the hill road to the dam, when Williams, chief engineer of the ditch
project, met President Baldwin in the Brewster offices of the ditch
company and spent a busy hour with the colonel going over the
contractors' estimates for the month in prospect. In an interval of the
business talk, Baldwin remembered the good-looking young tramp who had
wanted a job.
"Oh, yes; I knew there was something else that I wanted to ask you," he
said. "How about the young fellow that I unloaded on you a couple of
weeks ago? Did he make good?"
"Who--Smith?"
"Yes; if that's his name."
The engineer's left eyelid had a quizzical droop when he said dryly:
"It's the name he goes by in camp; 'John Smith.' I haven't asked him his
other name."
The ranchman president matched the drooping eyelid of unbelief with a
sober smile. "I thought he looked as if he might be out here for his
health--like a good many other fellows who have no particular use for a
doctor. How is he making it?"
The engineer, a hard-bitten man with the prognathous lower jaw
characterizing the tribe of those who accomplish things, thrust his
hands into his pockets and walked to the window to look down into the
Brewster street. When he turned to face Baldwin again, it was to say:
"That young fellow is a wonder, Colonel. I put him into the quarry at
first, as you suggested, and in three days he had revolutionized things
to the tune of a twenty-per-cent saving in production costs. Then I gave
him a hack at the concrete-mixers, and he's making good again in the
cost reduction. That seems to be his specialty."
The president nodded and was sufficiently interested to follow up what
had been merely a casual inquiry.
"What are you calling him now?--a betterment engineer? You know your
first guess was that he was somebody's bookkeeper out of a job."
Williams wagged his head.
"He's a three-cornered puzzle to me, yet. He isn't an engineer, but when
you drag a bunch of cost money up the trail, he goes after it like a dog
after a rabbit. I'm not anxious to lose him, but I really believe you
could make better use of him here in the town office than I can on the
job."
Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
"I'm afraid he'd have to loosen up on his record a little before we
could bring him in here. Badly as we're needing a money man, we can
hardly afford to put a 'John Smith' into the saddle--at least not
without knowing what his other name used to be."
"No; of course not. I guess, after all, he's only a 'lame duck,' like a
good many of the rest of them. Day before yesterday, Burdell, the deputy
sheriff, was out at the camp looking the gangs over for the fellow who
broke into Lannigan's place last Saturday night. When he came into the
office Smith was busy with an estimate, and Burdell went up and touched
him on the shoulder, just to let him know that it was time to wake up.
Suffering cats! It took three of us to keep him from breaking Burdell in
two and throwing him out of the window!"
"That looks rather bad," was the president's comment. Colonel Dexter
Baldwin had been the first regularly elected sheriff of Timanyoni County
in the early days and he knew the symptoms. "Was Burdell wearing his
star where it could be seen?"
The engineer nodded.
"What explanation did Smith make?"
"Oh, he apologized like a gentleman, and said he was subject to little
nervous attacks like that when anybody touched him unexpectedly. He took
Burdell over to Pete Simm's shack saloon and bought him a drink.
Perkins, the timekeeper, says he's going to get a megaphone so he can
give due notice in advance when he wants to call Smith's attention."
The colonel pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of diplomatic
cigars and passed it to the engineer, saying: "Light up a sure-enough
good one, and tell me what you think Smith has been doing back yonder in
the other country."
Williams took the cigar but he shied at the conundrum.
"Ask me something easy," he said. "I've stacked up a few guesses. He's
from the Middle West--as the Bible says, his 'speech bewrayeth' him--and
he's had a good job of some kind; the kind that required him to keep
abreast of things. If there's anything in looks, you'd say he wasn't a
thief or an embezzler, and yet it's pretty apparent that he's been used
to handling money in chunks and making it work for its living. I've put
it up that there's a woman in it. Perhaps the other fellow got in his
way, or came up behind him and touched him unexpectedly, or something of
that sort. Anyway, I'm not going to believe he's a crooked crook until I
have to."
Colonel Baldwin helped himself to one of his own cigars, and the talk
went back to business. In the irrigation project, Williams was a
stockholder as well as the chief of construction, and Baldwin had more
than once found him a safe adviser. There was need for counsel. The
Timanyoni Ditch Company was in a rather hazardous condition financially,
and the president and Williams rarely met without coming sooner or later
to a threshing out of the situation.
The difficulties were those which are apt to confront a small and local
enterprise when it is so unfortunate as to get in the way of larger
undertakings. Colonel Baldwin, and a group of his neighbors on the north
side of the river, were reformed cattlemen and horse breeders. Instead
of drifting farther west in advance of the incoming tide of population
following the coming of the railroad, they had availed themselves of
their homestead rights and had taken up much of the grass-land in the
favorable valleys, irrigating it at first with water taken out of the
river in private or neighborhood ditches.
Later on came the sheep-feeding period, and after that the utilization
of larger crop-raising areas. The small ditches proving inadequate for
these, Colonel Baldwin had formed a stock company among his neighbors in
the grass-lands and his friends in Brewster for the building of a
substantial dam in the eastern hills. The project had seemed simple
enough in the beginning. The stock was sold for cash and each
stockholder would be a participating user of the water. Williams, who
had been a United States reclamation man before he came to the
Timanyoni, had made careful estimates, and the stock subscription
provided money enough to cover the cost of the dam and the main ditch.
After some little bargaining, the dam site and the overflow land for the
reservoir lake had been secured, and the work was begun. Out of a clear
sky, however, came trouble and harassment. Alien holders of mining
claims in the reservoir area turned up and demanded damages. Some few
homesteaders who had promised to sign quitclaims changed their minds and
sued for relief, and after the work was well under way it appeared that
there was a cloud on the title of the dam site itself. All of these
clashings were carried into court, and the rancher promoters found
themselves confronting invisible enemies and obstacle-raisers at every
turn.
The legal fight, as they soon found out, cost much money in every phase
of it; and now, when the dam was scarcely more than half completed, a
practically empty treasury was staring them in the face. This was the
situation which called for its regular threshing out in every conference
between Colonel Baldwin and his chief of construction. There was no
disguising the fact that a crisis was approaching, a financial crisis
which no one among the amateur promoters was big enough to cope with.
"We've got to go in deeper, Colonel; there is nothing else to do," was
the engineer's summing up of the matter at the close of the conference.
"The snow is melting pretty rapidly on the range now, and when we get
the June rise we'll stand to lose everything we have if we can't keep
every wheel turning to get ready for the high water."
Baldwin was holding his cigar between his fingers and scowling at it as
if it had mortally offended him.
"Assessments on the stock, you mean?" he said. "I'm afraid our crowd
won't stand for that. A good part of it is ready to lie down in the
harness right now."
"How about a bond issue?" asked the engineer.
"Lord of heavens! What do we, or any of us, know about bond issues? Why,
we knew barely enough about the business at the start to chip in
together and buy us a charter and go to work on a plan a little bit
bigger than the neighborhood ditch idea. You couldn't float bonds in
Timanyoni Park, and we're none of us foxy enough to go East and float
'em."
"I guess that's right, too," admitted Williams. "Besides, with the stock
gone off the way it has, it would take a mighty fine-haired financial
sharp to sell bonds."
"What's that?" demanded the president. "Who's been selling any stock?"
"Buck Gardner, for one; and that man Bolling, up at the head of Little
Creek, for another. Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, told me about
it, and he says that the price offered, and accepted, was thirty-nine."
"Dad burn a cuss with a yellow streak in him!" rasped the Missouri
colonel. "We had a fair and square agreement among ourselves that if
anybody got scared he was to give the rest of us a chance to buy him
out. Who bought from these welshers?"
"Maxwell didn't know that. He said it was done through Kinzie's bank.
From what I've heard on the outside, I'm inclined to suspect that
Crawford Stanton was the buyer."
"Stanton, the real-estate man?"
"The same."
Again the president stared thoughtfully at the glowing end of his cigar.
"There's another of the confounded mysteries," he growled. "Who is
Crawford Stanton, and what is he here for? I know what he advertises,
but everybody in Brewster knows that he hasn't made a living dollar in
real estate since he came here last winter. Williams, do you know, I'm
beginning to suspect that there is a mighty big nigger in our little
wood-pile?"
"You mean that all these stubborn hold-ups have been bought and paid
for? You'll remember that is what Billy Starbuck tried to tell us when
the first of the missing mining-claim owners began to shout at us."
"Starbuck has a long head, and what he doesn't know about mining claims
in this part of the country wouldn't fill a very big book. I remember he
said there had never been any prospecting done in the upper Timanyoni
gulches, and now you'd think half the people in the United States had
been nosing around up there with a pick and shovel at one time or
another. But it was a thing that Starbuck told me no longer ago than
yesterday that set me to thinking," Baldwin went on. "As you know, the
old Escalante Spanish Grant corners over in the western part of this
park. When the old grants were made, they were ruled off on the map
without reference to mountain ranges or other natural barriers."
Williams nodded.
"Well, as I say, one corner of the Escalante reaches over the Hophras
and out into the park, covering about eight or ten square miles of the
territory just beyond us on our side of the river. Starbuck told me
yesterday that a big Eastern colonization company had got a bill through
Congress alienating that tract."
The chief of construction bounded out of his chair and began to walk the
floor. "By George!" he said; and again: "By George! That's what we're up
against, Colonel! Where will those fellows get the water for their land?
There is no site for a dam lower down than ours, and, anyway, that land
lies too high to be watered by anything but a high-line ditch!"
"Nice little brace game, isn't it?" growled Baldwin. "If we hadn't been
a lot of hayseed amateurs, we might have found out long ago that some
one was running in a cold deck on us. What's your notion? Are we done
up, world without end?"
Williams's laugh was grim.
"What we need, Colonel, is to go out on the street and yell for a
doctor," he said. "It's beginning to look as if we had acquired a pretty
bad case of malignant strangle-itis."
Baldwin ran his fingers through his hair and admitted that he had lost
his sense of humor.
"It's hell, Williams," he said soberly. "You know how recklessly I've
waded into this thing--how recklessly we've all gone into it for that
matter. I'll come down like a man and admit that it has climbed up the
ladder to a place where I can't reach it. This Eastern crowd is trying
to freeze us out, to get our dam and reservoir and ditch rights for
their Escalante scheme. When they do, they'll turn around and sell us
water--at fifty dollars an inch, or something like that!"
"What breaks my heart is that we haven't been able to surround the
sure-enough fact while there was still time to do something," lamented
the ex-reclamation man. "The Lord knows it's been plain enough, with
Stanton right here on the ground, and probably every one of the
interferences traceable directly to him. He has begun to close in on
us; his purchase of the Gardner and Bolling stockholdings is the
beginning of the end. You know as well as I do, Colonel, what a
contagious disease 'the yellows' is. Others will get it, and the first
thing we know, Stanton will own a majority of the stock and be voting us
all out of a job. You'll have to come around to my suggestion, after
all, and advertise for a doctor." It was said of the chief of
construction that he would have joked on his death-bed, and, as a
follower for the joke, he added: "Why don't you call Smith in and give
him the job?"
"Smith be damned," growled the colonel, who, as we have seen, had become
completely color-blind on the sense-of-humor side.
"I wouldn't put it beyond him to develop into the young Napoleon of
finance that we seem to be needing just now," Williams went on, carrying
the jest to its legitimate conclusion.
Baldwin, like other self-made promoters in their day of trouble, was in
the condition of the drowning man who catches at straws.
"You don't really mean that, Williams, do you?" he asked.
"No, I didn't mean it when I said it," was the engineer's admission; "I
was only trying to get a rise out of you. But really, Colonel, on
second thought I don't know but it is worth considering. As I say,
Smith seems to know the money game from start to finish. What is better
still, he is a fighter from the word go--what you might call a joyous
fighter. Suppose you drive out to-morrow or next day and pry into him a
little."
The rancher president had relapsed once more into the slough of
discouragement.
"You are merely grabbing for handholds, Bartley--as I was a minute ago.
We are in a bad row of stumps when we can sit here and talk seriously
about roping down a young hobo and putting him into the financial
harness. Let's go around to Frascati's and eat before you go back to
camp. It's bread-time, anyway."
The chief of construction said no more about his joking suggestion at
the moment, but when they were walking around the square to the Brewster
Delmonico's he went back to the dropped subject in all seriousness,
saying: "Just the same, I wish you could know Smith and size him up as I
have. I can't help believing, some way, that he's all to the good."
V
The Specialist
Though the matter of calling in an expert doctor of finance to diagnose
the alarming symptoms in Timanyoni Ditch had been left indeterminate in
the talk between Colonel Baldwin and himself, Williams did not let it go
entirely by default. On the day following the Brewster office conference
the engineer sent for Smith, who was checking the output of the crushers
at the quarry, and a little later the "betterment" man presented himself
at the door of the corrugated-iron shack which served as a field office
for the chief.
Williams looked the cost-cutter over as he stood in the doorway. Smith
was thriving and expanding handsomely in the new environment. He had let
his beard grow and it was now long enough to be trimmed to a point. The
travel-broken clothes had been exchanged for working khaki, with lace
boots and leggings, and the workman's cap had given place to the
campaign felt of the engineers. Though he had been less than a month on
the job, he was already beginning to tan and toughen under the healthy
outdoor work--to roughen, as well, his late fellow members of the
Lawrenceville Cotillon Club might have said, since he had fought three
pitched battles with as many of the camp bullies, and had in each of
them approved himself a man of his hands who could not only take
punishment, but could hammer an opponent swiftly and neatly into any
desired state of subjection.
"Come in here and sit down; I want to talk to you," was the way Williams
began it; and after Smith had found a chair and had lighted a gift cigar
from the headquarters desk-box, the chief went on: "Say, Smith, you're
too good a man for anything I've got for you here. Haven't you realized
that?"
Smith pulled a memorandum-book from his hip pocket and ran his eye over
the private record he had been keeping.
"I've shown you how to effect a few little savings which total up
something like fifteen per cent of your cost of production and
operation," he said. "Don't you think I'm earning my wages?"
"That's all right; I've been keeping tab, too, and I know what you're
doing. But you are not beginning to earn what you ought to, either for
yourself or the company," put in the chief shrewdly. And then: "Loosen
up, Smith, and tell me something about yourself. Who are you, and where
do you come from, and what sort of a job have you been holding down?"
Smith's reply was as surprising as it was seemingly irrelevant.
"If you're not too busy, Mr. Williams, I guess you'd better make out my
time-check," he said quietly.
Williams took a reflective half-minute for consideration, turning the
sudden request over deliberately in his mind, as his habit was.
"I suppose, by that you mean that you'll quit before you will consent to
open up on your record?" he assumed.
"You've guessed it," said the man who had sealed the book of his past.
Again Williams took a little time. It was discouraging to have his own
and the colonel's prefigurings as to Smith's probable state and standing
so promptly verified.
"I suppose you know the plain inference you're leaving, when you say a
thing like that?"
Smith made the sign of assent. "It leaves you entirely at liberty to
finish out the story to suit yourself," he admitted, adding: "The back
numbers--my back numbers--are my own, Mr. Williams. I've kept a file of
them, as everybody does, but I don't have to produce it on request."
"Of course, there's nothing compulsory about your producing it. But
unless you are what they call in this country a 'crooked' crook, you are
standing in your own light. You have such a staving good head for
figures and finances that it seems a pity for you to be wasting it here
on an undergraduate's job in cost-cutting. Any young fellow just out of
a technical school could do what you're doing in the way of paring down
expenses."
The cost-cutter's smile was mildly incredulous.
"Nobody seemed to be doing it before I came," he offered.
"No," Williams allowed, "that's the fact. To tell the plain truth, we've
had bigger things to wrestle with; and we have them yet, for that
matter--enough of them to go all around the job twice and tie in a
bow-knot."
"Finances?" queried Smith, feeling some of the back-number instincts
stirring within him.
The chief engineer nodded; then he looked up with a twinkle in his
closely set gray eyes. "If you'll tell me why you tried to kill Burdell
the other day, maybe I'll open up the record--our record--for you."
This time the cost-cutter's smile was good-naturedly derisive, and it
ignored the reference to Burdell.
"You don't have to open up your record--for me; it's the talk of the
camp. You people are undercapitalized--to boil it down into one word.
Isn't that about the way it sizes up?"
"That is the way it has turned out; though we had capital enough to
begin with. We've been bled to death by damage suits."
Smith shook his head. "Why haven't you hired a first-class attorney, Mr.
Williams?"
"We've had the best we could find, but the other fellows have beaten us
to it, every time. But the legal end of it hasn't been the whole thing
or the biggest part of it. What we are needing most is a man who knows a
little something about corporation fights and high finance." And at this
the engineer forgot the Smith disabilities, real or inferential, and
went on to explain in detail the peculiar helplessness of the Timanyoni
Company as the antagonist of the as yet unnamed land and irrigation
trust.
Smith heard him through, nodding understandingly when the tale was
told.
"It's the old story of the big fish swallowing the little one; so old
that there is no longer any saving touch of novelty in it," he
commented. "I've been wondering if there wasn't something of that kind
in your background. And you say you haven't any Belmonts or Morgans or
Rockefellers in your company?"
"We have a bunch of rather badly scared-up ranch owners and local
people, with Colonel Baldwin in command, and that's all. The colonel is
a fighting man, all right, and he can shoot as straight as anybody, when
you have shown him what to shoot at. But he is outclassed, like all the
rest of us, when it comes to a game of financial freeze-out. And that is
what we are up against, I'm afraid."
"There isn't the slightest doubt in the world about that," said the one
who had been called in as an expert. "What I can't understand is why
some of you didn't size the situation up long ago--before it got into
its present desperate shape. You are at the beginning of the end, now.
They've caught you with an empty treasury, and these stock sales you
speak of prove that they have already begun to swallow you by littles.
Timanyoni Common--I suppose you haven't any Preferred--at thirty-nine is
an excellent gamble for any group of men who can see their way clear to
buying the control. With an eager market for the water--and they can
sell the water to you people, even if they don't put their own Escalante
project through--the stock can be pushed to par and beyond, as it will
be after you folks are all safely frozen out. More than that, they can
charge you enough, for the water you've got to have, to finance the
Escalante scheme and pay all the bills; and their investment, at the
present market, will be only thirty-nine cents in the dollar. It's a
neat little play."
Williams was by this time far past remembering that his adviser was a
man with a possible _alias_ and presumably a fugitive from justice.
"Can't something be done, Smith? You've had experience in these things;
your talk shows it. Have we got to stand still and be shot to pieces?"
"The necessity remains to be demonstrated. But you will be shot to
pieces, to a dead moral certainty, if you don't put somebody on deck
with the necessary brains, and do it quickly," said Smith with frank
bluntness.
"Hold on," protested the engineer. "Every man to his trade. When I said
that we had nobody but the neighbors and our friends in the company, I
didn't mean to give the impression that they were either dolts or
chuckleheads. As a matter of fact, we have a pretty level-headed bunch
of men in Timanyoni Ditch--though I'll admit that some of them are
nervous enough, just now, to want to get out on almost any terms. What I
meant to say was that they don't happen to be up in all the crooks and
turnings of the high-finance buccaneers."
"I didn't mean to reflect upon Colonel Baldwin and his friends,"
rejoined the ex-cashier good-naturedly. "It is nothing especially
discrediting to them that they are not up in all the tricks of a trade
which is not theirs. The financing of a scheme like this has come to be
a business by itself, Mr. Williams, and it is hardly to be expected that
a group of inexperienced men could do it successfully."
"I know that, blessed well. That is what I said from the beginning, and
I think Colonel Baldwin leaned that way, too. But it seemed like a very
simple undertaking. A number of stockmen and crop growers wanted a dam
and a ditch, and they had the money to pay for them. That seemed to be
all there was to it in the beginning."
Smith was leaning back in his chair and smoking reflectively.
"Did you call me in here to get an expert opinion?" he asked, half
humorously.
"Something of that kind--yes; just on the bare chance that you could,
and would, give us one," Williams admitted.
"Well, I'm hardly an expert," was the modest reply; "but if I were in
your place I should hire the best financial scrapper that money could
pay for. I can't attempt to tell you what such a man would do, but he
would at least rattle around in the box and try to give you a fighting
chance, which is more than you seem to have now."