going to make it bigger in a few minutes, I hope. Who is your banker
here?"
"Dave Kinzie, of the Brewster City National."
"Tell me a little something about Mr. Kinzie before we go down to see
him; just brief him for me as a man, I mean."
The colonel was shaking his head slowly.
"He's what you might call a twenty-ton optimist, Dave is; solid, a
little slow and sure, but the biggest boomer in the West, if you can
get him started--believes in the resources of the country and all that.
But you can't borrow money from him without security, if that's what
you're aiming to do."
"Can't we?" smiled the young man who knew banks and bankers. "Let's go
and see. You never know until you try, Colonel; and even then you're not
always dead certain. Take me around and introduce me to this Mr. David
Kinzie--and, hold on; it may be as well to give me a handle of some sort
before we begin to talk money with other people. What are you going to
call me in this new scheme of things?"
The big Missourian's laugh was a hearty guffaw.
"Gosh all Friday! the way it's starting out you're the whole works,
Smith! Just name your own name, and we'll cinch it for you."
"I suppose you've already got a secretary and treasurer?"
"We had up to a few days ago, before Buck Gardner sold out his stock to
Crawford Stanton."
"Haven't you had a board meeting since?"
"Yes; but only to accept Gardner's resignation. We didn't elect anybody
else--nobody wanted the place; every last man of 'em shied."
"Naturally; not seeing any immediate prospects of having anything to
treasure," laughed Smith. "But that will do. You may introduce me to
Kinzie as your acting financial secretary, if you like. Now one more
question: what is Kinzie's attitude toward Timanyoni Ditch?"
"At first it was all kinds of friendly; he is a stockholder in a small
way, and he's heart and soul for anything that promises to build up the
country, as I told you. But after a while he began to cool down a
little, and now--well, I don't know; I hate to think it of Dave, but I'm
afraid he's leaning the other way, toward these Eastern fellows. Little
things he has let fall, and this last deal in which he tried to cover
Stanton's tracks in the stock-buying from Gardner and Bolling; they all
point that way."
"That is natural, too," said Smith, whose point of view was always
unobscured in any battle of business. "The big company would be a better
customer for the bank than your little one could ever hope to be. I
guess that's all for the present. If you're ready, we'll go down and
face the music. Take me to the Brewster City National and introduce me
to Mr. Kinzie; then you can stand by and watch the wheels go round."
"By Janders!" said the colonel with an open smile; "I believe you'd just
as soon tackle a banker as to eat your dinner; and I'd about as soon
take a horsewhipping. Come on; I'll steer you up against Dave, but I'm
telling you right now that the steering is about all you can count on
from me."
It was while they were crossing the street together and turning down
toward the Alameda Avenue corner where the Brewster City National Bank
windows looked over into the windows of the Hophra House block opposite,
that Mr. Crawford Stanton had his third morning caller, a thick-set
barrel-bodied man with little pig-like eyes, closely cropped hair, a
bristling mustache, and a wooden leg of the home-made sort--a peg with a
hollowed bowl for the bent knee and a slat-like extension to go up the
outside of the leg to be stapled to a leathern belt. Across one of the
swarthy cheeks there was a broad scar that looked, at first sight, like
a dash of blue paint. It was a knife slash got in the battle with
Mexican Ruiz in which the thick-set man had lost his leg. After the
Mexican had brought him down with a bullet, he had added his mark as he
had said he would; laying the big man's cheek open and rubbing the
powder from a chewed cartridge into the wound. Afterward, the men of the
camps called the cripple "Pegleg" or "Blue Pete" indifferently, though
not to his face. For though the fat face was always relaxed in a
good-natured smile, the crippled saloon-keeper was of those who kill
with the knife; and since he could not pursue, he was fain to cajole the
prey within reach.
Stanton looked up from his desk when the pad-and-click of the cripple's
step came in from the street.
"Hello, Simms," he said, in curt greeting. "Want to see me?"
"Uh-huh; for a minute or so. Busy?"
"Never too busy to talk business. Sit down."
Simms threw the brim of his soft hat up with a backhanded stroke and
shook his head. "It ain't worth while; and I gotta get back to camp. I
blew in to tell y'u there's a fella out there that needs th' sand-bag."
"Who is it?"
"Fella name' Smith. He's showin' 'em how to cut too many
corners--pace-settin', he calls it. First thing they know, they'll get
the concrete up to where the high water won't bu'st it out."
Stanton's laugh was impatient.
"Don't make any mistake of that sort, Simms," he said. "_We_ don't want
the dam destroyed; we'd work just as hard as they would to prevent that.
All we want is to have other people think it's likely to go out--think
it hard enough to keep them from putting up any more money. Let that go.
Is there any more fresh talk--among the men?" Stanton prided himself a
little upon the underground wire-pulling which had resulted in putting
Simms on the ground as the keeper of the construction-camp canteen. It
was a fairly original way of keeping a listening ear open for the camp
gossip.
"Little," said the cripple briefly. "This here blink-blank fella Smith's
been tellin' Williams that I ort to be run off th' reservation; says th'
booze puts the brake on for speed."
"So it does," agreed Stanton musingly. "But I guess you can stay a while
longer. What do the men say about Smith?"
"Whole heap o' things. The best guess is that he's a jail-break' from
somewheres back in the States. He ain't no common 'bo; that's a dead
cinch. Gatrow, the quarry foreman, puts it up that he done something he
had to run for."
"Get him drunk and find out," suggested Stanton shortly.
"Not him," said the round-faced villain, with the ingratiating smile
wrinkling at the corners of the fat-embedded eyes. "He's the
take-a-drink-or-let-it-alone kind."
"Well, keep your eye on him and your ears open. I have a notion that
he's been sent here--by some outfit that means to buck us. If he hasn't
any backing----"
The interruption was the hurried incoming of the young man with sleepy
eyes and the cigarette stains on his fingers, and for once in a way he
was stirred out of his customary attitude of cynical indifference.
"Smith and Colonel Baldwin are over yonder in Kinzie's private office,"
he reported hastily. "Before they shut the door I heard Baldwin
introducing Smith as the new acting financial secretary of the Timanyoni
Ditch Company!"
XI
When Greek Meets Greek
Smith allowed himself ten brief seconds for a swift eye-measuring of the
square-shouldered, stockily built man with a gray face and stubbly
mustache sitting in the chair of authority at the Brewster City National
before he chose his line of attack.
"We are not going to cut very deeply into your time this morning, Mr.
Kinzie," he began when the eye-appraisal had given him his cue. "You
know the history of Timanyoni Ditch up to the present, and you have no
doubt had your own misgivings about the wisdom of its financing on such
a small scale, and as a purely local enterprise. Others have had the
same misgivings, and--well, to cut out the details, there is to be a
complete reorganization of the company on a new basis, and we are here
to offer to take your personal allotment of the stock off your hands at
par for cash. Colonel Baldwin has stipulated that his friends in the
original deal must be protected, and----"
"Here, here--hold on," interrupted the bank president; "you're hitting
it up a little bit too fast for me, Mr. Smith. Before we get down to any
talk of buying and selling, suppose you tell me something about yourself
and your new company. Who are you? and whereabouts do you hold forth
when you are at home?"
Smith laughed easily. "If we were trying to borrow money of you, we
might have to go into preliminaries and particulars, Mr. Kinzie. As it
is, I'm sure you are not going to press for the answers to these very
natural questions of yours. Further than that, we shall have to ask you
to hold anything that may be said here in strict confidence--as between
a banker and his customer. We are not alone in the fight for the
water-rights on the other side of the river, as you know, and until we
are safely fortified we shall have to be prudently cautious. But that is
another matter. What we want to know now is this: will you let us
protect you by taking your Timanyoni Ditch stock at par? That's the
principal question at issue just now."
Kinzie met the issue fairly. "I don't know you yet, Mr. Smith; but I do
know Colonel Baldwin, here, and I guess I'll take a chance on things as
they stand. I'll keep my stock."
The new secretary's smile was rather patronizing than grateful.
"As you please, Mr. Kinzie, of course," he said smoothly. "But I'm going
to tell you frankly that you'll keep it at your own risk. I am not sure
what plan will be adopted, but I assume it will be amortization and a
retirement of the stock of the original company. All that we need to
enable us to bring this about is the voting control of the old stock,
and we already have that, as you know."
The banker pursed his lips until the stubbly gray mustache stood out
stiffly. Then he cut straight to the heart of the matter.
"You mean that there will be a majority pool of the old stock, and that
the pool will ignore those stockholders who don't come in?"
"Something like that," said Smith pleasantly. And then: "We're going to
be generously liberal, Mr. Kinzie; we are giving Colonel Baldwin's
friends a fair chance to come in out of the wet. Of course, if they
refuse to come in--if they prefer to stay out----"
Kinzie was smiling sourly.
"You'll have to take care of your own banker, won't you, Mr. Smith?" he
asked. "Why don't you loosen up and tell me a little more? What have
you fellows got up your sleeve, anyway?"
At this, the new financial manager slacked off on the hawser of secrecy
a little--just a little.
"Mr. Kinzie, we've got the biggest thing, and the surest, that ever came
to Timanyoni Park; not in futures, mind you, but in facts already as
good as accomplished. If it were necessary--as it isn't--I could go to
New York to-day and put a million dollars behind our reorganization plan
in twenty-four hours. You'd say so, yourself, if I were at liberty to
explain. But again we're dodging and wasting your time and ours. Think
the matter over--about your stock--and let me know before noon. It's
rather cruel to hurry you so, but time is precious with us and----"
"You sit right down there, young man, and put a little of this precious
time of yours against mine," said Kinzie, pointing authoritatively at
the chair which Smith had just vacated. "You mustn't go off at
half-cock, that way. You'll need a bank here to do business with, won't
you?"
Smith did not sit down. Instead, he smiled genially and fired his final
shot.
"No, Mr. Kinzie; we shan't need a local bank--not as a matter of
absolute necessity. In fact, on some accounts, I don't know but that it
would be better for us not to have one."
"Sit down," insisted the bank president; and this time he would take no
denial. Then he turned abruptly upon Baldwin, who had been playing his
part of the silent listener letter-perfect.
"Baldwin, we are old friends, and I'd trust you to the limit--on any
proposition that doesn't ask for more than straight-from-the-shoulder
honesty. How much is this young friend of ours talking through his hat?"
"Not any, whatever, Dave. He's got the goods." Baldwin was wise enough
to limit himself carefully as to quantity in his reply.
"It's straight, is it? No gold-brick business?"
"So straight that if we can't pay twenty per cent on what money we put
in, I'll throw up my three thousand acres over yonder on Little Creek
and go back to cow-punching."
Again the banker made a comical bristle brush of his cropped mustache.
"I want your business, Dexter; I've got to have it. But I'm going to be
plain with you. You two are asking me to believe that you've gone
outside and dug up a new bunch of backers. That may be all right, but
Timanyoni Ditch has struck a pretty big bone that maybe your new
backers know about--and maybe they don't. You've had a lot of bad luck,
so far; getting your land titles cleared, and all that; and you're going
to have more. I've----"
It was Smith's turn again and he cut in smartly.
"That is precisely what I was driving at. Our banker can't run with the
hare and hunt with the hounds. You'll excuse me if I say that you
haven't been altogether fair with Timanyoni Ditch, or with Colonel
Baldwin, Mr. Kinzie. A friendly banker doesn't help sell out his
customer. You know that, as well as I do. Still, you did it."
Kinzie threw up his hands and tried to defend himself. "It was a
straight business transaction, Mr. Smith. As long as we're in the
banking business, we buy and sell for anybody who comes along."
"No, we don't, Mr. Kinzie; we protect our customers first. In the
present instance you thought your customer was a dead one, anyway, so it
wouldn't make much difference if you should throw another shovelful of
dirt or so onto the coffin. Wasn't that the way of it?"
The president was fairly pushed to the ropes and he showed it.
"Answer me one question, both of you," he snapped. "Are you big enough
to fight for your own hand against Stanton's crowd?"
"You'll see; and the sight is going to cost you something," said Smith,
and the blandest oil could have been no smoother than his tone.
"Is that right, Dexter?"
"That's the way it looks to me, Dave," said the ranchman capitalist,
who, whatever might be his limitations in the field of high finance, was
not lacking the nerve to fight unquestioning in any partner's quarrel.
The president of the Brewster City National turned back to Smith.
"What do you want, Mr. Smith?" he asked, not too cordially.
"Nothing that you'd give us, I guess; a little business loyalty, for one
thing----"
"And a checking balance for immediate necessities for another?"
suggested the banker.
With all his trained astuteness--trained in Kinzie's own school, at
that--Smith could not be sure that the gray-faced old Westerner was not
setting a final trap for him, after all. But he took the risk, saying,
with a decent show of indifference: "Of course, it would be more
convenient here than in Denver or Chicago. But there is no hurry about
that part of it."
The president took a slip of paper from a pigeonhole and wrote rapidly
upon it. Once more his optimism was locking horns with prudent caution.
It was the optimism, however, that was driving the pen. Baldwin's word
was worth something, and it might be disastrous to let these two get
away without anchoring them solidly to the Brewster City National.
"Sign this, you two," he said. "I don't know even the name of your new
outfit yet, but I'll take a chance on one piece of two-name paper,
anyhow."
Smith took up the slip and glanced at it. It was an accommodation note
for twenty thousand dollars. With the money fairly in his hands, he
paused to drive the nail of independence squarely home before he would
sign.
"We don't want this at all, Mr. Kinzie, unless the bank's good-will
comes with it," he said with becoming gravity.
"I'll stand with you," was the brusque rejoinder. "But it's only fair to
you both to say that you've got the biggest kind of a combination to
buck you--a national utilities corporation with the strongest sort of
political backing."
"I doubt if you can tell us anything that we don't already know," said
Smith coolly, as he put his name on the note; and when Baldwin had
signed: "Let this go to the credit of Timanyoni Ditch, if you please,
Mr. Kinzie, and we'll transfer it later. It's quite possible that we
shan't need it, but we are willing to help out a little on your discount
profits, anyway. Further along, when things shape themselves up a bit
more definitely, you shall know all there is to know, and we'll give you
just as good a chance to make money as you'll give us."
When they were safely out of the bank and half a square away from it,
Dexter Baldwin pushed his hat back and mopped his forehead. "They say a
man can't sweat at this altitude," he remarked. "I'm here to tell you,
Smith, that I've lost ten pounds in the last ten minutes. Where in the
name of the jumping Jehoshaphat did you get your nerve, boy? You stand
to lose an even hundred-and-fifty-dollar bill on this deal; don't you
know that?"
"How so?" asked the plunger.
"I'd have bet you that much against the old campaign hat you're wearing
that you couldn't 'touch' Dave Kinzie for twenty dollars--let alone
twenty thousand--in a month of Sundays! You made him believe we'd got
outside backing from somewhere."
"I didn't say anything like that, did I?"
"No; but you opened the door and he walked in."
"That's all right: I'm not responsible for Mr. Kinzie's imagination. We
were obliged to have a little advertising capital; we couldn't turn a
wheel without it. Now that we have it, we'll get busy. We've got to
furnish a new suite of offices, install a bigger office force,
incorporate Timanyoni High Line, and open its stock subscription books,
all practically while the band plays. Time is the one thing we can't
waste. Put me in touch with a good business lawyer and I'll start the
legal machinery. Then you can get into your car and go around and
interview your crowd, man by man. I want to know exactly where we stand
with the old stockholders before we make any move in public. Can you do
that?"
Baldwin lifted his hat and shoved his fingers through his hair.
"I reckon I can; there are only sixty or seventy of 'em. And Bob
Stillings is your lawyer. Come around the corner and I'll introduce
you."
XII
The Rocket and the Stick
For a full fortnight after the preliminary visit to the Brewster City
National Bank, Smith was easily the busiest man in Timanyoni County.
Establishing himself in the Hophra House, and discarding the working
khaki only because he was shrewd enough to dress the new part
becomingly, he flung himself into what Colonel Baldwin called the
"miracle-working" campaign with a zest that knew no flagging moment.
Within the fourteen-day period new town offices were occupied on the
second floor of the Brewster City National Building; Stillings, most
efficient of corporation counsels, had secured the new charter; and the
stock-books of Timanyoni High Line had been opened, with the Brewster
City National named as the company's depository and official fiduciary
agent.
At the dam the building activities had been generously doubled. An
electric-light plant had been installed, and Williams was working day
and night shifts both in the quarries and on the forms. Past this, the
new financial manager, himself broadening rapidly as his field
broadened, was branching out in other directions. After a brief
conference with a few of his principal stockholders he had instructed
Stillings to include the words "Power and Light" in the cataloguing of
the new company's possible and probable charter activities, and by the
end of the fortnight the foundations of a power-house were going in
below the dam, and negotiations were already on foot with the Brewster
city council looking toward the sale of electric current to the city for
lighting and other purposes.
Notwithstanding all the demands made upon him as the chief energizer in
the working field, Smith had made the planting of his financial anchor
securely to windward his first care. Furnished with a selected list by
Colonel Baldwin, he had made a thorough canvas of possible investors,
and by the time the new stock was printed and ready for delivery through
Kinzie's bank, an iron-clad pool of the majority of the original
Timanyoni Ditch stock had been organized, and Smith had sold to Maxwell,
Starbuck, and other local capitalists a sufficient amount of the new
treasury stock to give him a fighting chance; this, with a promise of
more if it should be needed.
The stock-selling campaign was a triumph, and though he did not
recognize it as such, it marked the longest step yet taken in the march
of the metamorphosis. As the cashier in Dunham's bank Smith had been
merely a high-grade clerk. There had been no occasion for the
development of the precious quality of initiative, and he had hardly
known the meaning of the word. But now there seemed to be no limit to
the new powers of accomplishment. Men met him upon his own ground, and a
lilting sense of triumph gave him renewed daring when he found that he
could actually inspire them with some portion of his own confidence and
enthusiasm.
But in all this there had been no miracle, one would say; nothing but
enterprise and shrewd business acumen and lightning-like speed in
bringing things to pass. If there were a miracle, it lay in this: that
not to Maxwell or to any of the new investors had Smith revealed the
full dimensions of the prize for which Timanyoni High Line was entering
the race. Colonel Baldwin and one William Starbuck, Maxwell's
brother-in-law, by courtesy, and his partner in the Little Alice mine,
alone knew the wheel within the wheel; how the great Eastern utility
corporation represented by Stanton had spent a million or more in the
acquisition of the Escalante Grant, which would be practically worthless
as agricultural land without the water which could be obtained only by
means of the Timanyoni dam and canal system.
With all these strenuous stirrings in the business field, it may say
itself that Smith found little time for social indulgences during the
crowded fortnight. Day after day the colonel begged him to take a night
off at the ranch, and it was even more difficult to refuse the proffered
hospitality at the week-end. But Smith did refuse it.
With the new life and the larger ambition had come a sturdy resolve to
hold himself aloof from entanglements of every sort. That Corona Baldwin
was going to prove an entanglement he was wise enough to foresee from
the moment in which he had identified her with the vitalizing young
woman whose glove he had carried off. In fact, she was already
associated in his thoughts with every step in the business battle. Was
he not taking a very temerarious risk of discovery and arrest merely for
the sake of proving to her that her "hopeless case" of the lawn-party
could confute her mocking little theories about men and types without
half trying?
It was not until after Miss Corona--driving to town with her father, as
she frequently did--had thrice visited the new offices that Smith began
to congratulate himself, rather bitterly, to be sure, upon his wisdom in
staying away from Hillcrest. For one thing, he was learning that Corona
Baldwin was an exceedingly charming young woman of many moods and
tenses, and that in some of the moods, and in practically all of the
tenses, she was able to make him see rose-colored. When she was not with
him, he had no difficulty in assuring himself that the rose-colored
point of view was entirely out of the question for a man in daily peril
of meeting the sheriff. But when she was present, calm sanity had a way
of losing its grip, and the rose-colored possibilities reasserted
themselves with intoxicating accompaniments.
Miss Corona's fourth visit to the handsome suite of offices over the
Brewster City National chanced to fall upon a Saturday. Her father,
president of the new company, as he had been of the old, had a private
office of his own, but Miss Corona soon drifted out to the railed-off
end of the larger room, where the financial secretary had his desk.
"Colonel-daddy tells me that you are coming out to Hillcrest for the
week-end," was the way in which she interrupted the financial
secretary's brow-knittings over a new material contract. "I have just
wagered him a nice fat little round iron dollar of my allowance that you
won't. How about it?"
Smith looked up with his best-natured grin.
"You win," he said shortly.