"Keeping in mind what you said a few minutes ago about 'back numbers,'
would it be climbing over the fence too far for me to ask if your
experience has been such as would warrant you in tackling a job of this
kind?"
"That is a fair question, and I can answer it straight," said the man
under fire. "I've had the experience."
"I thought so; and that brings on more talk. I'm not authorized to make
you any proposal. But Colonel Baldwin and I were talking the matter over
yesterday and your name was mentioned. I told the colonel that it was
very evident that you were accustomed to handling bigger financial
matters than these labor-and-material cost-cuttings you've been figuring
on out here. If the colonel should ask you to, would you consider as a
possibility the taking of the doctor's job on this sick project of
ours?"
"No," was the brief rejoinder.
"Why not?"
Smith looked away out of the one square window in the shack at the busy
scene on the dam stagings.
"Let us say that I don't care to mix and mingle with my kind, Mr.
Williams, and let it go at that," he said.
"You are not interested in that side of it?"
"Interested, but not to the point of enlisting."
"You don't think of anything that might make you change your mind?"
"There is nothing that you could offer which would be a sufficient
inducement."
"Why isn't there?"
"Because I'm not exactly a born simpleton, Mr. Williams. There are a
number of reasons which are purely personal to me, and at least one
which cuts ice on your side of the pond. Your financial 'doctor,' as you
call him, would have to be trusted absolutely in the handling of the
company's money and its negotiable securities. You would have a perfect
right to demand any and every assurance of his fitness and
trustworthiness. You could, and should, put him under a fairly heavy
bond. I'll not go into it any deeper than to say that I can't give a
bond."
Williams took his defeat, if it could be called a defeat, without
further protest.
"I thought it might not be amiss to talk it over with you," he said. "I
don't know that the colonel will make any move, but if he does, he will
deal with you direct. You say it is impossible, and perhaps it is. But
it won't do any harm for you to think it over, and if I were you, I
shouldn't burn all the bridges behind me. There ought to be considerable
money in it for the right man, if he succeeds, and nothing much to lose
if he should fail."
Smith went back to his work in the quarry with a troubled mind. The
little heart-to-heart talk with Williams had been sharply depressive. It
had shown him, as nothing else could, how limited for all the remainder
of his life his chances must be. That he would be pursued, that
descriptions and photographs of the ex-cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank
and Trust Company were already circulating from hand to hand among the
paid man-catchers, he did not doubt for a moment. While he could remain
as a workman unit in an isolated construction camp, there was some
little hope that he might be overlooked. But to become the public
character of Williams's suggestion in a peopled city was to run to meet
his fate.
In a way the tentative offer was a keen temptation. One of the lustiest
growths pushing its way up through the new soil of the metamorphosis was
a strong and mounting conviction that J. Montague Smith, of the
Lawrenceville avatar, had been only half a man; was, at his best, only a
pale shadow of the plain John Smith to whom accident and a momentary
impulse of passion had given birth. With a clear field he would have
asked for nothing better than a chance to take the leadership in the
fight which Williams had outlined, and the new and elemental stirrings
were telling him that he could win the fight. But with a price on his
head it was not to be thought of.
That night, when he rolled himself in his blankets in the bunk tent, he
had renewed his prudent determination and it was crystallizing itself in
words.
"No, not for money or gratitude or any other argument they can bring to
bear," he said to himself, and thereupon fell asleep with the mistaken
notion that he had definitely pushed the temptation aside for good and
all.
VI
The Twig
It is said that the flow of a mighty river may owe its most radical
change in direction to the chance thrusting of a twig into the current
at some critical instant in the rise or fall of the flood. To the
reincarnated Smith, charting his course upon the conviction that his
best chance of immunity lay in isolation and a careful avoidance of the
peopled towns, came the diverting twig in this wise.
On the second morning following the unofficial talk with Bartley
Williams in the iron-sheeted headquarters office at the dam, a delayed
consignment of cement, steel, and commissary supplies was due at the
side-track a mile below the camp. Perkins, the timekeeper, took the
telephone call from Brewster giving notice of the shipment, and started
the camp teams to meet the train, sending a few men along to help with
the unloading. Later, he called Smith in from the quarry and gave him
the invoices covering the shipment.
"I guess you'd better go down to the siding and check this stuff in, so
that we'll know what we're getting," was his suggestion to the general
utility man; and Smith put the invoices into his pocket and took the
road, a half-hour or more behind the teams.
When the crookings of the tote-road let him get his first sight of the
side-track, he saw that the train was already in and the mixed shipment
of camp supplies had been transferred to the wagons. A few minutes
sufficed for the checking, and since there was nothing more to be done,
he sent the unloading gang back to camp with the teams, meaning to walk
back, himself, after he should have seen the car of steel and the two
cars of cement kicked in at the upper end of the side-track.
While he was waiting for the train to pull up and make the shift he was
commenting idly upon the clumsy lay-out of the temporary unloading yard,
and wondering if Williams were responsible for it. The siding was on the
outside of a curve and within a hundred yards of the river bank. There
was scanty space for the unloading of material, and a good bit of what
there was was taken up by the curving spur which led off from the siding
to cross the river on a trestle, and by the wagon road itself, which
came down a long hill on the south side of the railroad and made an
abrupt turn to cross the main track and the siding fairly in the midst
of things.
As the long train pulled up to clear the road crossing, Smith stepped
back and stood between the two tracks. A moment later the cut was made,
and the forward section of the train went on to set the three loaded
cars out at the upper switch, leaving the rear half standing on the main
line. From his position between the tracks there was a clear view past
the caboose at the end of the halted section and beyond, to the road
crossing and the steep grade down which the dusty wagon road made a
rough gash in the shoulder of the mountain spur which had crowded it
from the river-bank side of the railroad right of way. At the bottom of
the steep grade, where the road swerved to cross the two tracks, there
was a little sag; and between the sag and the crossing a sharp bit of
up-grade made to gain the level of the railroad embankment.
One of the men of the unloading gang, a leather-faced grade shoveller
who had helped to build the Nevada Short Line, had lagged behind the
departing wagons to fill and light his pipe.
"Wouldn't that jar you up right good and hard f'r a way to run a
railroad," he said to Smith, indicating the wholly deserted standing
section of the freight with the burnt match-end. "Them fellies 've all
gone off up ahead, a-leavin' this yere hind end without a sign of a
man'r a flag to take keer of it. S'pose another train 'd come boolgin'
'round that curve. Wouldn't it rise merry hell with things 'long about
this-away?"
Smith was listening only with the outward ear to what the pipelighter
was saying. Somewhere in the westward distances a thunderous murmur was
droning upon the windless air of the June morning, betokening, as it
seemed, the very catastrophe the ex-grade-laborer was prefiguring. Smith
stripped his coat for a flag and started to run toward the crossing, but
before he had caught his stride a dust cloud swept up over the shoulder
of the wagon-road hill and the portentous thunderings were accounted
for. A big gray automobile, with the cut-out open, was topping the
side-hill grade, and Smith recognized it at once. It was Colonel Dexter
Baldwin's roadster, and it held a single occupant--namely, the young
woman who was driving it.
Smith stopped running and transferred his anxiety from the train and
railroad affairs to the young woman. Being himself a skilful driver of
cars--and a man--he had a purely masculine distrust of the woman, any
woman, behind a steering-wheel. To be sure, there was no danger, as yet.
Turning to look up the track, he saw that the three loaded cars had been
set out, that the forward section of the train had been pulled up over
the switch, and that it was now backing to make the coupling with the
standing half. He hoped that the trainmen had seen the automobile, and
that they would not attempt to make the coupling until after the gray
car had crossed behind the caboose. But in the same breath he guessed,
and guessed rightly, that they were too far around the curve to be able
to see the wagon-road approach.
Still there was time enough, and room enough. The caboose on the rear
end of the standing section was fully a hundred feet clear of the road
crossing; and if the entire train should start backward at the coupling
collision, the speed at which the oncoming roadster was running should
take it across and out of danger. Nevertheless, there was no margin for
the unexpected. Smith saw the young woman check the speed for the abrupt
turn at the bottom of the hill, saw the car take the turn in a skidding
slide, heard the renewed roar of the motor as the throttle was opened
for a run at the embankment grade. Then the unexpected dropped its bomb.
There was a jangling crash and the cars on the main track were set in
motion toward the crossing. The trainmen had tried to make their
coupling, the drawheads had failed to engage, and the rear half of the
train was surging down upon the point of hazard.
Smith's shout, or the sight of the oncoming train, one of the two, or
both, put the finishing touch on the young woman's nerve. There was
still time in which to clear the train, but at the critical instant the
young woman apparently changed her mind and tried to stop the big car
short of the crossing. The effort was unsuccessful. When the stop was
made, the front wheels of the roadster were precisely in the middle of
the main track, and the motor was killed.
By this time Smith had thrown his coat away and was racing the backing
train, with the ex-grade-laborer a poor second a dozen yards to the rear.
Having ridden in the roadster, Smith knew that it had no self-starter.
"_Jump!_" he yelled. "Get out of the car!" and then his heart came into
his mouth when he saw that she was struggling to free herself and
couldn't; that she was entangled in some way behind the low-hung
tiller-wheel.
Smith was running fairly abreast of the caboose when he made this
discovery, and the hundred feet of clearance had shrunk to fifty. In
imagination he could already see the gray car overturned and crushed
under the wheels of the train. In a flying spurt he gained a few yards
on the advancing menace and hurled himself against the front of the
stopped roadster. He did not attempt to crank the motor. There was time
only for a mighty heave and shove to send the car backing down the slope
of the crossing approach; for this and for the quick spring aside to
save himself; and the thing was done.
VII
A Notice to Quit
Once started and given its push, the gray roadster drifted backward from
the railroad crossing and kept on until it came to rest in the sag at
the turn in the road. Running to overtake it, Smith found that the young
woman was still trying, ineffectually, to free herself. In releasing the
clutch her dress had been caught and Smith was glad enough to let the
extricating of the caught skirt and the cranking of the engine serve for
a breath-catching recovery.
When he stepped back to "tune" the spark the young woman had subsided
into the mechanician's seat and was retying her veil with fingers that
were not any too steady. She was small but well-knit; her hair was a
golden brown and there was a good deal of it; her eyes were set well
apart, and in the bright morning sunlight they were a slaty gray--of the
exact shade of the motor veil she was rearranging. Smith had a sudden
conviction that he had seen the wide-set eyes before; also the straight
little nose and the half boyish mouth and chin, though where he had seen
them the conviction could give no present hint.
"I sup-pup-pose I ought to say something appropriate," she was
beginning, half breathlessly, while Smith stood at the fender and
grinned in character-not with the ex-leader of the Lawrenceville younger
set, but with the newer and more elemental man of all work on a desert
dam-building job. "Wha-what _is_ the proper thing to say when you have
just been sus-snatched out of the way of a railroad train?"
As J. Montague, the rescuer would have had a neatly turned rejoinder at
his tongue's end; but the well-mannered phrases were altogether too
conventional to suggest themselves to a strapping young barbarian in
ill-fitting khaki and leggings and a slouch felt. Being unable to recall
them, he laughed and pushed the J. Montague past still farther into the
background.
"You don't have to say anything. It's been a long time since I've had a
chance to make such a bully grand-stand play as this." And then: "You're
Colonel Baldwin's daughter, aren't you?"
She nodded, saying:
"How did you know?"
"I know the car. And you have your father's eyes."
She did not seem to take it amiss that he was making her eyes a basis
for comparisons. One William Starbuck, a former cattleman and her
father's time-tried friend, paid Miss Corona the compliment of saying
that she never allowed herself to get "bogged down in the
haughtinesses." She was her father's only son, as well as his only
daughter, and she divided her time pretty evenly in trying to live up to
both sets of requirements.
"You have introduced me; wo-won't you introduce yourself?" she said,
when a second crash of the shifting freight-train spent itself and gave
her an opening.
"I'm Smith," he told her; adding: "It's my real name."
Her laugh was an instant easing of tensions.
"Oh, yes; you're Mr. Williams's assistant. I've heard Colonel-da--my
father, speak of you."
"No," he denied in blunt honesty, "I'm not Williams's assistant; at
least, the pay-roll doesn't say so. Up at the camp they call me 'The
Hobo,' and that's what I was a week or so ago when your father picked me
up and gave me a lift to the dam in this car."
The young woman had apparently regained whatever small fraction of
self-possession the narrow escape had shocked aside.
"Are they never going to take that miserable train out of the way?" she
exclaimed. "I've got to see Mr. Williams, and there isn't a minute to
spare. That is why I was breaking all the speed limits."
"They are about ready to pull out now," he returned, with a glance over
his shoulder at the train. "I'm a sort of general utility man up at the
camp: can you use me in any way?"
"I'm afraid you won't do," she replied, with a little laughing grimace
that made him wonder where and when in the past he had seen some young
woman do the same thing under exactly similar conditions. "It's a matter
of business--awfully urgent business. Colonel-da--I mean my father, has
gone up to Red Butte, and a little while ago they telephoned over to the
ranch from the Brewster office to say that there was going to be some
more trouble at the dam."
"They?" he queried.
"Mr. Martin, the head bookkeeper. He said he'd been trying to get Mr.
Williams, but the wires to the camp were out of order."
"They're not," said Smith shortly, remembering that Perkins had been
talking from the camp to the Brewster railroad agent within the
half-hour. "But never mind that: go on."
Again she let him see the piquant little grimace.
"You say that just as if you _were_ Mr. Williams's assistant," she threw
back at him. "But I haven't time to quarrel with you this morning, Mr.
Real-name Smith. If you'll take your foot off the fender I'll go on up
to the dam and find Mr. Williams."
"You couldn't quarrel with me if you should try," was the good-natured
rejoinder, and Smith tried in vain to imagine himself taking his present
attitude with any of the young women he had known in his cotillon
days--with Verda Richlander, for example. Then he added: "You won't find
Williams at the camp. He started out early this morning to ride the
lower ditch lines beyond Little Creek, and he said he wouldn't be back
until some time to-morrow. Now will you tell me what you're needing--and
give me a possible chance to get my pay raised?"
"_Oh!_" she exclaimed, with a little gasp of disappointment, presumably
for the Williams absence. "I've simply _got_ to find Mr. Williams--or
somebody! Do you happen to know anything about the lawsuit troubles?"
"I know all about them; Williams has told me."
"Then I'll tell you what Mr. Martin telephoned. He said that three
men were going to pretend to relocate a mining claim in the hills
back of the dam, somewhere near the upper end of the reservoir
lake-that-is-to-be. They're doing it so that they can get out an
injunction, or whatever you call it, and then we'll have to buy them
off, as the others have been bought off."
Smith was by this time entirely familiar with the maps and profiles and
other records of the ditch company's lands and holdings.
"All the land within the limits of the flood level has been bought and
paid for--some of it more than once, hasn't it?" he asked.
"Oh, yes; but that doesn't make any difference. These men will claim
that their location was made long ago, and that they are just now
getting ready to work it. It's often done in the case of mining claims."
"When is all this going to happen?" he inquired.
"It is already happening," she broke out impatiently. "Mr. Martin said
the three men left town a little after daybreak and crossed on the
Brewster bridge to go up on the other side of the Timanyoni. They had a
two-horse team and a camping outfit. They are probably at work long
before this time."
The young woman had taken her place again behind the big tiller-wheel,
and Smith calmly motioned her out of it.
"Take the other seat and let me get in here," he said; and when she had
changed over, he swung in behind the wheel and put a foot on the clutch
pedal.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to take you on up to the camp, and then, if you'll lend me
this car, I'll go and do what you hoped to persuade Williams to do--run
these mining-claim jokers into the tall timber."
"But you can't!" she protested; "you can't do it alone! And, besides,
they are on the other side of the river, and you can't get anywhere with
the car. You'll have to go all the way back to Brewster to get across
the river!"
It was just here that he stole another glance at the very-much-alive
little face behind the motor veil; at the firm, round chin and the
resolute, slaty-gray eyes.
"I suppose I ought to take you to the camp," he said. "But you may go
along with me, if you want to--and are not afraid."
She laughed in his face.
"I was born here in the Timanyoni, and you haven't been here three
weeks: do you think I'd be afraid to go anywhere that you'll go?"
"We'll see about that," he chuckled, matching the laugh; and with that
he let the clutch take hold and sent the car rolling gently up to the
level of the railroad embankment and across the rails of the main track.
On the right of way of the paralleling side-track he steered off the
crossing and pulled the roadster around until it was headed fairly for
the upper switch. Then he climbed down and recovered his coat which had
been flung aside in the race with the train. Resuming his place behind
the tiller-wheel, he put the motor in the reverse and began to back the
car on the siding, steering so that the wheels on one side hugged the
inside of one rail.
"What in the world are you trying to do?" questioned the young woman who
had said she was not afraid.
"Wait," he temporized; "just wait a minute and get ready to hang on like
grim death. We're going across on that trestle."
He fully expected her to shriek and grab for the steering-wheel. That,
he told himself, was what the normal young woman would do. But Miss
Corona disappointed him.
"You'll put us both into the river, and smash Colonel-daddy's car, but I
guess the Baldwin family can stand it if you can," she remarked quite
calmly.
Smith kept on backing until the car had passed the switch from which the
spur branched off to cross to the material yard on the opposite side of
the river. A skilful bit of juggling put the roadster over on the ties
of the spur-track. Then he turned to his fellow risk.
"Sit low, and hang on with both hands," he directed. "_Now!_" and he
opened the throttle.
The trestle was not much above two hundred feet long, and, happily, the
cross-ties were closely spaced. Steered to a hair, the big car went
bumping across, and in his innermost recesses Smith was saying to his
immediate ancestor, the well-behaved bank clerk: "You swab! _you_ never
saw the day when you could do a thing like this ... you thought you had
me tied up in a bunch of ribbon, didn't you?"
If Miss Baldwin were frightened, she did not show it; and when the
crossing was safely made, Smith caught a little side glance that told
him he was making good. He jerked the roadster out of the entanglement
of the railroad track and said: "You may sit up now and tell me which
way to go. I don't know anything about the roads over here."
She pointed out the way across the hills, and a four-mile dash followed
that set the blood dancing in Smith's veins. He had never before driven
a car as fast as he wanted to; partly because he had never owned one
powerful enough, and partly because the home-land speed laws--and his
own past _metier_--would not sanction it. Up hill and down the big
roadster raced, devouring the interspaces, and at the topping of the
last of the ridges the young woman opened the small tool-box in the
dividing arm between the seats and showed her reckless driver a large
and serviceable army automatic snugly holstered under the lid.
"Daddy always keeps it there for his night drives on the horse ranges,"
she explained. But Smith was shaking his head.
"We're not going to need anything of that sort," he assured her, and the
racing search for three men and a two-horse team was continued.
Beyond the final hill, in a small, low-lying swale which was well hidden
from any point of view in the vicinity of the distant dam, they came
upon the interlopers. There were three men and two horses and a covered
wagon, as Martin's telephone message had catalogued them. The horses
were still in the traces, and just beyond the wagon a long, narrow
parallelogram, of the length and breadth of a legal mining claim, had
been marked out by freshly driven stakes. In one end of the
parallelogram two of the men were digging perfunctorily, while the third
was tacking the legal notice on a bit of board nailed to one of the
stakes.
Smith sent the gray car rocketing down into the swale, brought it to a
stand with a thrust of the brakes, and jumped out. Once more the
primitive Stone Age man in him, which had slept so long and so quietly
under the Lawrenceville conventionalities, was joyously pitching the
barriers aside.
"It's moving day for you fellows," he announced cheerfully, picking the
biggest of the three as the proper subject for the order giving. "You're
on the Timanyoni Ditch Company's land, and you know it. Pile into that
wagon and fade away!"