president's office and collect." Then: "One dinner, lodging, and
breakfast of us was about all you could stand, wasn't it? I thought
maybe it would be that way."
"What made you think so?"
"You should never ask a woman why; it's a frightfully unsafe thing to
do."
"I know," he mocked. "There have been whole books written about the lack
of logic on your side of the sex fence."
She had seated herself in the chair reserved for inquiring investors.
There was a little interval of glove-smoothing silence, and then, like a
flash out of a clear sky, she smiled across the desk-end at him and
said:
"Will you forgive me if I ask you a perfectly ridiculous question?"
"Certainly. Other people ask them every day."
"Is--is your name really and truly John Smith?"
"Why should you doubt it?"
It was just here that Smith was given to see another one of Miss
Corona's many moods--or tenses--and it was a new one to him. She was
visibly embarrassed.
"I--I don't want to tell you," she stammered.
"All right; you needn't."
"If you're going to take it that easy, I _will_ tell you," she retorted.
"Mr. Williams thought your name was an _alias_; and I'm not sure that he
doesn't still think so."
"The Smiths never have to have _aliases_. It's like John Doe or Richard
Roe, you know."
"Haven't you any middle name?"
"I have a middle initial. It is 'M.'" He was looking her fairly in the
eyes as he said it, and the light in the new offices was excellent.
Thanks to her horseback riding, Miss Corona's small oval face had a
touch of healthy outdoor tan; but under the tan there came, for just a
flitting instant, a flush of deeper color, and at the back of the gray
eyes there was something that Smith had never seen there before.
"It's--it's just an initial?" she queried.
"Yes; it's just an initial, and I don't use it ordinarily. I'm not
ashamed of the plain 'John.'"
"I don't know why you should be," she commented, half absently, he
thought. And then: "How many 'John M. Smiths' do you suppose there are
in the United States?"
"Oh, I don't know; a million or so, I guess."
"I should think you would be rather glad of that," she told him. But
when he tried to make her say why he should be glad, she talked
pointedly of other things and presently went back to her father's
office.
It was not until after she had gone out with her father, and he had made
her wager good by steadfastly refusing to spend the week-end at the
ranch, that Smith began to put two and two together, erroneously, as it
happened, though he could not know this. Mrs. Baldwin's home town in his
native State was the little place that her daughter had visited and
where the daughter had had a lawn-party given in her honor. Was it not
more than probable that the colonel's wife was still keeping up some
sort of a correspondence with her home people and that through this, or
some mention in a local paper, Corona had got hold of the devastating
story of one J. Montague Smith?
There were fine little headings of perspiration standing on the
fugitive's forehead when the small sum in addition had progressed thus
far. But if he had only known it, there was no need, as yet, for the
sweat of apprehension. Like some other young women, Miss Baldwin
suffered from spasmodic attacks of the diary-keeping malady; she had
been keeping one at the time of her return from school, and the
lawn-party in the little town in the Middle West had its due entry.
In a moment of idle curiosity on the Saturday forenoon, she had looked
into the year-old diary to find the forgotten name of the man of whom
Smith was still persistently reminding her. It was there in all its
glory: "J. Montague Smith." Could it be possible?--but, no; John Smith,
her father's John Smith, had come to the construction camp as a hobo,
and that was not possible, not even thinkable, of the man she had met.
None the less, it was a second attack of the idle curiosity that had
moved her to go to town with her father on the Saturday afternoon of
questionings.
After the other members of the office force had taken their departure,
Smith still sat at his desk striving to bring himself back with some
degree of clear-headedness to the pressing demands of his job. Just as
he was about to give it up and go across to the Hophra House for his
dinner, William Starbuck drifted in to open the railing gate and to come
and plant himself in the chair of privilege at Smith's desk-end.
"Well, son; you've got the animals stirred up good and plenty, at last,"
he said, when he had found the "makings" and was deftly rolling a
cigarette--his one overlapping habit reaching back to his range-riding
youth. "Dick Maxwell got a wire to-day from his kiddie's grandpaw--and
my own respected daddy-in-law--Mr. Hiram Fairbairn; you know him--the
lumber king."
"I'm listening," said Smith.
"Dick's wire was an order; instructions from headquarters to keep hands
off of your new company and to work strictly in cahoots--'harmony' was
the word he used--with Crawford Stanton. How does that fit you?"
The financial secretary's smile was the self-congratulatory
face-wrinkling of the quarry foreman who has seen his tackle hitch hold
to land the big stone safely at the top of the pit.
"What is Maxwell going to do about it?" he asked.
"Dick is all wool and a yard wide; and what he signs his name to is what
he is going to stand by. You won't lose him, but the wire shows us just
about where we're aiming to put our leg into the gopher-hole and break
it, doesn't it?"
"I'm not borrowing any trouble. Mr. Fairbairn and his colleagues are
just a few minutes too late, Starbuck. We've got our footing--inside of
the corral."
The ex-cow-puncher, who was now well up on the middle rounds of
fortune's ladder, shook his head doubtfully.
"Don't you make any brash breaks, John. Mr. Hiram Fairbairn and his
crowd can swing twenty millions to your one little old dollar and a
half, and they're not going to leave any of the pebbles unturned when it
comes to saving their investment in the Escalante. I don't care
specially for my own ante--Stella and I will manage to get a bite to
eat, anyway. But for your own sake and Colonel Dexter's, you don't want
to let the grass grow under your feet; not any whatsoever. You go ahead
and get that dam finished, _pronto_, if you have to put a thousand men
on it and work 'em Sundays as well as nights. That's all; I just thought
I'd drop in and tell you."
Smith went to his rooms in the hotel a few minutes later to change for
dinner. Having been restocking his wardrobe to better fit his new state
and standing as the financial head of Timanyoni High Line, he found the
linen drawer in his dressing-case overflowing. Opening another, he began
to arrange the overflow methodically. The empty drawer was lined with a
newspaper, and he took the paper out to fold it afresh. In the act he
saw that it was a copy of the _Chicago Tribune_ some weeks old. As he
was replacing it in the drawer bottom, a single head-line on the
upturned page sprang at him like a thing living and venomous. He bent
lower and read the underrunning paragraph with a dull rage mounting to
his eyes and serving for the moment to make the gray of the printed
lines turn red.
LAWRENCEVILLE, May 19.--The grand jury has found a true bill
against Montague Smith, the absconding cashier of the
Lawrenceville Bank and Trust, charged with embezzling the
bank's funds. The crime would have been merely a breach of
trust and not actionable but for the fact that Smith, by owning
stock in the bankrupt Westfall industries lately taken over by
the Richlander Company, had so made himself amenable to the
law. Smith disappeared on the night of the 14th and is still at
large. He is also wanted on another criminal count. It will be
remembered that he brutally assaulted President Dunham on the
night of his disappearance. The reward of $1,000 for his
apprehension and arrest has been increased to $2,000 by the
bank directors.
XIII
The Narrow World
At the fresh newspaper reminder that his sudden bound upward from the
laboring ranks to the executive headship of the irrigation project had
merely made him a more conspicuous target for the man-hunters, Smith
scanted himself of sleep and redoubled his efforts to put the new
company on a sound and permanent footing. In the nature of things he
felt that his own shrift must necessarily be short. Though his own
immediate public was comparatively small, the more or less dramatic
_coup_ in Timanyoni High Line had advertised him thoroughly. He was
rapidly coming to be the best-known man in Brewster, and he cherished no
illusions about lost identities, or the ability to lose them, in a land
where time and space have been wired and railroaded pretty well out of
existence.
Moreover, Dunham's bank was a member of a protective association, and
Smith knew how wide a net could be spread and drawn when any absconding
employee was really wanted. The doubling of the reward gave notice that
Dunham was vindictively in earnest, and in that event it would be only a
question of time until some one of the hired man-hunters would hit upon
the successful clew.
It was needful that he should work while the day was his in which to
work; and he did work. There was still much to be done. Williams was
having a threat of labor troubles at the dam, and Stillings had
unearthed another possible flaw in the land titles dating back to the
promotion of a certain railroad which had never gotten far beyond the
paper stage and the acquiring of some of its rights of way.
Smith flung himself masterfully at the new difficulties as they arose,
and earned his meed of praise from the men for whom he overcame them.
But under the surface current of the hurrying business tide a bitter
undertow was beginning to set in. In every characterizing change it is
inevitable that there should be some loss in the scrapping of the old to
make way for the new. Smith saw himself in two aspects. In one he stood
as a man among men, with a promise of winning honors and wealth; with
the still more ecstatic promise of being able, perhaps, to win the love
of the vivifying young woman who had once touched the spring of
sentiment in him--and was touching it again. In the other he was a
fugitive and an outlaw, waiting only for some spreader of the net to
come and tap him on the shoulder.
He took his first decided backward step on the night when he went into a
hardware store and bought a pistol. The free, fair-fighting spirit which
had sent him barehanded against the three claim-jumpers was gone and in
its place there was a fell determination, undefined as yet, but keying
itself to the barbaric pitch. With the weapon in his pocket he could
look back over the transforming interspaces with a steadier eye. Truly,
he had come far since that night in the Lawrenceville Bank when a single
fierce gust of passion had plucked him away from all the familiar
landmarks.
And as for Corona Baldwin, there were days in which he set his jaw and
told himself that nothing, even if it were the shedding of blood, should
stand in the way of winning her. It was his right as a man; he had done
nothing to make himself the outlaw that the Lawrenceville indictment
declared him to be; therefore he would fight for his chance--slay for
it, if need be. But there were other days when the saner thought
prevailed and he saw the pit of selfishness into which the new
barbarisms were plunging him. The Baldwins were his friends, and they
were accepting him in the full light of the inference that he was a man
under a cloud. Could he take a further advantage of their generosity by
involving them still more intimately in his own particular entanglement?
He assured himself that he couldn't and wouldn't; that though he might,
indeed, commit a murder when the pinch came, he was still man enough to
stay away from Hillcrest.
He was holding this latter view grimly on an evening when he had worked
himself haggard over the draft of the city ordinance which was to
authorize the contract with the High Line Company for lights and power.
It had been a day of nagging distractions. A rumor had been set
afoot--by Stanton, as Smith made no doubt--hinting that the new dam
would be unsafe when it should be completed; that its breaking, with the
reservoir behind it, would carry death and destruction to the lowlands
and even to the city. Timid stockholders, seeing colossal damage suits
in the bare possibility, had taken the alarm, and Smith had spent the
greater part of the day in trying to calm their fears. For this cause,
and some others, he was on the ragged edge when Baldwin dropped in on
his way home from the dam and protested.
"Look here, John; you're overdoing this thing world without end! It's
six o'clock, man!--quitting-time. Another week of this grinding and
you'll be hunting a nice, quiet cot in the railroad hospital, and then
where'll we be? You break it off short, right now, and go home with me
and get your dinner and a good night's rest. No, by Jupiter, I'm not
going to let you off, this trip. Get your coat and hat and come along,
or I'll rope you down and hog-tie you."
For once in a way, Smith found that there was no fight left in him, and
he yielded, telling himself that another acceptance of the Baldwin
hospitality, more or less, could make no difference. But no sooner was
the colonel's gray roadster headed for the bridge across the Timanyoni
than the exhilarating reaction set in. In a twinkling the business
cares, and the deeper worries as well, fled away, and in their place
heart-hunger was loosed. If Corona would give him this one evening, rest
him, revive him, share with him some small portion of her marvellous
vitality....
He did not overrate the stimulative effect of her presence; of the mere
fact of propinquity. When the roadster drew up at the portico of the
transplanted Missouri plantation mansion she was waiting on the steps.
It was dinner-time, and she had on an evening gown of some shimmering,
leafy stuff that made her look more like a wood-nymph than he had ever
supposed any mere mortal woman could look. When she stood on tiptoes for
her father's kiss, Smith knew the name of his malady, however much he
may have blinked it before; knew its name, and knew that it would have
to be reckoned with, whatever fresh involvements might be lying in wait
for him behind the curtain of the days to come.
After dinner, a meal at which he ate little and was well content to
satisfy the hunger of his soul by the road of the eye, Smith went out to
the portico to smoke. The most gorgeous of mountain sunsets was painting
itself upon the sky over the western Timanyonis, but he had no eyes for
natural grandeurs, and no ears for any sound save one--the footstep he
was listening for. It came at length, and he tried to look as tired as
he had been when the colonel made him close his desk and leave the
office; tried and apparently succeeded.
"You poor, broken-down Samson, carrying all the brazen gates of the
money-Philistines on your shoulders! You had to come to us at last,
didn't you? Let me be your Delilah and fix that chair so that it will be
really comfortable." She said it only half mockingly, and he forgave the
sarcasm when she arranged some of the hammock pillows in the easiest of
the porch chairs and made him bury himself luxuriously in them.
Still holding the idea, brought over from that afternoon of the name
questioning, that she had in some way discovered his true identity,
Smith was watching narrowly for danger-signals when he thanked her and
said:
"You say it just as it is. I had to come. But you could never be
anybody's Delilah, could you? She was a betrayer, if you recollect."
He made the suggestion purposely, but it was wholly ignored, and there
was no guile in the slate-gray eyes.
"You mean that you didn't want to come?"
"No; not that. I have wanted to come every time your father has asked
me. But there are reasons--good reasons--why I shouldn't be here."
If she knew any of the reasons she made no sign. She was sitting in the
hammock and touching one slippered toe to the flagstones for the
swinging push. From Smith's point of view she had for a background the
gorgeous sunset, but he could not see the more distant glories.
"We owe you much, and we are going to owe you more," she said. "You
mustn't think that we don't appreciate you at your full value.
Colonel-daddy thinks you are the most wonderful somebody that ever
lived, and so do a lot of the others."
"And you?" he couldn't resist saying.
"I'm just plain ashamed--for the way I treated you when you were here
before. I've been eating humble-pie ever since."
Smith breathed freer. Nobody but a most consummate actress could have
simulated her frank sincerity. He had jumped too quickly to the small
sum-in-addition conclusion. She did _not_ know the story of the
absconding bank cashier.
"I don't know why you should feel that way," he said, eager, now, to run
where he had before been afraid to walk.
"_I_ do. And I believe you wanted to shame me. I believe you gave up
your place at the dam and took hold with daddy more to show me what an
inconsequent little idiot I was than for any other reason. Didn't you,
really?"
He laughed in quiet ecstasy at this newest and most adorable of the
moods.
"Honest confession is good for the soul: I did," he boasted. "Now beat
that for frankness, if you can."
"I can't," she admitted, laughing back at him. "But now you've
accomplished your purpose, I hope you are not going to give up. That
would be a little hard on Colonel-daddy."
"Oh, no; I'm not going to give up--until I have to."
"Does that mean more than it says?"
"Yes, I'm afraid it does."
She was silent for the length of time that it took the flaming crimson
in the western sky to fade to salmon.
"I know I haven't earned the right to ask you any of the whys," she said
at the end of the little pause.
"Women like you--only there are not any more of them, I think--don't
have to earn things. The last time you were in the office you said
enough to let me know that you and your father and Williams--all of you,
in fact--suspect that I am out here under a cloud of some sort. It is
true."
"And that is why you say you won't give up until you have to?"
"That is the reason; yes."
There was another little interval of silence and then she said: "I
suppose you couldn't tell me--or anybody--could you?"
"I can tell you enough so that you will understand why I may not be
permitted to go on and finish what I have begun in Timanyoni High Line.
When I left home I thought I was a murderer."
He would not look at her to see how she was taking it, but he could not
help hearing her little gasp.
"_Oh!_" she breathed; and then: "You say you 'thought.' Wasn't it so?"
"It happened not to be. The man didn't die. I suppose I might say that I
didn't try to kill him; but that would hardly be true. At the moment, I
didn't care. Have you ever felt that way?--you know what I mean, just
utterly blind and reckless as to consequences?"
"I have a horrible temper, if that covers it."
"It's something like that," he conceded; "only, up to the moment when it
happened I hadn't known that I had any temper. Perhaps I might say that
the provocation was big enough, though the law won't say so."
The pink flush had faded out of the high western horizon and the stars
were coming out one at a time. The colonel had come up from the ranch
bunk-house where the men slept, and was smoking his long-stemmed
corn-cob pipe on the lawn under the spreading cottonwoods. Peace was the
key-note of the perfect summer night, and even for the man under the
shadow of the law there was a quiet breathing space.
"I don't believe you could ever kill a man in cold blood," said the
young woman in the hammock. "I'm sure you know that, yourself, and it
ought to be a comfort to you."
"It might have been once, but it isn't any more."
"Why not?"
"I suppose it is because I left a good many things behind me when I ran
away--besides the man I thought was dead. In that other life I never
knew what it meant to fight for the things I wanted; perhaps it was
because I never wanted anything very badly, or possibly it was because
the things I did want came too easily."
"They are not coming so easily now?"
"No; but I'm going to have them at any cost. You will know what I mean
when I say that nothing, not even human life, seems so sacred to me as
it used to."
"Have you ever talked with daddy about all these things?"
"No. You don't know men very well; they don't talk about such things to
one another. The average man tells some woman, if he can be lucky enough
to find one who will listen."
"You haven't told me all of it," she said, after another hesitant pause.
"You have carefully left the woman out of it. Was she pretty?"
Smith buried his laugh so deep that not a flicker of it came to the
surface.
"Is that the open inference always?--that a man tries to kill another
because there is a woman in it?"
"I merely asked you if she was pretty."
"There was a woman," he answered doggedly; "though she had nothing to do
with the trouble. I was going to call on her the night I--the night the
thing happened. I hope she isn't still waiting for me to ring the
door-bell."
"You haven't told her where you are?"
"No; but she's not losing any sleep about that. She isn't that kind.
Indeed, I'm not sure that she wouldn't turn the letter over to the
sheriff, if I should write her. Let's clear this up before we go any
further. It was generally understood, in the home town, you know, that
we were to be married some time, though nothing definite had ever been
said by either of us. There wasn't any sentiment, you understand; I was
idiotic enough at the time to believe that there wasn't any such thing
as sentiment. It has cost me about as much to give her up as it has cost
her to give me up--and that is a little less than nothing."
Again the silence came between. The colonel was knocking his pipe bowl
against a tree trunk and an interruption was threatening. When the low
voice came again from the hammock it was troubled.
"You are disappointing me, now. You are taking it very lightly, and
apparently you neither know nor care very much how the woman may be
taking it. Perhaps there wasn't any sentiment on your part."
Smith was laughing quietly. "If you could only know Verda Richlander,"
he said. "Imagine the most beautiful thing you can think of, and then
take the heart out of it, and--but, hold on, I can do better than that,"
and he drew out his watch and handed it to her with the back case
opened.
She took the watch and stopped the hammock swing to let the light from
the nearest window fall upon the photograph.
"She is very beautiful; magnificently beautiful," she said, returning
the watch. And an instant later: "I don't see how you could say what you
did about the sentiment. If I were a man----"
The colonel had mounted the steps and was coming toward them. The young
woman slipped from the hammock and stood up.
"Don't go," said Smith, feeling as if he were losing an opportunity and
leaving much unsaid that ought to be said. But the answer was a quiet
"good night" and she was gone.
Smith went back to town with the colonel the next morning physically
rested, to be sure, but in a frame of mind bordering again upon the
sardonic. In the cold light of the following day, after-dinner
confidences, even with the best-beloved, have a way of showing up all
their puerilities and inadequacies. Two things, and two alone, stood out
clearly: one was that he was most unmistakably in love with Corona
Baldwin, and the other was that he had shown her the weakest side of
himself by appealing like a callow boy to her sympathies.
Hence there was another high resolve not to go to Hillcrest again until
he could go as a free man; a resolve which, it is perhaps needless to
say, was broken thereafter as often as the colonel asked him to go. Why,
in the last resort, Smith should have finally chosen another confidant
in the person of William Starbuck, the reformed cow-puncher, he scarcely
knew. But it was to Starbuck that he appealed for advice when the
sentimental situation had grown fairly desperate.