IV

It was a very different person, in appearance, who seated himself on the

observation platform of the Overland Limited that evening. Only the

round steel spectacles were left as a memento of Brainard’s former

condition. He had had no scruples in helping himself freely from the

store of bills in the wallet. What lay before him to do for the sick man

would probably be difficult, in any event, and it would be foolish to

handicap himself by presenting a suspicious appearance at Krutzmacht’s

office. He would play his part properly dressed.

So, when he glanced into the little mirror beside his berth, he smiled in

satisfaction at the clean-shaven, neatly dressed, alert young man who

looked back at him. With his ragged habiliments he seemed also to have

discarded that settled look of failure, and not a few of his years.

Without unduly flattering himself, he felt that he might easily be taken

for one of the energetic young brokers or lawyers whom he observed on the

train.

Removing his new hat, and stretching his well-shod feet on the cushioned

seat opposite, he took up the evening newspapers and glanced through them

for some telegraphic item about the fate of his mysterious employer. If

Krutzmacht were a well-known figure, as he supposed likely, reporters

must doubtless have discovered him before this and proclaimed his

predicament to the world. But Brainard could find no reference to any

such person in the newspapers, and with a sigh of relief he let them slip

from his lap.

His task would be easier, if it could be accomplished while the sick man

lay undiscovered in the hospital. If he should already be dead, when he

arrived, there would be an end to Brainard’s job altogether; and that

would have been a keen disappointment to the young man.

His job? A hundred times his mind reverted to this perplexing

consideration—what, exactly, was he to do when he had reached the end of

his long journey?

First, he would find where Krutzmacht’s offices were, and then? He had

been told to make off with whatever he might find in the private safe.

For this purpose he had provided himself, in Chicago, with a bulky

leather valise, in which his discarded raiment was now reposing. It all

sounded like an expedition in high piracy, but he quieted any scruples

with the resolve that he would make off merely to New York, if Krutzmacht

still lived, instead of Berlin, and remain there to await further

developments.

So, as the Overland Limited rushed across the prairie states, Brainard

took counsel with himself, mentally sketching out his every move from the

moment when he should step from the train. The readiness with which his

mind reached out to this new situation surprised himself; he was already

becoming in some way a new person.

The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his

Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above

the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much

habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did

not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness.

At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his

surprising new rôle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread

before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more

provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he

began to realize that America was more than a strip of land along the

Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect

for his fatherland had immensely increased.

He noticed also that the character of the people on the train was

gradually changing. Large, rough-looking men, with tanned faces not too

carefully shaved, and sometimes with a queer assortment of jewelry and

patent leather shoes took the places of the pallid, smooth shaven

business men that had been his companions from Jersey City to Chicago.

There were also a number of women traveling alone, large, competent, and

not overrefined. Brainard, whose ideas of Americans other than the types

to be seen on the streets of New York had been drawn from the travestied

figures of the stage,—the miner and the cowboy with flapping sombrero and

chaps,—watched these new specimens of his fellow countrymen with keen

interest. In spite of their rather uncouth speech and their familiarity

with the negro porters, they were attractive. They had a vigorous air

about them, indicating that they came from a big country, with big ways

of doing things in it, and a broad outlook over wide horizons. The

would-be dramatist began to perceive that the world was not peopled

wholly by the types that the American stage had made familiar to him.

A little way beyond Ogden the train rolled out into the bright blue

inland sea of the Great Salt Lake and trundled on for mile after mile in

the midst of the water on a narrow strip of rocky roadbed. Brainard had

read in the newspapers of this famous “Lucin cut-off” where in an effort

to save a detour of a few miles around the shore of the lake millions of

tons of “fill” had been dumped into an apparently bottomless hole. The

pluck and the energy of that road builder who had conceived this work and

kept at it month after month, dumping trainloads of rock into a great

lake had not specially thrilled him when he read of it. But now the

imagination and the courage of the little man who did this sort of thing

thrilled him. Harriman, the bold doer of this and greater things, was of

course a popular Wall Street hero to the New Yorker,—one of those

legendary creatures who were supposed to have their seat of power in the

lofty cliffs of that narrow Via Dolorosa and somehow like the alchemists

of old conjure great fortunes out of air, with the aid of the “tape.”

That was the way in which this young man had always thought of

Harriman,—“the wizard of railroad finance.”

But now as he glided smoothly over the solid roadbed that ran straight

westward into the remote distance with the salt waves almost lapping the

tracks and leaving a white crust from their spume, with lofty mountains

looming to south and to north,—as he stood on the rear platform of the

heavy steel train observing this marvelous panorama,—a totally new

conception of the renowned financier came to him. This was not done by

watching the tape! It demanded will and force and imagination and

faith—spiritual qualities in a man—to do this. The young traveler

mentally did homage to the character that had created the wonderful

highway over which for a day and a half he had been comfortably borne in

luxurious ease.

As he watched the blue mountains about Ogden fade into the haze, it

seemed that New York, his life there, and all his conventional

conceptions of the little world in which he had vainly struggled for

existence also receded and grew smaller, less real. The train in its

westward flight was bearing him forward into a new world, within as well

as without! As the track began to wind up again to higher levels before

taking its next great leap over the Sierras, Brainard went forward to the

smoking room, his usual post of observation, where he sat through long,

meditative hours, listening to the talk about him and gazing at the

fleeting landscape. Whatever else it might mean,—this jaunt across the

continent on a stranger’s errand,—it was bringing him a rich cargo of new

ideas.

Of all his fellow travelers the man who happened to occupy the

drawing-room in the car where Brainard had his section aroused his

curiosity especially. He was one of those well-dressed, alert young

business men who had made Brainard conscious of his shabby and

inappropriate appearance when he first started on his journey. The door

of his room had been closed all the way to Chicago, and Brainard had seen

nothing of the man. But since the train left Omaha the door to the

drawing-room had been open, and from his section Brainard observed its

occupant diligently reading a book. What aroused his attention and

interested him in the stranger more than his pleasant appearance of frank

good humor had been the sort of book he had chosen for this long journey.

It was bound like a “best seller” in a gaudy red cloth, and a picture of

a starry-eyed maiden with floating hair adorned the cover. But it was

labeled in unmistakable black letters _Paradise Lost_. Brainard, who had

made a painful and superficial acquaintance in his youth with this poetic

masterpiece, decided that the smartly dressed young American could not be

devoting the journey to Milton’s epic. It must be that some writer of

best sellers had cribbed the great poet’s title and fitted it to a less

strenuous tale of love and starry-eyed maidens. This theory, however,

broke down before the fact that from time to time the young man consulted

a small black book that was indubitably a dictionary, and Brainard taking

advantage of a moment when the traveler had left his room assured himself

that the book was really a copy of Milton’s poem set within profane

modern covers. Just why this young man should spend his hours on the

train reading the puritan epic of heaven and hell puzzled Brainard and

whetted his curiosity to know what sort of man the stranger was.

Earlier this morning as the train was climbing down from the Rockies into

Utah, an opportunity had come to speak to his fellow traveler. The train

had pulled up somewhere before a desolate station whose architect had

tried to make a Queen Anne cottage that looked singularly out of place in

the bare, wild landscape. While the engine took its long drink, the

passengers stretched their legs and enjoyed the crisp mountain air. The

stranger came to the vestibule, yawned, and read the name of the station:

“Palisade, is it? . . . The last time I was over this way it looked more

lively than this.”

“What was happening?” Brainard inquired.

“There was a bunch of miners somewheres in Utah making trouble, on a

strike. The company had brought in a couple of carloads of greasers, and

the miners were down here shooting up the party.”

He got down to the ground, yawned again, and opened a gold cigarette case

which he offered to Brainard,—“Have one?”

Brainard took one of the monogrammed cigarettes, and they sauntered

together in the sunlight.

“Yes, sir,” his new acquaintance continued, “they sure did have a lively

time. The greasers were over there on the siding in their cars, and they

just let go at ’em with their guns. Now and then they’d hit the station,

for fun, you know. I guess maybe you can see the holes yet.”

The young man pointed up at some scars among the shingles and a broken

window in the upper story. “Sure enough they left their marks!”

“What did they do to ’em?” Brainard asked naïvely, as they returned to

the car when the conductor droned “all aboard.”

“Who?” the stranger asked. “The police?”

He waved a hand at the desolate stretch of sage brush backed by grim

mountains and laughed. As the train moved off, he added, “Lord, I don’t

know! They were still popping when my train pulled out. There weren’t

many greasers fit to work in the mines. What was left after the

reception must have walked home—a long ways.”

Brainard was somewhat impressed with the possibilities of a country that

could offer such a scrap, _en passant_, so to speak. The stranger

invited him into his room and gave him another cigarette.

“From New York?” he inquired. “Not a bad sort of place,” he observed

tolerantly. “Ever been on the Coast? You’ve something to see.”

“How is San Francisco since the earthquake?” Brainard inquired, thinking

to come cautiously and guardedly to the topic of Krutzmacht.

“It’s all there and more than ever,” the stranger cheerily responded.

“You won’t find any large cracks,” he jested.

“It’s queer that you all went straight back to the same ground and built

over again.”

“Why? It was home, wasn’t it? Folks always have a feeling for the place

they’ve lived in, even if it has disadvantages. It’s only human!”

Brainard reflected that this was a sentimental point of view he should

hardly have expected from the practical sort of man opposite him. In the

course of their conversation Brainard inquired about the graft

prosecution then in full swing, which had attracted the notice even of

eastern papers on account of the highly melodramatic flavor that a

picturesque prosecuting attorney had given to the proceedings. The man

from San Francisco readily gave his point of view, which was unfavorable

to the virtuous citizens engaged in the task of civic purification. When

Brainard asked about the celebrated prosecuting attorney, the stranger

looked at him for the first time suspiciously, and said coldly:

“Well, as that gentleman has just been parading up and down the state

saying he was going to put me in state prison for the better part of my

remaining years, I can’t say I have a high opinion of him.”

“Indeed!” Brainard emitted feebly. The stranger was more mysterious than

ever. He did not seem in the least like a candidate for state prison.

“You see,” the young man continued cheerfully, “I’m loose now on about

seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. Time was up in fact day before

yesterday, and I’ve been wondering some what they are going to do to my

bondsmen. Well, we’ll find out at Ogden when we get the coast papers.”

And when they reached Ogden Brainard ventured to inquire, seeing his new

acquaintance deep in the folds of a San Francisco newspaper,—“Well, what

did they do to those bondsmen?”

“Nothing yet, so far as I can see. Oh, hell, it’s all bluff anyway!” and

he dropped his newspaper out of the open window. . . .

A man of such cheerful and frank presence, who read _Paradise Lost_ (with

the aid of a dictionary) and traveled to New York on seventy-five

thousand dollars of bail bonds was a curiosity to Brainard. He very much

wished to ask him a few impertinent questions in order to satisfy his

curiosity, but could not summon sufficient courage, though he felt sure

that the agreeable stranger would cheerfully enlighten him.

V

As Brainard entered the smoking compartment of the “club car,” he

observed that his interesting fellow traveler was in close conversation

with a new arrival, who had taken the section opposite Brainard at Ogden.

He had already noted this grizzled, thickset person, about sixty years

old, who wore a black frock coat, had a large seal ring and a massive

Masonic charm. When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black

skull cap, he had seen that the remaining contents of the bag were a mass

of papers, a few bits of loose rock, and a bottle of whisky. Whatever

toilet articles the traveler carried were carefully concealed.

Already the oldish, grizzled traveler with the skull cap was at home, the

center of a little group of men at one of the card tables,—a bottle of

beer in front of him, a cigar tilted at an angle between his teeth. He

was conversing with that perfect naturalness and freedom that Brainard

had observed was the custom in this large country, even among complete

strangers.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I came back from Alaska in 1907 broke,—that

is, what you might call broke,—a couple of thousand dollars all I had in

the world. I said to my wife, ‘I’m done with mines! For good. I’ve

spent the better part of thirty years chasing gold, and there may be

money to be got out of the ground, but it ain’t for me.’ And would you

believe it? The next morning I was starting for Union! Met a man I knew

at the hotel in Seattle and he showed me some samples of the ore they

were taking out there. And I started. The old woman too. Been there

ever since!” He paused as if to let the others say “Kismet!” and

repeated,—“Been there ever since, working the next claim. My wife died

six months ago, and I got lonely and thought I’d come out and see what

had happened to Frisco since the quake.”

From this point the talk drifted on erratically as the train rushed

towards the Sierras. The agreeable young man who read _Paradise Lost_

and was under bonds to justice seemed to have an extensive acquaintance

in common with the grizzled miner. They discussed some Scotchman who had

been mining but now owned an oil well in the “Midway field” that was

reputed to be bringing in five thousand dollars a day. Another of their

friends—an Englishman—had a silver “proposition” in Mexico. There was

also Jimmie Birt who owned a string of horses and had sunk a fortune in a

mine in British Columbia, but Jimmie, it seemed, was making good in

Oregon timber land. So it went with one adventurer after another,

roaming this side of the continent, now penniless, to-morrow with

millions, restlessly darting from subarctic Alaska to subtropical Mexico

along the coast or the mountain spine of the continent. They sought gold

and silver and copper, oil and wood and cattle, water-power, wheat, and

wine,—it made little odds what. Everything was a “big proposition” in

which to make or lose. Brainard drank in the varied biography of this

company of adventurers, his brain fired with the excitements of their

risks. Krutzmacht, it seemed to him, must have been such a one as these.

He was on the point of asking the old miner, who was the principal

talker, if he had ever heard of Krutzmacht, when his ears caught the

words:

“I see by to-day’s San Francisco paper that a receivership has been asked

for the Shasta companies. That means they’ve got Krutzmacht, don’t it?”

“I expect so—he’s been on the edge some time from what I hear,” the

younger man replied.

“So they got him. . . . I thought Herb would make good—he was a nervy

Dutchman, if there ever was one! But he couldn’t go up against that

crowd.”

“When he began building his road through the mountains to the Bay, the S.

P. crowd went for him and shut off his credit. You’ve got to get

permission to do some things in California.”

“I’m told he’d built up a big property.”

“That’s right—if he’d been able to hold on, there would have been

millions, what with the power company, the timber, the railroad, and the

land. That’s why the S. P. people wanted it! They waited, and when the

panic came on, they began squeezing him. I saw him in New York a few

days ago. I suppose he was trying to get money from some of those big

Jew bankers where he’d got it before. But it isn’t the right time to

pass the hat in Wall Street just now.”

The talk ran on desultorily about “the S. P. crowd,” who it seemed were

the financial dictators of the Pacific Coast and “the nerve of the

Dutchman who went up against that bunch.” Brainard listened closely to

every word, but refrained from asking questions for fear of betraying an

undue interest in Krutzmacht. As far as he could make out, with his

inexperience in business affairs, Krutzmacht’s companies were valuable

and solvent, but he himself was embarrassed, as many men of large

enterprises were at this time, and his enemies had taken this opportune

moment to get possession of his properties, using for that purpose the

courts of which they seemed to have control as they had of the

legislature and the governor.

“It’s a shame,” the younger stranger remarked frankly; “I expect they’ll

put him through the mill and take every dollar he owns.”

“They’ll eat the hide off him all right!”

“Well, well,” the miner sighed in conclusion. “So Herb’s lost out! He’s

a nervy one, though, obstinate as a mule. Wouldn’t surprise me if he

crawled through somehow. I remember him years ago when he had a mine

down in Arizona, a big low-grade copper proposition. That was in

nineteen four, no,—three. It was another of those big schemes, too big

for any one man,—a railroad and a smelter besides the mine. He claimed

there was a fortune in it—and I guess it was so—only he was forced to

shut down, and the next I heard of him he was out here on the Coast in

this Shasta proposition.”

And that was all they had to say about Krutzmacht.