Billy," he said to Starbuck one night when he had dragged the mine owner
up to the bath-room suite in the Hophra House, and had told him just a
little, enough to merely hint at his condition. "You see how it stacks
up. I'm in a fair way to come out of this the biggest scoundrel
alive--the piker who takes advantage of the innocence of a good girl.
I'm not the man she thinks I am. I am standing over a volcano pit every
minute of the day. If it blows up, I'm gone, obliterated, wiped out."
"Is it aiming to blow up?" asked Starbuck sagely.
"I don't know any more about that than you do. It is the kind that
usually does blow up sooner or later. I've prepared for it as well as I
can. What Colonel Baldwin and the rest of you needed was a financial
manager, and Timanyoni High Line has its fighting chance--which was
more than Timanyoni Ditch had when I took hold. If I should drop out
now, you and Maxwell and the colonel and Kinzie could go on and make the
fight; but that doesn't help out in this other matter."
Starbuck smoked in silence for a long minute or two before he said: "Is
there another woman in it, John?"
"Yes; but not in the way you mean. It never came to anything more than a
decently frank friendship, though the whole town had it put up that it
was all settled and we were going to be married."
"Huh! I wonder if that's what _she'd_ say? You say it never came to
anything more than a friendship: maybe that's all right from your side
of the fence. But how about the girl?"
The harassed one's smile was grimly reminiscent.
"If you knew her you wouldn't ask, Billy. She is the modern, up-to-date
young woman in all that the term implies. When she marries she will give
little and ask little, outside of the ordinary amenities and
conventionalities."
"That's what you say; and maybe it's what you think. But when you have
to figure a woman into it, you never can tell, John. Are you keeping in
touch with this other girl?"
Smith shook his head.
"No; I shall probably never see her or hear from her again. Not that it
matters a penny's worth to either of us. And your guess was wrong if you
thought that things past are having any effect on things present. Corona
Baldwin stands in a class by herself."
"She's a mighty fine little girl, John," said Starbuck slowly. "Any one
of a dozen fellows I could name would give all their old shoes to swap
chances with you."
"That isn't exactly the kind of advice I'm needing," was the sober
rejoinder.
"No; but it was the kind you were wanting, when you tolled me off up
here," laughed the ex-cow-puncher. "I know the symptoms. Had 'em myself
for about two years so bad that I could wake up in the middle of the
night and taste 'em. Go in and win. Maybe the great big stumbling-block
you're worrying about wouldn't mean anything at all to an open-minded
young woman like Corona; most likely it wouldn't."
"If she could know the whole truth--and believe it," said Smith
musingly.
"You tell her the truth, and she'll take care of the believing part of
it, all right. You needn't lose any sleep about that."
Smith drew a long breath and removed his pipe to say: "I haven't the
nerve, Billy, and that's the plain fact. I have already told her a
little of it. She knows that I----"
Starbuck broke in with a laugh. "Yes; it's a shouting pity about your
nerve! You've been putting up such a blooming scary fight in this
irrigation business that we all know you haven't any nerve. If I had
your job in that, I'd be going around here toting two guns and wondering
if I couldn't make room in the holster for another."
Smith shook his head.
"I was safe enough so long as Stanton thought I was the resident manager
and promoter for a new bunch of big money in the background. But he has
had me shadowed and tracked until now I guess he is pretty well
convinced that I actually had the audacity to play a lone hand; and a
bluffing hand, at that. That makes a difference, of course. Two days
after I had climbed into the saddle here, he sent a couple of his
strikers after me. I don't know just what their orders were, but they
seemed to want a fight--and they got it. It was in Blue Pete's doggery,
up at the camp."
"Guns?" queried Starbuck.
"Theirs; not mine, because I didn't have any. I managed to get the
shooting-irons away from them before we had mixed very far."
"You're just about the biggest, long-eared, stiff-backed, stubborn wild
ass of the wallows that was ever let loose in a half-reformed
gun-country!" grumbled the ex-cow-man. "You're fixing to get yourself
all killed up, Smith. Haven't you sense enough to see that these
rustlers will rub you out in two twitches of a dead lamb's tail if
they've made up their minds that you are the High Line main guy and the
only one?"
"Of course," said the wild ass easily. "If they could lay me up for a
month or two----"
"Lay up, nothing!" retorted Starbuck. "Lay you down, about six feet
underground, is what I mean!"
"Pshaw!" exclaimed the one whose fears ran in a far different channel
from any that could be dug by mere corporation violence. "This is
America, in the twentieth century. We don't kill our business
competitors nowadays."
"Don't we?" snorted Starbuck. "That will be all right, too. We'll
suppose, just for the sake of argument, that my respected and
respectable daddy-in-law, or whatever other silk-hatted old money-bags
happens to be paying Crawford Stanton's salary _and_ commission,
wouldn't send out an order to have you killed off. Maybe Stanton,
himself, wouldn't stand for it if you'd put it that barefaced. But
daddy-in-law, and Stanton, and all the others, hire blacklegs and
sharpers and gunmen and thugs. And every once in a while somebody takes
a wink for a nod--and _bang!_ goes a gun."
"Well, what's the answer?" said Smith.
"Tote an arsenal, yourself, and be ready to shoot first and ask
questions afterward. That's the only way you can live peaceably with
such men as Jake Boogerfield and Lanterby and Pete Simms."
Smith got out of his chair and took a turn up and down the length of the
room. When he came back to stand before Starbuck, he said: "I did that,
Billy. I've been carrying a gun for a week and more; not for these ditch
pirates, but for somebody else. The other night, when I was out at
Hillcrest, Corona happened to see it. I'm not going to tell you what she
said, but when I came back to town the next morning, I chucked the gun
into a desk drawer. And I hope I'm going to be man enough not to wear it
again."
Starbuck dropped the subject abruptly and looked at his watch.
"You liked to have done it, pulling me off up here," he remarked. "I'm
due to be at the train to meet Mrs. Billy, and I've got just about three
minutes. So long."
Smith changed his street clothes leisurely after Starbuck had gone, and
made ready to go down to the cafe dinner, turning over in his mind,
meanwhile, the problem whose solution he had tried to extract from his
late visitor. The workable answer was still as far off and as
unattainable as ever when he went down-stairs and stopped at the desk to
toss his room-key to the clerk.
The hotel register was lying open on the counter, and from force of
habit he ran his eye down the list of late arrivals. At the end of the
list, in sprawling characters upon which the ink was yet fresh, he read
his sentence, and for the first time in his life knew the meaning of
panic fear. The newest entry was:
"Josiah Richlander and daughter, Chicago."
Smith was not misled by the place-name. There was only one "Josiah
Richlander" in the world for him, and he knew that the Lawrenceville
magnate, in registering from Chicago, was only following the example of
those who, for good reasons or no reason, use the name of their latest
stopping-place for a registry address.
XIV
A Reprieve
For the length of time it took him to read Josiah Richlander's signature
on the Hophra House register and to grasp the full meaning of the
Lawrenceville magnate's presence in Brewster, Smith's blood ran cold and
there was a momentary attack of shocked consternation, comparable to
nothing that any past experience had to offer. It had been a foregone
conclusion from the very outset that, sooner or later, some one who knew
him would drift in from the world beyond the mountains; but in all his
imaginings he had never dreamed of the Richlander possibility. Verda, as
he knew, had been twice to Europe--and, like many of her kind, had never
been west of the Mississippi in her native land. Why, then, had she----
But there was no time to waste in curious speculations as to the whys
and wherefores. Present safety was the prime consideration. With Josiah
Richlander and his daughter in Brewster, and guests under the same roof
with him, discovery, identification, disgrace were knocking at the door.
Smith had a return of the panicky chill when he realized how utterly
impossible it would be for a man with his business activities to hide,
even temporarily, not in the hotel, to be sure, but anywhere in a town
of the Brewster dimensions. And the peril held no saving element of
uncertainty. He could harbor no doubt as to what Josiah Richlander would
do if discovery came. For so long a time as should be consumed in
telegraphing between Brewster and Lawrenceville, Smith thought he might
venture to call himself a free man. But that was the limit.
It was the dregs of the J. Montague subconsciousness yet remaining in
him that counselled flight, basing the prompting upon a bit of
panic-engendered reasoning. Miss Verda and her father could hardly be
anything more than transient visitors in Brewster. Possibly he might be
able to keep out of their way for the needful day or so. To resolve in
such an urgency was to act. One minute later he had hailed a passing
auto-cab at the hotel entrance, and the four miles between the city and
Colonel Baldwin's ranch had been tossed to the rear before he
remembered that he had expressly declined a dinner invitation for that
same evening at Hillcrest, the declination basing itself upon business
and having been made by word of mouth to Mrs. Baldwin in person when she
had called at the office with her daughter just before the luncheon
hour.
Happily, the small social offense went unremarked, or at least
unrebuked. Smith found his welcome at the ranch that of a man who has
the privilege of dropping in unannounced. The colonel was jocosely
hospitable, as he always was; Mrs. Baldwin was graciously lenient--was
good enough, indeed, to thank the eleventh-hour guest for reconsidering
at the last moment; and Corona----
Notwithstanding all that had come to pass; notwithstanding, also, that
his footing in the Baldwin household had come to be that of a family
friend, Smith could never be quite sure of the bewitchingly winsome
young woman who called her father "Colonel-daddy." Her pose, if it were
a pose, was the attitude of the entirely unspoiled child of nature and
the wide horizons. When he was with her she made him think of all the
words expressive of transparency and absolute and utter unconcealment.
Yet there were moments when he fancied he could get passing glimpses of
a subtler personality at the back of the wide-open, frankly questioning
eyes; a wise little soul lying in wait behind its defenses; prudent,
all-knowing, deceived neither by its own prepossessions or prejudices,
nor by any of the masqueradings of other souls.
Smith, especially in this later incarnation which had so radically
changed him, believed as little in the psychic as any hardheaded young
business iconoclast of an agnostic century could. But on this particular
evening when he was smoking his after-dinner pipe on the flagstoned
porch with Corona for his companion, there were phenomena apparently
unexplainable on any purely material hypothesis.
"I am sure I have much less than half of the curiosity that women are
said to have, but, really, I _do_ want to know what dreadful thing has
happened to you since we met you in the High Line offices this
morning--mamma and I," was the way in which one of the phenomena was
made to occur; and Smith started so nervously that he dropped his pipe.
"You can be the most unexpected person, when you try," he laughed, but
the laugh scarcely rang true. "What makes you think that anything has
happened?"
"I don't think--I _know_," the small seeress went on with calm
assurance. "You've been telling us in all sorts of dumb ways that you've
had an upsetting shock of some kind; and I don't believe it's another
lawsuit. Am I right, so far?"
"I believe you are a witch, and it's a mighty good thing you didn't live
in the Salem period," he rejoined. "They would have hanged you to a dead
moral certainty."
"Then there was something?" she queried; adding, jubilantly: "I knew
it!"
"Go on," said the one to whom it had happened; "go on and tell me the
rest of it."
"Oh, that isn't fair; even a professional clairvoyant has to be told the
color of her eyes and hair."
"Wha-what!" the ejaculation was fairly jarred out of him and for the
moment he fancied he could feel a cool breeze blowing up the back of his
neck.
The clairvoyant who did not claim to be a professional was laughing
softly.
"You told me once that a woman was adorable in the exact degree in which
she could afford to be visibly transparent; yes, you said 'afford,' and
I've been holding it against you. Now I'm going to pay you back. You
are the transparent one, this time. You have as good as admitted that
the 'happening' thing isn't a man; 'wha-what' always means that, you
know; so it must be a woman. Is it the Miss Richlander you were telling
me about?"
There are times when any mere man may be shocked into telling the simple
truth, and Smith had come face to face with one of them. "It is," he
said.
"She is in Brewster?"
"Yes."
"When did she come?"
"This evening."
"And you ran away? That was horribly unkind, don't you think--after she
had come so far?"
"Hold on," he broke in. "Don't let's go so fast. I didn't ask her to
come. And, besides, she didn't come to see me."
"Did she tell you that?"
"I have taken precious good care that she shouldn't have the chance. I
saw her name--and her father's--on the hotel register; and just about
that time I remembered that I could probably get a bite to eat out
here."
"You are queer! All men are a little queer, I think--always excepting
Colonel-daddy. Don't you want to see her?"
"Indeed, I don't!"
"Not even for old times' sake?"
"No; not even for old times' sake. I've given you the wrong impression
completely, if you think there is any obligation on my part. It never
got beyond the watch-case picture stage, as I have told you. It might
have drifted on to the other things in the course of time, simply
because neither of us might have known any better than to let it drift.
But that's all a back number, now."
"Just the same, her coming shocked you."
"It certainly did," he confessed soberly; and then: "Have you forgotten
what I told you about the circumstances under which I left home?"
"_Oh!_" she murmured, and as once before there was a little gasp to go
with the word. Then: "She wouldn't--she wouldn't----"
"No," he answered; "she wouldn't; but her father would."
"So her father wanted her to marry the other man, did he? What was he
like--the other man? I don't believe you've ever told me anything about
him."
Smith's laugh was an easing of strains.
"Now your 'control' is playing tricks on you. There were a dozen other
men, more or less."
"And her picture was in the watch-case of each?"
"You've pumped me dry," he returned, the sardonic humor reasserting
itself. "I haven't her watch-case list; I never had it. But I guess it's
within bounds to suppose that she got the little pictures from the
photographer by the half-dozen, at least. Young women in my part of the
world don't think much of the watch-case habit; I mean they don't regard
it seriously."
A motor-car was coming up the driveway and Smith was not altogether
sorry when he saw Stillings, the lawyer, climb out of it to mount the
steps. It was high time that an interruption of some sort was breaking
in, and when the colonel appeared and brought Stillings with him to the
lounging end of the porch, a business conference began which gave Miss
Corona an excuse to disappear, and which accounted easily for the
remainder of the evening.
Borrowing a horse from the Hillcrest corral the following morning, Smith
returned to Brewster by way of the dam, making the long detour count for
as much as possible in the matter of sheer time-killing. It was a little
before noon when he reached town by the roundabout route, and after
putting the horse up at the livery-stable in which Colonel Baldwin was a
half owner, he went to the hotel to reconnoitre. The room-clerk who gave
him his key gave him also the information he craved.
"Mr. Richlander? Oh, yes; he left early this morning by the stage. He is
interested in some gold properties up in the range beyond Topaz. Fine
old gentleman. Do you know him, Mr. Smith?"
"The name seemed familiar when I saw it on the register last evening,"
was Smith's evasion; "but it is not such a very uncommon name. He didn't
say when he was coming back?"
"No."
Smith took a fresh hold upon life and liberty. While the world is
perilously narrow in some respects, it is comfortably broad in others,
and a danger once safely averted is a danger lessened. Snatching a hasty
luncheon in the grill-room, the fighting manager of Timanyoni High Line
hurried across to the private suite in the Kinzie Building offices into
which he had lately moved and once more plunged into the business
battle.
Notwithstanding a new trouble which Stillings had wished to talk over
with his president and the financial manager the night before--the
claim set up by the dead-and-gone paper railroad to a right of way
across the Timanyoni at the dam--the battle was progressing favorably.
Williams was accomplishing the incredible in the matter of speed, and
the dam was now nearly ready to withstand the high-water stresses when
they should come. The power-house was rising rapidly, and the machinery
was on the way from the East. Altogether things were looking more
hopeful than they had at any period since the hasty reorganization.
Smith attacked the multifarious details of his many-sided job with
returning energy. If he could make shift to hold on for a few days or
weeks longer....
He set his teeth upon a desperate determination to hold on at any cost;
at all costs. If Josiah Richlander should come back to Brewster--but
Smith would not allow himself to think of this. At the worst, the period
of peril could not be long. Smith knew his man, and was well assured
that it would take something more alluring than a gold-mine to keep the
Lawrenceville millionaire away from his business at home for any
considerable length of time. With the comforting conclusion for a
stimulus, the afternoon of hard work passed quickly and there was only a
single small incident to break the busy monotonies. While Smith was
dictating the final batch of letters to the second stenographer a young
man with sleepy eyes and yellow creosote stains on his fingers came in
to ask for a job. Smith put him off until the correspondence was
finished and then gave him a hearing.
"What kind of work are you looking for?" was the brisk query.
"Shorthand work, if I can get it," said the man out of a job.
"How rapid are you?"
"I have been a court reporter."
Smith was needing another stenographer and he looked the applicant over
appraisingly. The appraisal was not entirely satisfactory. There was a
certain shifty furtiveness in the half-opened eyes, and the rather weak
chin hinted at a possible lack of the discreetness which is the prime
requisite in a confidential clerk.
"Any business experience?"
"Yes; I've done some railroad work."
"Here in Brewster?"
Shaw lied smoothly. "No; in Omaha."
"Any recommendations?"
The young man produced a handful of "To Whom it May Concern" letters.
They were all on business letter-heads, and were apparently genuine,
though none of them were local. Smith ran them over hastily and he had
no means of knowing that they had been carefully prepared by Crawford
Stanton at no little cost in ingenuity and painstaking. How careful the
preparation had been was revealed in the applicant's ready suggestion.
"You can write or wire to any of these gentlemen," he said; "only, if
there is a job open, I'd be glad to go to work on trial."
The business training of the present makes for quick decisions. Smith
snapped a rubber band around the letters and shot them into a pigeonhole
of his desk.
"We'll give you a chance to show what you can do," he told the man out
of work. "If you measure up to the requirements, the job will be
permanent. You may come in to-morrow morning and report to Mr. Miller,
the chief clerk."
The young man nodded his thanks and went out, leaving just as the first
stenographer was bringing in his allotment of letters for the
signatures. Having other things to think of, Smith forgot the
sleepy-eyed young fellow instantly. But it is safe to assume that he
would not have dismissed the incident so readily if he had known that
Shaw had been waiting in the anteroom during the better part of the
dictating interval, and that on the departing applicant's cuffs were
microscopic short-hand notes of a number of the more important letters.
XV
"Sweet Fortune's Minion"
It was late dinner-time when Smith closed the big roll-top desk in the
new private suite in the Kinzie Building offices and went across the
street to the hotel. A little farther along, as he was coming down from
his rooms to go to dinner, he saw Starbuck in the lobby talking to
Williams; but since they did not see him, he passed on without stopping.
The great dining-room of the Hophra House was on the ground floor; a
stucco-pillared immensity with scenic mural decorations after Bierstadt
and a ceiling over which fat cupids and the classical nude in goddesses
rioted in the soft radiance of the shaded electrics. The room was well
filled, but the head waiter found Smith a small table in the shelter of
one of the pillars and brought him an evening paper.
Smith gave his dinner order and began to glance through the paper. The
subdued chatter and clamor of the big room dinned pleasantly in his
ears, and the disturbing thought of peril imminent was losing its
keenest cutting edge when suddenly the solid earth yawned and the
heavens fell. Half absently he realized that the head waiter was seating
some one at the place opposite his own; then the faint odor of violets,
instantly reminiscent, came to his nostrils. He knew instinctively, and
before he could put the newspaper aside, what had happened. Hence the
shock, when he found himself face to face with Verda Richlander, was not
so completely paralyzing as it might have been. She was looking across
at him with a lazy smile in the glorious brown eyes, and the surprise
was quite evidently no surprise for her.
"I told the waiter to bring me over here," she explained; and then,
quite pleasantly: "It is an exceedingly little world, isn't it,
Montague?"
He nodded gloomily.
"Much too little for a man to hide in," he agreed; adding: "But I think
I have known that, all along; known, at least, that it would be only a
question of time."
The waiter had come to take Miss Richlander's dinner order, and the talk
paused. After the man had gone she began again.
"Why did you run away?" she asked.
Smith shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
"What else was there for me to do. Besides, I believed, at the time,
that I had killed Dunham. I could have sworn he was dead when I left
him."
She was toying idly with the salad-fork. "Sometimes I am almost sorry
that he wasn't," she offered.
"Which is merely another way of saying that you were unforgiving enough
to wish to see me hanged?" he suggested, with a sour smile.
"It wasn't altogether that; no." There was a pause and then she went on:
"I suppose you know what has been happening since you ran away--what has
been done in Lawrenceville, I mean?"
"I know that I have been indicted by the grand jury and that there is a
reward out for me. It's two thousand dollars, isn't it?"
She let the exact figure of the reward go unconfirmed.
"And still you are going about in public as if all the hue and cry meant
nothing to you? The beard is an improvement--it makes you look older and
more determined--but it doesn't disguise you. I should have known you
anywhere, and other people will."
Again his shoulders went up.
"What's the use?" he said. "I couldn't dig deep enough nor fly high
enough to dodge everybody. You have found me, and if you hadn't,
somebody else would have. It would have been the same any time and
anywhere."
"You knew we were here?" she inquired.
He made the sign of assent.
"And yet you didn't think it worth while to take your meals somewhere
else?"