immediately after dinner. A gorgeous sunset was flaming over the western
Timanyonis and there was time for a quiet stroll and a smoke under the
silver-leafed cottonwoods with his hostess for a companion. In the
little talk and walk, Smith found himself drawn more and more to the
calm-eyed, well-bred matron who had given a piquant Corona to an
otherwise commonplace world. He found her exceedingly well-informed;
she had read the books that he had read, she had heard the operas that
he had always wanted to hear, and if any other bond were needed, he
found it in the fact that she was a native of his own State.
Under such leadings the relapse became an obsession. He abandoned
himself shamelessly to the J. Montague attitude, and the events crowding
so thickly between the tramp-like flight from Lawrenceville and the
present were as if they had not been. Mrs. Baldwin saw nothing of the
rude fighter of battles her daughter had drawn for her, and wondered a
little. She knew Corona's leanings, and was not without an amused
impression that Corona would not find this later Smithsonian phase
altogether to her liking.
A little later the daughter, who had been to the horse corral with her
father, came to join them, and the mother, smiling inwardly, saw her
impression confirmed. Smith was talking frivolously of _thes dansants_
and dinner-parties and club meets; whereat the mother smiled and Miss
Corona's lip curled scornfully.
Smith got what he had earned, good measure, pressed down, shaken
together and running over, a few minutes after Mrs. Baldwin had gone in,
leaving him to finish his cigar under the pillared portico with Corona
to keep him company. He never knew just what started it, unless it was
his careful placing of a chair for the young woman and his
deferential--and perfectly natural--pause, standing, until she was
seated.
"Do, for pity's sake, sit down!" she broke out, half petulantly. And
when he had obeyed: "Well, you've spoiled it all, good and hard.
Yesterday I thought you were a real man, but now you are doing your best
to tell me that you were only shamming."
Smith was still so far besotted as to be unable to imagine wherein he
had offended.
"Really?" he said. "I'm sorry to have disappointed you. All I need now
to make me perfectly happy is to be told what I have done."
"It isn't what you've done; it's what you are," she retorted.
"Well, what am I?" he asked patiently.
Her laugh was mocking. "You are politely good-natured, for one thing;
but that wasn't what I meant. You have committed the unpardonable sin by
turning out to be just one of the ninety-nine, after all. If you knew
women the least little bit in the world, you would know that we are
always looking for the hundredth man."
Under his smile, Smith was searching the Lawrenceville experience
records minutely in the effort to find something that would even
remotely match this. The effort was a complete failure. But he was
beginning to understand what this astonishingly frank young woman meant.
She had seen the depth of his relapse, and was calmly deriding him for
it. A saving sense of humor came to remind him of his own sardonic
musings on the silent drive from the camp with the colonel; how he had
railed inwardly at the social trivialities.
"You may pile it on as thickly as you please," he said, the good-natured
smile twisting itself into the construction-camp grin. Then he added: "I
may not be the hundredth man, but you, at least, are the hundredth
woman."
"Why? Because I say the first thing that asks to be said?"
"That, and some other things," he rejoined guardedly. Then, with malice
aforethought: "Is it one of the requirements that your centennial man
should behave himself like a boor at a dinner-table, and talk shop and
eat with his knife?"
"You know that isn't what I meant. Manners don't make the man. It's what
you talked about--the trumpery little social things that you found your
keenest pleasure in talking about. I don't know what has ever taken you
out to a construction camp and persuaded you to wear khaki. Perhaps it
was only what Colonel-daddy calls a 'throw-back.' I don't believe you
ever did a day's hard work in your life before you came to the
Timanyoni."
Smith looked at his hands. They were large and shapely, but the only
callouses they could show were accusingly recent.
"If you mean manual labor, you are right," he admitted thoughtfully.
"Just the same, I think you are a little hard on me."
It was growing dark by this time, and the stars were coming out. Some
one had turned the lights on in the room the windows of which opened
upon the portico, and the young woman's chair was so placed that he
could still see her face. She was smiling rather more amicably when she
said:
"You mustn't take it too hard. It isn't you, personally, you know; it's
the type. I've met it before. I didn't meet any other kind during my
three years in the boarding-school; nice, pleasant young gentlemen, as
immaculately dressed as their pocketbooks would allow, up in all the
latest little courtesies and tea-table shop-talk. They were all men, I
suppose, but I'm afraid a good many of them had never found it out--will
never find it out. I've been calling it environment; I don't like to
admit that the race is going down-hill."
By this time the sardonic humor was once more in full possession and he
was enjoying her keenly.
"Go on," he said. "This is my night off."
"I've said enough; too much, perhaps. But a little while ago at the
dinner-table, and again out there in the grove where you were walking
with mamma, you reminded me so forcibly of a man whom I met just for a
part of one evening about a year ago."
"Tell me about him," he urged.
"I was coming back from school and I stopped over in a small town in the
Middle West to visit some old friends of mamma's. There were young
people in the family, and one evening they gave a lawn-party for me. I
met dozens of the pleasant young gentlemen, more than I had ever seen
together at any one time before; clerks and book-keepers, and rich
farmers' sons who had been to college."
"But the man of whom I am reminding you?"
"He was one of them. He drove over from some neighboring town in his
natty little automobile and gave me fully an hour of his valuable time.
He made me perfectly furious!"
"Poor you!" laughed Smith; but he was thankful that the camp sunburn and
his four weeks' beard were safeguarding his identity. "I hope you didn't
tell him so. He was probably doing his level best to give you a good
time in the only definition of the term that the girls of his own set
had ever given him. But why the fury in his case in particular?"
"Just because, I suppose. He was rather good-looking, you know; and down
underneath all the airy little things he persisted in talking about it
seemed as if I could now and then get tiny glimpses of something that
might be a real man, a strong man. I remember he told me he was a bank
cashier and that he danced. He was quite hopeless, of course. Without
being what you would call conceited, you could see that the crust was so
thick that nothing short of an earthquake would ever break it."
"But the earthquakes do come, once in a blue moon," he said, still
smiling at her. "Let's get it straight. You are not trying to tell me
that you object to decent clothes and good manners _per se_, are you?"
"Not at all; I like them both. But the hundredth man won't let either
his clothes or his manners wear him; he'll wear _them_."
"Still, you think the type of man you have been describing is entirely
hopeless; that was the word you used, I believe."
The colonel was coming out, and he had stopped in the doorway to light a
long-stemmed pipe. The young woman got up and fluffed her hair with the
ends of her fingers--a little gesture which Smith remembered, recalling
it from the night of the far-away lawn-party.
"Daddy wants you, and I'll have to vanish," she said; "but I'll answer
your question before I go. Types are always hopeless; it's only the
hundredth man who isn't. It's a great pity you couldn't go on whipping
claim-jumpers all the rest of your life, Mr. Smith. Don't you think so?
Good night. We'll meet again at breakfast. Daddy isn't going to let you
get away short of a night's lodging, I know."
Two cigars for Smith and four pipes for the colonel further along, the
tall Missourian rose out of the split-bottomed chair which he had drawn
up to face the guest's and rapped the ashes from the bowl of the
corn-cob into the palm of his hand.
"I think you've got it all now, Smith, every last crook and turn of it,
and I reckon you're tired enough to run away to bed. You see just where
we stand, and how little we've got to go on. If I've about talked an arm
off of you, it's for your own good. I don't know how you've made up your
mind, or if you've made it up at all; but it was only fair to show you
how little chance we've got on anything short of a miracle. I wouldn't
want to see you butt your head against a stone wall, and that's about
what it looks like to me."
Smith took a turn up and down the stone-flagged floor of the portico
with his hands behind him. Truly, the case of Timanyoni Ditch was
desperate; even more desperate than he had supposed. Figuring as the
level-headed bank cashier of the former days, he told himself soberly
that no man in his senses would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Then the
laughing gibes of the hundredth woman--gibes which had cut far deeper
than she had imagined--came back to send the blood surging through his
veins. It would be worth something to be able to work the miracle the
colonel had spoken of; and afterward....
Colonel Dexter Baldwin was still tapping his palm absently with the
pipe when Smith came back and said abruptly:
"I have decided, Colonel. I'll start in with you to-morrow morning, and
we'll pull this mired scheme of yours out of the mud, or break a leg
trying to. But you mustn't forget what I told you out at the camp. Right
in the middle of things I may go rotten on you and drop out."
X
The Sick Project
Brewster, owing its beginnings to the completion of the Nevada Short
Line, and the fact that the railroad builders designated it as a
division headquarters, had grown into city-charter size and importance
with the opening of the gold-mines in the Gloria district, and the
transformation of the surrounding park grass-lands into cultivated
ranches. To the growth and prosperity of the intermountain city a summer
hotel on the shore of Lake Topaz--reached only by stage from
Brewster--had added its influence; and since the hotel brought people
with well-lined pocketbooks, there was a field for the enthusiastic
real-estate promoters whose offices filled all the odd corners in the
Hophra House block.
In one of these offices, on the morning following Smith's first dinner
at Hillcrest, a rather caustic colloquy was in progress between the man
whose name appeared in gilt lettering on the front windows and one of
his unofficial assistants. Crawford Stanton, he of the window name, was
a man of many personalities. To summer visitors with money to invest, he
was the genial promoter, and if there were suggestions of iron hardness
in the sharp jaw and in the smoothly shaven face and flinty eyes, there
was also a pleasant reminder of Eastern business methods and alertness
in the promoter's manner. But Lanterby, tilting uneasily in the
"confidential" chair at the desk-end, knew another and more biting side
of Mr. Stanton, as a hired man will.
"Good Gad! do you sit there and tell me that the three of them let that
hobo of Williams's push them off the map?" Stanton was demanding
raucously. "I thought you had at least sense enough to last you
overnight. I told you to pick out a bunch with sand--fellows that could
hang on and put up a fight if they had to. And you say all this happened
the day before yesterday: how does it come that you are just now
reporting it?"
The hard-faced henchman in the tilting chair made such explanations as
he could.
"Boogerfield and his two partners 've been hidin' out somewhere; I allow
they was plumb ashamed to come in and tell how they'd let one man run
'em off. You'd think that curly-whiskered helper o' Williams's was a
holy terror, to hear Boogerfield talk. They'd left their artillery in
the chuck-wagon, and they say he come at 'em barehanded--with the
colonel's girl settin' in the ortamobile a-lookin' on. Boogerfield wants
to know who's goin' to pay him for them two Winchesters that His
Whiskers bu'sted over the wagon-wheel."
Mr. Crawford Stanton was carelessly unconcerned about the claim-jumpers'
loss, either in gear or skin.
"Damn the Winchesters!" he said morosely. "What do you know about this
fellow Smith? Who is he, and where did he come from?"
Lanterby told all that was known of Smith, and had no difficulty in
compressing it into a single sentence. Stanton leaned back in his chair
and the lids of the flinty eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
"There's a lot more to it than that," he said incisively at the end of
the reflective pause. Then he added a curt order: "Make it your job to
find out."
Lanterby moved uneasily in his insecure seat, but before he could speak,
his employer went on again, changing the topic abruptly, but still
keeping within the faultfinding boundaries.
"What sort of a screw has gone loose in your deal with the railroad
men? I thought you told me you had it fixed with the yard crews so that
Williams's material would have a chance to season a while in the
Brewster yards before it was delivered. They got two cars of cement and
one of steel the day before yesterday, and the delivery was made within
three hours after the stuff came in from the East."
Again Lanterby tried to explain.
"Dougherty, the yardmaster, took the bank roll I slipped him, all right
enough, and promised to help out. But he's scared of Maxwell. He told me
this mornin' that Colonel Baldwin has been kickin' like blazes to
Maxwell about the delays."
"Maxwell is a thick-headed ass!" exploded the faultfinder. "I've done
everything on earth except to tell him outright in so many words that
his entire railroad outfit, from President Brewster down, is lined up on
the other side of the fight. But go on with your dickering. Jerk
Dougherty into line and tell him that nothing is going to happen to him
if he doesn't welsh on us. Hint to him that we can pull a longer string
than Dick Maxwell can, if it comes to a show-down. Now go out and find
Shaw. I want him, and I want him right now."
The hard-faced man who looked as if he might be a broken-down gambler
unjointed his leg-hold upon the tilted chair and went out; and a few
minutes later another of Stanton's pay-roll men drifted in. He was a
young fellow with sleepy eyes and cigarette stains on his fingers, and
he would have passed readily for a railroad clerk out of a job, which
was what he really was.
"Well?" snapped Stanton when the incomer had taken the chair lately
vacated by Lanterby.
"I shadowed the colonel, as you told me to," said the young man. "He
went up to Red Butte to see if he couldn't rope in some of the
old-timers on his ditch project. He was trying to sell some treasury
stock. His one-horse company is about out of money. Mickle, a clerk in
Kinzie's bank, tells me that the ditch company's balance is drawn down
to a few thousand dollars, with no more coming in."
"Did the colonel succeed in making a raise in Red Butte?"
"Nary," said the spy nonchalantly. "Drake, the banker up there, was his
one best bet; but I got a man I know to give Drake a pointer, and he
curled up like a hedgehog when you poke it with a sharp stick."
"That's better. The colonel came back yesterday, didn't he?"
"Yesterday afternoon. His wife and daughter met him at the
railroad-station with the automobile, and told him something or other
that made him hire old man Shuey to drive the women out home while he
took the roadster and went up to the dam."
"You went along?" queried Stanton.
"As soon as I could find somebody to drive me; yes. That wasn't right
away, though; and when I got there I had to leave my buzz-wagon back in
the hills a piece and walk into camp. When I inquired around I found
that the colonel was shut up in Williams's office with a fellow named
Smith. They were finishing up whatever they'd been talking about when I
got a place to listen in; but I heard enough to make me suspect that
something new had broken loose. Just as they were getting ready to quit,
the colonel was saying: 'That settles it, Smith; you've got to come over
into'--I didn't catch the name of the place--'and help us. Williams
tells me you refused him, but you can't refuse me.' There was more of
it, but they had opened the door and I had to skin out. A little later
they drove off together in the colonel's car, coming on through town to
go out to the ranch, I suppose, because Smith didn't show up any more
at the camp."
Again the gentleman with the sharp jaw took time for narrow-eyed
reflection.
"You'll have to switch over from the colonel to this fellow Smith for
the present, Shaw," he decided, at length. "Lanterby is supposed to be
on that part of the job, but he's altogether too coarse-handed. I want
to know who Smith is, and where he hails from, and how he comes to be
butting in. Lanterby said at first, and says yet, that he is just a
common hobo tumbling in from the outside. It's pretty evident that
Lanterby has another guess coming. You look him up and do it quick."
The young man glanced up with a faint warming of avarice in his sleepy
eyes. "It'll most likely run into money--for expenses," he suggested.
"For graft, you mean," snapped Stanton. Then he had it out with this
second subordinate in crisp English. "I'm onto you with both feet, Shaw;
every crook and turn of you. More than that, I know why you were fired
out of Maxwell's office; you've got sticky fingers. That's all right
with me up to a certain point, but beyond that point you get off.
Understand?"
Shaw made no answer in direct terms, but if his employer had been
watching the heavy-lidded eyes he might have seen in them the shadow of
a thing much more dangerous than plain dishonesty: a passing shadow of
the fear that makes for treachery when the sharp need for
self-protection arises.
"I'll try to find out about the hobo," he said, with fair enough
lip-loyalty, and after he had rolled a fresh cigarette he went away to
begin the mining operations which might promise to unearth Smith's
record.
It was ten o'clock when Shaw left the real-estate office in the Hophra
House block. Half an hour earlier Smith had come to town with the
colonel in the roadster, and the two had shut themselves up in the
colonel's private room in the Timanyoni Ditch Company's town office in
the Barker Building, which was two squares down the street from the
Hophra House. Summoned promptly, Martin, the bookkeeper, had brought in
his statements and balance-sheets, and the new officer, who was as yet
without a title, had struck out his plan of campaign.
"'Amortization' is the word, Colonel," was Smith's prompt verdict after
he had gone over Martin's summaries. "The best way to get at it now is
to wipe the slate clean and begin over again."
The ranchman president was chuckling soberly.
"Once more you'll have to show me, John," he said. "We folks out here in
the hills are not up in all the Wall Street crinkles."
"You don't know the word? It means to scrap the old machinery to make
room for the new," Smith explained. "In modern business it is the
process of extinguishing a corporation: closing it up and burying it in
another and bigger one, usually. That is what we must do with Timanyoni
Ditch."
"I'm getting you, a little at a time," said the colonel, taking his
first lesson in high finance as a duck takes to the water. Then he
added: "It won't take much of a lick to kill off the old company, in the
shape it's got into now. How will you work it?"
Smith had the plan at his fingers' ends. With the daring of all the
perils had come a fresh access of fighting fitness that made him feel as
if he could cope with anything.
"We must close up the company's affairs and then reorganize promptly
and, with just as little noise as may be, form another company--which we
will call Timanyoni High Line--and let it take over the old outfit,
stock, liabilities, and assets entire. You say your present capital
stock is one hundred thousand dollars; is it all paid in?"
"Every dollar of it except a little for a few shares of treasury stock
that we've been holding for emergencies. As I told you last night, I
went up to Red Butte and tried to sell that treasury stock to Drake, the
banker; but he wouldn't bite."
"Which was mighty lucky for us," Smith put in. "It would have queered us
beautifully if he had, and the story had got out that the president of
Timanyoni Ditch had sold a block of treasury stock at thirty-nine."
"Well, he didn't take it," said the colonel. "He was so blame' chilly
that I like to froze to death before I could get out of the bank."
"All right; then we'll go on. This new company that I am speaking of
will be capitalized at, say, an even half million. To the present
holders of Timanyoni Ditch we'll give the new stock for the old, share
for share, with a bonus of twenty-five shares of the new stock for every
twenty-five shares of the old surrendered and exchanged. This will be
practically giving the present shareholders two for one. Will that
satisfy them?"
This time Colonel Dexter Baldwin's smile was grim.
"You're just juggling now, John, and you know it. Out here on the woolly
edge of things a dollar is just a plain iron dollar, and you can't make
it two merely by calling it so."
"Never you mind about that," cut in the new financier. "The first rule
of investment is that a dollar is worth just what it will earn in
dividends; no more, and equally no less. You know, and I know, that if
we can pull this thing through there is a barrel of money in it for all
concerned. But we'll skip that part of it and stick to the details. At
two to one for the amortization of the old company we shall still have
something like three hundred thousand dollars treasury stock upon which
to realize for the new capital needed, and that will be amply sufficient
to complete the dam and the ditches and to provide a fighting fund. Now
then, tell me this: how near can we come to placing that treasury stock
right here in Timanyoni Park? In other words, can the money be had here
at any price?"
"You mean that you don't want to go East to raise it?"
"I mean that we haven't time. More than that, it's up to us to keep this
thing in the family, so to speak; and the moment we go into other
markets, we are getting over into the enemy's country. I'm not saying
that the money couldn't be raised in New York; but if we should go
there, the trust would have an underhold on us, right from the start."
"I see," said the colonel, who was indeed seeing many things that his
simple-hearted philosophy had never dreamed of; and then he answered the
direct question. "There is plenty of money right here in the Timanyonis;
not all of it in Brewster, perhaps, but in the country among the Gloria
and Little Butte mine owners, smelter men, and the better class of
ranchmen. Take Dick Maxwell, the railroad superintendent--he's a miner
on the side, you know--he could put ten or twenty thousand more into it
without turning a hair; and so could some of the others."
Smith nodded. He was getting his second wind now, and the race promised
to be a keen joy.
"But they would have to be 'shown,' you think?" he suggested. "All
right; we'll proceed to show them. Now we can come down to present
necessities. We've got to keep the work going--and speed it up to the
limit: we ought to double Williams's force at once--put on a night shift
to work by electric light. I took the liberty of telephoning Williams
from Hillcrest this morning while you were reading your newspaper. I
told him to wire advertisements for more labor to the newspapers in
Denver, offering wages high enough to make the thing look attractive."
The colonel blinked twice and swallowed hard.
"Say, John," he said, leaning across the table-desk; "you've sure got
your nerve with you. Do you know what our present bank balance happens
to be?"
"No; I was just coming to that," said the reorganizer, smiling easily.
"How much is it?"
"It is under five thousand dollars, and a good part of that is owing to
the cement people!"