the order giver was palpably unarmed. But on second thought he began to
supplement the laugh with an oath. Smith's right arm shot out, and when
the blow landed there were only two left to close in on him. In such
sudden hostilities the advantages are all with the beginner. Having
superior reach and a good bit more skill than either of the two
tacklers, Smith held his own until he could get in a few more of the
smashing right-handers, but in planting them he took punishment enough
to make him Berserk-mad and so practically invincible. There was a
fierce mingling of arms, legs, and bodies, sufficiently terrifying, one
would suppose, to a young woman sitting calmly in an automobile a
hundred yards away; but she neither cried out nor attempted to go to the
rescue with the weapon which it seemed as if Smith might be needing.
The struggle was short in just proportion to its vigor, and at the end
of it two of the trespassers were knocked out, and Smith was dragging
the third over to the wagon, into which he presently heaved the man as
if he had been a sack of meal. Miss Baldwin, sitting in the car, saw her
ally dive into the covered wagon and come out with a pair of
Winchesters. Pausing only long enough to smash the guns, one after the
other, over the wagon-wheel, he started back after the two other men.
They were not waiting to be carried to the wagon; they were up and
running in a wide semicircle to reach their hope of retreat unslain, if
that might be. It was all very brutal and barbarous, no doubt, but the
colonel's daughter was Western born and bred, and she clapped her hands
and laughed in sheer enthusiasm when she saw Smith make a show of
chasing the circling runners.
He did not return to her until after he had pulled up the freshly driven
stakes and thrown them away, and by that time the wagon, with the horses
lashed to a keen gallop, was disappearing over the crest of the northern
ridge.
"That's one way to get rid of them, isn't it?" said the emancipated bank
man, jocosely, upon taking his place in the car to cramp it for the
turn. "Was that something like the notion you had in mind?"
"Mercy, no!" she rejoined. And then: "Are you sure you are not hurt?"
"Not worth mentioning," he evaded. "Those duffers couldn't hurt anybody,
so long as they couldn't get to their guns."
"But you have saved the company at your own expense. They will be sure
to have you arrested."
"We won't cross that bridge until we come to it," he returned. "And,
besides, there were no witnesses. _You_ didn't see anything."
"Of course, I didn't; not the least little thing in the world!" she
agreed, laughing with him.
"I thought not. There were too many of us for any single eye-witness to
get more than the general effect." Then, in easy assertion of his victor
rights: "If we were back in the country from which I have lately escaped
it would be proper for me to ask your permission to drive you safely
home. Since we are not, I shall assume the permission and do it anyway."
"Oh, is that necessary?" she asked, meaning, as he took it, nothing more
than comradely deprecation at putting him to the trouble of it.
"Not absolutely necessary, perhaps, but decently prudent. You might drop
me opposite the dam, but you'd have to pass those fellows somewhere on
the way and they might try to make it unpleasant for you."
She made no further comment, and he sent the car spinning along over the
hills to the westward. A mile short of the trestle river crossing they
overtook and passed the wagon. Because he had the colonel's daughter
with him, Smith put on a burst of speed and so gave the claim-jumpers no
chance to provoke another battle. With the possible unpleasantnesses
thus left in the rear, Smith knew well enough that there was really no
reason for his going any farther than the spur-track trestle. None the
less, he held to his announced determination, driving briskly down the
north-side river road and on toward the grass-land ranches.
In the maze of cross-roads opposite the little city on the south bank of
the river, Smith was out of his reckoning, and was obliged to ask his
companion to direct him.
"I thought you weren't ever going to say anything any more," she sighed,
in mock despair. "Take this road to the right."
"I can't talk and drive a speed-wagon at the same time," he told her,
twisting the gray car into the road she had indicated, and he made the
assertion good by covering the four remaining miles in the same
preoccupied fashion.
There was a reason, of a sort, for his silence; two of them, to be
exact. For one, he was troubled by that haunting sense of familiarity
which was still trying to tell him that this was not his first meeting
with Colonel Baldwin's daughter; and the other was much bigger, and more
depressing. Though he was continually assuring himself that he had
buried the former bank clerk and all of his belongings in a deep grave,
some of the bank-clerk convictions still refused to remain decently in
the coffin. One of these--and it had been daggering him sharply for the
past half-hour--was the realization that in breaking with his past, he
had broken also with the world of women--good women--at least to the
extent of ever asking one of them to marry him.
Truly, though shadows are insubstantial things for the greater part,
there is one exception. The shadow of a crime may involve both the
innocent and the guilty quite as effectually as the thing itself, and
Smith saw himself shut out automatically from the married beatitudes....
He pushed the thought aside, coming back to the other one--the puzzle of
familiarity--when Miss Baldwin pointed to a transplanted Missouri farm
mansion, with a columned portico, standing in a grove of cottonwoods on
the left-hand side of the road, telling him it was Hillcrest.
There was a massive stone portal fronting the road, and when he got down
to open the gates the young woman took the wheel and drove through;
whereupon, he decided that it was time for him to break away, and said
so.
"But how will you get back to the camp?" she asked.
"I have my two legs yet, and the walking isn't bad."
"No; but you might meet those men again."
"That is the least of my troubles."
Miss Corona Baldwin, like the Missouri colonel, her father, came upon
moments now and then when she had the ultimate courage of her impulses.
"I should have said you hadn't a trouble in the world," she asserted,
meeting his gaze level-eyed.
The polite paraphrases of the coffined period were slipping to the end
of his tongue, but he set his teeth upon them and said, instead: "That's
all you know about it. What if I should tell you that you've been
driving this morning with an escaped convict?"
"I shouldn't believe it," she said calmly.
"Well, you haven't--not quite," he returned, adding the qualifying
phrase in sheer honesty.
She had untied her veil and was asking him hospitably if he wouldn't
come in and meet her mother. Something in the way she said it, some
little twist of the lips or look of the eyes, touched the spring of
complete recognition and the familiarity puzzle vanished instantly.
"You forget that I am a workingman," he smiled. "My gang in the quarry
will think I've found a bottle somewhere." And then: "Did you ever lose
a glove, Miss Baldwin--a white kid with a little hole in one finger?"
"Dozens of them," she admitted; "and most of them had holes, I'm afraid.
But what has that got to do with your coming in and meeting mamma and
letting her thank you for saving my life?"
"Nothing at all, of course," he hastened to say; and with that he bade
her good-by rather abruptly and turned his back upon the transplanted
Missouri mansion, muttering to himself as he closed the portal gates
behind him: "'Baldwin,' of course! What an ass I was not to remember the
name! And now I've got the other half of it, too; it's 'Corona.'"
VIII
Timanyoni Ditch
Smith had his vote of thanks from Colonel Dexter Baldwin in person late
in the afternoon of the day following the summary eviction of the sham
mine locators in the upper reservoir; presidential thanks for his prompt
defense of the company's interests, and a warm outhanding of fatherly
gratitude for the rescue at the unloading side-track. The vote was
passed in Williams's sheet-iron office at the dam, the colonel having
driven out to the camp for the express purpose; and the chief of
construction himself was not present.
"You've loaded us up with a tolerably heavy obligation, Smith--Corry's
mother and me," was the way the colonel summed up in the personal field.
"If you hadn't been on deck and strictly on the job at that railroad
crossing yesterday morning----"
"Don't mention it, Colonel," Smith broke in, protesting honestly as
plain "John" where a "J. Montague" might have made self-gratulatory
capital. "There is only one thing in this world more onerous than owing
an obligation, and that is the feeling that you've got to live up to
one. I did nothing more than any man would have done for any woman. You
know it, and I know it. Let's leave it that way and forget it."
The tall Missourian's laugh was entirely approbative.
"I like that," he said. "It's a good, man-fashion way of looking at it.
Corry wanted me to tell her what I was going to say to you, and I said
I'd be hanged if I knew. I owe you one for making it easy. You know how
I feel about it--how any father would feel; and that's enough."
"Plenty," was the brief rejoinder.
"But there's another chapter to it that neither of us can cross out;
you'll have to come out to the ranch and let Corry's mother have a hack
at you," Baldwin went on. "I couldn't figure you out of that if I should
try. And now about those claim-jumpers: I suppose you didn't know any of
them by name?"
"No."
"Corry says you gave them the time of their lives. By George, I wish I'd
been there to see!" and the colonel slapped his leg and laughed. "Did
they look like the real thing--sure-enough prospectors?"
"They looked like a bunch of hired assassins," said Smith, with a grin.
"It's some more of the interference, isn't it?"
The colonel's square jaw settled into the fighting angle.
"How much do you know about this business mix-up of ours, Smith?" he
asked.
"All that Williams could tell me in a little heart-to-heart talk we had
the other day."
"You agreed with him that there was a tolerably big nigger in the
wood-pile, didn't you?"
"I had already gathered that much from the camp gossip."
"Well, it's so. We're just about as helpless as a bunch of cattle in a
sink-hole," was the ranchman president's confirmation of the camp
guesses. "As long as it was a straightaway stunt of buying land and
building a dam and digging a few ditches, we were in the fight. We knew
what we wanted, and we had the money to go out and buy it. But now it
looks as if we were aiming to get it where the chicken got the cleaver.
If our hunch about the Escalante irrigation trust is right, we are not
only going to lose our money and our work; we've run slap up against a
proposition that will shut us out of the water altogether and force us
to buy it of these Eastern sharks--at their own price. When it comes to
that, we may as well make 'em a present of the entire Little Creek
district. They can take it whenever they have a mind to."
Smith was thinking of the young woman with the resolute slaty-gray eyes
when he said: "That is, of course, if you lie down and let them put the
steam-roller over you. But you're not going to do that, are you?"
Baldwin shook his head as one who will not permit himself to minimize a
hazard.
"Keep that notion of the cattle in a sink-hole in front of you, Smith,
and you'll get a pretty fair idea of the chances. What in the name of
the great horn spoon can we do--more than we have done?"
"There are a number of things that might be done," said Smith, falling
back reflectively upon the presumably dead and buried bank-cashier part
of him. "In the first place, these trust people can't take your dam and
your ditch right of way until after they have bought up a voting control
of your stock. It is very pointedly up to you and your fellow
stockholders to say whether or not you are going to let them scare or
force you into selling, isn't it?"
"I reckon maybe it is. But two of our men have already sold out, and
more will follow. These Eastern sharks 've got the bulge on us; they
have the money, and we're just about as good as dead broke."
"Of course," said the younger man. "That was part of the game; to swamp
you with costly lawsuits, use up your capital, and break your credit.
It's done every day in business, and in a thousand different ways, some
of them pure robberies, but most of them legally defensible. You folks
have made the mistake of letting it go too far on too small a
capitalization. You're left without a fighting fund. Still, while there
is life there is always hope. And if you can manage to stay in the game
and play it out, there is big money in it for all of you; enough to make
it well worth while for you to put up the fight of your lives."
"Big money?--you mean in saving our investment?"
"Oh, no; not at all; in cinching the other fellows," Smith put in
genially. "As Williams explained it to me, there is the biggest kind of
a killing in it for you people, if you can hold on and win out."
Colonel Dexter Baldwin lifted his soft hat and ran his fingers through
his grizzled hair.
"Say, Smith; you mustn't forget that I'm from Missouri," he said half
quizzically.
"But I shouldn't think you'd need to be 'shown' in this particular
instance," was the smiling rejoinder. "Why are these Eastern capitalists
spending their good money on a scheme to freeze out your little handful
of ranch owners, Colonel? Surely you've asked yourself that question
long before this, haven't you?"
"Why, yes; it's because they want to get something for nothing, isn't
it?"
"In a general sense, of course, that is the basis of all crooked
business schemes. But the chance to sell you people water from your own
dam isn't the only thing or the main thing in this case; that part of it
is merely incidental. Didn't Williams tell me that they are obliged to
have this dam site, or, at least, one as high up the river as this, in
order to get the water over to their newly alienated grant in the
western half of the park?"
"I don't know what Bartley told you, but that is the fact."
"No way of dodging that, is there? They couldn't possibly build a dam of
their own, lower down, and make it work, could they? I'm asking because
what I don't know about irrigation engineering would fill a Carnegie
library in a good-sized little city."
"You've got it straight," said the colonel. "A good part of the
Escalante Grant lies higher than our Little Creek ranches. From any
point farther down the river than this, they'd have to pump the water to
get it up to the Escalante mesas."
"Very good. Then they're simply obliged to have your dam, or--Don't you
see the alternative now, Colonel?"
"Heavens to Betsy!" exclaimed the breeder of fine horses, bringing his
fist down upon Williams's desk with a crash that made the ink-bottles
dance. And then: "The Lord have mercy! What a lot of fence-posts we
are--the whole kit and b'ilin' of us! If they get the dam, they sell
water to us; if they don't get it, _we sell it to them_!"
"That's it, exactly," Smith put in quietly. "And I should say that your
stake in the game is worth the stiffest fight you can make to save it.
Don't you agree with me?"
"Great Jehu! I should say so!" ejaculated the amateur trust fighter.
Then he broke down the barriers masterfully. "That settles it, Smith.
You can't wiggle out of it now, no way or shape. You've got to come over
into Macedonia and help us. Williams tells me you refused him, but you
can't refuse me."
If Smith hesitated, it was only partly on his own account. He was
thinking again of the young woman with the honest eyes when he said: "Do
you know why I turned Williams down when he spoke to me the other day?"
Colonel Dexter Baldwin had his faults, like other men, but they were not
those of indirection.
"I reckon I do know, son," he said, with large tolerance. "You're a
'lame duck' of some sort; you've made that pretty plain in your talks
with Williams, haven't you? But that's our lookout. Bartley is ready to
swear that you are not a crooked crook, whatever else it is that you're
dodging for, and if we want to shut our eyes to the way you won't loosen
up about yourself.... Besides, there's yesterday; and what you did down
at the railroad crossing and out yonder in the hills----"
"We agreed to forget the yesterday incidents," the lame duck reminded
him quickly. And then: "I ought to say 'No,' Colonel Baldwin; say it
straight out, and stick to it. If I don't say it--if I ask for a little
time--it is because I want to weigh up a few things--the things I can't
talk about to you or to Williams. If, in the end, I should be fool
enough to say 'Yes,' it will be merely because, the way things have
turned out with me, I'd a little rather fight than eat. But even in that
case it is only fair to you to say that, right in the middle of the
scrap, I may fall to pieces on you."
Baldwin was too shrewd to try to push his advantage when there was, or
seemed to be, a chance that the desired end was as good as half
attained. And it was a purely manful prompting that made him get up and
thrust out his hand to the young fellow who was trying to be as frank as
he dared to be.
"Put it there, John," he said heartily. "Nobody in the Timanyoni is
going to pry into you an inch farther than you care to let 'em; and if
you get into trouble by helping us, you can count on at least one backer
who will stand by you until the cows come home. Now then, hunt up your
coat, and we'll drive over to Hillcrest for a bite to eat. I know you
won't be easy in your mind until you've had it out with Corry's
mother--about that little railroad trick--and you may as well do it now
and have it over with. No; excuses don't go, this time. I had my orders
from the Missus before I left town, and I know better than to go home
without you. Never mind the commissary khaki. It won't be the first time
that the working-clothes have figured at the Hillcrest table--not by a
long shot."
And because he did not know how to frame a refusal that would refuse,
Smith got his coat and went.
IX
Relapsings
Given his choice between the two, Smith would cheerfully have faced
another hand-to-hand battle with the claim-jumpers in preference to even
so mild a dip into the former things as the dinner at Hillcrest
foreshadowed. The reluctance was not forced; it was real. The primitive
man in him did not wish to be entertained. On the fast auto drive down
to Brewster, across the bridge, and out to the Baldwin ranch Smith's
humor was frankly sardonic. Dinners, social or grateful, were such
childish things; so little worth the time and attention of a real man
with work to do!
It mattered nothing that he had lived twenty-five years and more without
suspecting this childishness of things social. That door was closed and
another had been opened; beyond the new opening the prospect was as yet
rather chaotic and rugged, to be sure, but the color scheme, if somewhat
raw, was red-blood vivid, and the horizons were illimitable. Smith sat
up in the mechanician's seat and straightened the loose tie under the
soft collar of his working-shirt, smiling grimly as his thought leaped
back to the dress clothes he had left lying on the bed in his
Lawrenceville quarters. He cherished a small hope that Mrs. Baldwin
might be shocked at the soft shirt and the khaki. It would serve her
right for taking a man from his job.
The colonel did not try to make him talk, and the fifteen-mile flight
down the river and across into the hills was shortly accomplished. At
the stone-pillared portal he got out to open the gates. Down the road a
little distance a horseman was coming at a smart gallop--at least, the
rider figured as a man for the gate-opener until he saw that it was
Corona Baldwin, booted and spurred and riding a man's saddle.
Smith let the gray car go on its way up the drive without him and held
the gates open for the horse and its rider.
"So you weakened, did you? I'm disappointed in you," was Miss Baldwin's
greeting. "You've made me lose my bet with Colonel-daddy. I said you
wouldn't come."
"I had no business to come," he answered morosely. "But your father
wouldn't let me off."
"Of course, he wouldn't; daddy never lets anybody off, unless they owe
him money. Where are your evening clothes?"
Smith let the lever of moroseness slip back to the grinning notch. "They
are about two thousand miles away, and probably in some second-hand shop
by this time. What makes you think I ever wore a dress suit?" He had
closed the gates and was walking beside her horse up the driveway.
"Oh, I just guessed it," she returned lightly, "and if you'll hold your
breath, I'll guess again."
"Don't," he laughed. "You are going to say that at some time in my life
I knew better than to accept anybody's dinner invitation undecorated.
Maybe there was such a time, but if so, I am trying to forget it."
Her laugh was good-naturedly derisive.
"You'll forget it just so long as you are able to content yourself in a
construction camp. I know the symptoms. There are times when I feel as
if I'd simply blow up if I couldn't put on the oldest things I've got
and go and gallop for miles on Shy, and other times when I want to put
on all the pretty things I have and look soulful and talk nonsense."
"But you've been doing that--the galloping, I mean--all your life,
haven't you?"
"Not quite. There were three wasted years in a finishing school back
East. It is when I get to thinking too pointedly about them that I have
to go out to the stable and saddle Shy."
They had reached the steps of the pillared portico, and a negro
stable-boy, one of the colonel's importations from Missouri, was waiting
to take Miss Baldwin's horse. Smith knew how to help a woman down from a
side-saddle; but the two-stirruped rig stumped him. The young woman saw
his momentary embarrassment and laughed again as she swung out of her
saddle to stand beside him on the step.
"The women don't ride that way in your part of the country?" she
queried.
"Not yet."
"I'm sorry for them," she scoffed. And then: "Come on in and meet mamma;
you look as if you were dreading it, and, as Colonel-daddy says, it's
always best to have the dreaded things over with."
Smith did not find his meeting with the daughter's mother much of a
trial. She was neither shocked at his clothes nor disposed to be
hysterically grateful over the railroad-crossing incident. A large,
calm-eyed, sensible matron, some ten or a dozen years younger than the
colonel, Smith put her, and with an air of refinement which was
reflected in every interior detail of her house.
Smith had not expected to find the modern conveniences in a Timanyoni
ranch-house, but they were there. The room to which the Indian house-boy
led him had a brass bedstead and a private bath, and the rugs, if not
true Tabriz, were a handsome imitation. Below stairs it was much the
same. The dining-room was a beamed baronial hall, with a rough-stone
fireplace big enough to take a cord-wood length, and on the hearth
andirons which might have come down from the Elizabethan period. It was
mid-June and the fireplace was empty, but its winter promise was so
hospitable that Smith caught himself hoping that he might stay out of
jail long enough to be able to see it in action.
The dinner was strictly a family meal, with the great mahogany table
shortened to make it convenient for four. There were cut glass and
silver and snowy napery, and Smith was glad that the colonel did most of
the talking. Out of the past a thousand tentacles were reaching up to
drag him back into the net of the conventional. With the encompassments
to help, it was so desperately easy to imagine himself once more the
"debutantes' darling," as Westfall had often called him in friendly
derision. When the table-talk became general, he found himself joining
in, and always upon the lighter side.
By the time the dessert came on, the transformation was complete. It was
J. Montague, the cotillon leader, who sat back in his chair and told
amiable little after-dinner stones, ignoring the colonel's heartinesses,
and approving himself in the eyes of his hostess as a dinner guest of
the true urban quality. Now and then he surprised a look in the younger
woman's eyes which was not wholly sympathetic, he thought; but the
temptation to show her that he was not at all the kind of man she had
been taking him for was too strong to be resisted. Since she had seen
fit to charge him with a dress-clothes past he would show her that he
could live up to it.