times.

"I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day, Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the little ranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from us and went back to you at the autos?"

"No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say."

"But it, or something else, has changed you--very much for the worse. Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch this afternoon?"

"And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition?--never in this world!"

"More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame of mind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever do you suppose has become of Tucker?"

"How should I know?"

"If he had come in last night, and you had met him--as I asked you to--in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might think you had murdered him."

It was doubtless by sheer accident that Smith, reaching at the moment for the salad-oil, overturned his water-glass. But the small accident by no means accounted for the sudden graying of his face under the Timanyoni wind tan--for that or for the shaking hands with which he seconded the waiter's anxious efforts to repair the damage. When they were alone again, the momentary trepidation had given place to a renewed hardness that lent a biting rasp to his voice.

"Kinzie, the suspicious old banker that I've been telling you about, is determined to run me down," he said, changing the subject abruptly. "I've got it pretty straight that he is planning to send one of his clerks to the Topaz district to try and find your father."

"In the hope that father will tell what he knows about you?"

"Just that."

"Does this Mr. Kinzie know where father is to be found?"

"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."

Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.

"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making, if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell you that Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in trying to make me tell him where father has gone."

"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assure you, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach your father--alive."

"_Ooh!_" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the rounded shoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a much simpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie in some way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you do that?"

"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"

"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said the young woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, you know. Father left it with me--in case I should want to communicate with him."

Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.

"_You_ wouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of the ultimate right and wrong, would you? _You_ wouldn't say that the only great man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"

Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.

"Are you quoting the little ranch person?" she inquired. Then she answered his query: "The only great men worth speaking of are the men who win. For the lack of something better to do, I'm willing to help you win, Montague. Contrive in some way to have that clerk sent to me. It can come about quite casually if it is properly suggested. Most naturally, I am the one who would know where my father is to be found. And I have changed my mind about wanting to drive to the Baldwins'. We'll compromise on the play--if there _is_ a play."

Two things came of this talk over the luncheon table. Smith went back to his office and shut himself up, without going near the Brewster City National. None the less, the expedient suggested by Verda Richlander must have found its means of communication in some way, since at two o'clock David Kinzie summoned the confidential clerk who had been directed to provide himself with a livery mount and gave him his instructions.

"I'm turning this over to you, Hoback, because you know enough to keep a still tongue in your head. Mr. Stanton doesn't know where Mr. Richlander is, but Mr. Richlander's daughter does know. Go over to the hotel and introduce yourself as coming from me. Say to the daughter that it is necessary for us to communicate with her father on a matter of important business, and ask her if she can direct you. That's all; only don't mention Stanton in the matter. Come back and report after you've seen her."

This was one of the results of the luncheon-table talk; and the other came a short half-hour further along, when the confidential clerk returned to make his report.

"I don't know why Miss Richlander wouldn't tell Mr. Stanton," he said. "She was mighty nice to me; made me a pencil sketch of the Topaz country and marked the mines that her father is examining."

"Good!" said David Kinzie, with his stubbly mustache at its most aggressive angle. "It's pretty late in the day, but you'd better make a start and get as far as you can before dark. When you find Mr. Richlander, handle him gently. Tell him who you are, and then ask him if he knows anything about a man named 'Montague,' or 'Montague Smith'; ask him who he is, and where he comes from. If you get that far with him, he'll probably tell you the rest of it."

Smith saw no more of Miss Richlander until eight o'clock in the evening, at which time he sent his card to her room and waited for her in the mezzanine parlors. When she came down to him, radiant in fine raiment, he seemed not to see the bedeckings or the beauty which they adorned.

"There is a play, and I have the seats," he announced briefly.

"_Merci!_" she flung back. "Small favors thankfully received, and larger ones in proportion; though it's hardly a favor, this time, because I have paid for it in advance. Mr. Kinzie's young man came to see me this afternoon."

"What did you do?"

"I gave him a tracing of my map, and he was so grateful that it made me want to tell him that it was all wrong; that he wouldn't find father in a month if he followed the directions."

"But you didn't!"

"No; I can play the game, when it seems worth while."

Smith was frowning thoughtfully when he led her to the elevator alcove.

"My way would have been the surer," he muttered, half to himself.

"Barbarian!" she laughed; and then: "To think that you were once a 'debutantes' darling'! Oh, yes; I know it was Carter Westfall who said it first, but it was true enough to name you instantly for all Lawrenceville."

Smith made no comment, and Miss Richlander did not speak again until they were waiting in the women's lobby for the house porter to call a cab. Then, as if she had just remembered it:

"Oh! I forgot to ask you: is the Eastern train in?"

He nodded. "It was on time this evening--for a wonder."

"And no Tucker yet! What in the world do you suppose could have happened to him, Montague?"

The porter was announcing the theatre cab and Smith reserved his answer until the motor hackney was rolling jerkily away toward the opera-house.

"Jibbey has probably got what was coming to him," he said grittingly. "I don't know whether you have ever remarked it or not, but the insect of the Jibbey breed usually finds somebody to come along and step on it, sooner or later."

XXII

The Megalomaniac

On a day which was only sixty-odd hours short of the expiration of the time limit fixed by the charter conditions under which the original Timanyoni Ditch Company had obtained its franchise, Bartley Williams, lean and sombre-eyed from the strain he had been under for many days and nights, saw the president's gray roadster ploughing its way through the mesa sand on the approach to the construction camp, and was glad.

"I've been trying all the morning to squeeze out time to get into town," he told Baldwin, when the roadster came to a stand in front of the shack commissary. "Where is Smith?"

The colonel threw up his hand in a gesture expressive of complete detachment.

"Don't ask me. John has gone plumb loco in these last two or three days. It's as much as your life's worth to ask him where he has been or where he is going or what he means to do next."

"He hasn't stopped fighting?" said the engineer, half aghast at the bare possibility.

"Oh, no; he's at it harder than ever--going it just a shaving too strong, is what I'd tell him, if he'd let me get near enough to shout at him. Last night, after the theatre, he went around to the _Herald_ office, and the way they're talking it on the street, he was aiming to shoot up the whole newspaper joint if Mark Allen, the editor, wouldn't take back a bunch of the lies he's been publishing about the High Line. It wound up in a scrap of some sort. I don't know who got the worst of it, but John isn't crippled up any, to speak of, this morning--only in his temper."

"Smith puzzles me more than a little," was Williams's comment. "It's just as you say; for the last few days he's been acting as if he had a grouch a mile long. Is it the old sore threatening to break out again?--the 'lame duck' business?"

"I shouldn't wonder," said the colonel evasively. Loyal to the last, he was not quite ready to share with Williams the half-confidence in which Smith had admitted, by implication at least, that the waiting young woman at the Hophra House held his future between her thumb and finger.

Williams shook his head. "I guess we'll have to stand for the grouch, if he'll only keep busy. He has the hot end of it, trying to stop the stampede among the stockholders, and hold up the money pinch, and keep Stanton from springing any new razzle on us. We couldn't very well get along without him, right now, Colonel. With all due respect to you and the members of the board, he is the fighting backbone of the whole outfit."

"He is that," was Baldwin's ready admission. "He is just what we've been calling him from the first, Bartley--a three-ply, dyed-in-the-wool wonder in his specialty. Stanton hasn't been able to make a single move yet that Smith hasn't foreseen and discounted. He is fighting now like a man in the last ditch, and I believe he thinks he is in the last ditch. The one time lately when I have had anything like a straight talk with him, he hinted at that and gave me to understand that he'd be willing to quit and take his medicine if he could hold on until Timanyoni High Line wins out."

"That will be only two days more," said the engineer, saying it as one who has been counting the days in keen anxiety. And then: "Stillings told me yesterday that we're not going to get an extension of the time limit from the State authorities."

"No; that little fire went out, blink, just as Smith said it would. Stanton's backers have the political pull--in the State, as well as in Washington. They're going to hold us to the letter of the law."

"Let 'em do it. We'll win out yet--if we don't run up against one or both of the only two things I'm afraid of now: high water, or the railroad call down."

"The water is pushing you pretty hard?"

"It's touch and go every night now. A warm rain in the mountains--well, I won't say that it would tear us up, because I don't believe it would, or could; but it would delay us, world without end."

"And the railroad grab? Have you heard anything more about that?"

"That is what I was trying to get to town for; to talk the railroad business over with you and Stillings and Smith. They've had a gang here this morning; a bunch of engineers, with a stranger, who gave his name as Hallowell, in charge. They claimed to be verifying the old survey, and Hallowell notified me formally that our dam stood squarely in their right of way for a bridge crossing of the river."

"They didn't serve any papers on you, did they?" inquired the colonel anxiously.

"No; the notice was verbal. But Hallowell wound up with a threat. He said, 'You've had due warning, legally and otherwise, Mr. Williams. This is our right of way, bought and paid for, as we can prove when the matter gets into the courts. You mustn't be surprised if we take whatever steps may be necessary to recover what belongs to us.'"

"Force?" queried the Missourian, with a glint of the border-fighter's fire in his eyes.

"Maybe. But we're ready for that. Did you know that Smith loaded half a dozen cases of Winchesters on a motor-truck yesterday, and had them sent out here?"

"No!"

"He did--and told me to say nothing about it. It seems that he ordered them some time ago from an arms agency in Denver. That fellow foresees everything, Colonel."

Dexter Baldwin had climbed into his car and was making ready to turn it for the run back to town.

"If I were you, Bartley, I believe I'd open up those gun boxes and pass the word among as many of the men as you think you can trust with rifles in their hands. I'll tell Smith--and Bob Stillings."

Colonel Baldwin made half of his promise good, the half relating to the company's attorney, as soon as he reached Brewster. But the other half had to remain in abeyance. Smith was not in his office, and no one seemed to know where he had gone. The colonel shrewdly suspected that Miss Richlander was making another draft upon the secretary's time, and he said as much to Starbuck, later in the day, when the mine owner sauntered into the High Line headquarters and proceeded to roll the inevitable cigarette.

"Not any, this time, Colonel," was Starbuck's rebuttal. "You've missed it by a whole row of apple-trees. Miss Rich-dollars is over at the hotel. I saw her at luncheon with the Stantons less than an hour ago."

"You haven't seen Smith, have you?"

"No; but I know where he is. He's out in the country, somewhere, taking the air in Dick Maxwell's runabout. I wanted to borrow the wagon myself, and Dick told me he had already lent it to Smith."

"We're needing him," said the colonel shortly, and then he told Starbuck of the newest development in the paper-railroad scheme of obstruction.

From that the talk drifted to a discussion of Kinzie's latest attitude. By this time there had been an alarming number of stock sales by small holders, all of them handled by the Brewster City National, and it was plainly evident that Kinzie had finally gone over to the enemy and was buying--as cheaply as possible--for some unnamed customer. This had been Stanton's earliest expedient; to "bear" the stock and to buy up the control; and he was apparently trying it again.

"If they keep it up, they can wear us out by littles, and we'll break our necks finishing the dam and saving the franchise only to turn it over to them in the round-up," said the colonel dejectedly. "I've talked until I'm hoarse, but you can't talk marrow into an empty bone, Billy. I used to think we had a fairly good bunch of men in with us, but in these last few days I've been changing my mind at a fox-trot. These hedgers'll promise you anything on top of earth to your face, and then go straight back on you the minute you're out of sight."

The remainder of the day, up to the time when the offices were closing and the colonel was making ready to go home, passed without incident. In Smith's continued absence, Starbuck had offered to go to the dam to stand a night-watch with Williams against a possible surprise by the right-of-way claimants; and Stillings, who had been petitioning for an injunction, came up to report progress just as Baldwin was locking his desk.

"The judge has taken it under advisement, but that is as far as he would go to-day," said the lawyer. "It's simply a bald steal, of course, and unless they ring in crooked evidence on us, we can show it up in court. But that would mean more delay, and delay is the one thing we can't stand. I'm sworn to uphold the law, and I can't counsel armed resistance. Just the same, I hope Williams has his nerve with him."

"He has; and I haven't lost mine, yet," snapped a voice at the door; and Smith came in, dust-covered and swarthy with the grime of the wind-swept grass-lands. Out of the pocket of his driving coat he drew a thick packet of papers and slapped it upon the drawn-down curtain of Baldwin's desk. "There you are," he went on gratingly. "Now you can tell Mr. David Kinzie to go straight to hell with his stock-pinching, and the more money he puts into it, the more somebody's going to lose!"

"My Lord, John!--what have you done?" demanded Baldwin.

"I've shown 'em what it means to go up against a winner!" was the half-triumphant, half-savage exultation. "I have put a crimp in that fence-climbing banker of yours that will last him for one while! I've secured thirty-day options, at par, on enough High Line stock to swing a clear majority if Kinzie should buy up every other share there is outstanding. It has taken me all day, and I've driven a thousand miles, but the thing is done."