It was a sharp temptation. No one knew better than he what it would mean
to be involved in a long fight, with huge capital on one side and only
justice and a modest bank balance on the other. To continue would be to
leave Colonel Baldwin and Maxwell and Starbuck and their local following
a legacy of strife and shrewd battlings. He knew that Kinzie's offer was
made in good faith. It was most probably based on a tentative proposal
from Stanton, who, in turn, spoke for the great syndicate. By letting go
he might get the local investors out whole, or possibly with some small
profit.
Against the acceptance of this alternative every fibre of the new-found
manhood in him rose up in stubborn protest. Had it indeed come to a pass
at which mere money could dominate and dictate, rob, steal, oppress, and
ride roughshod over all opposition? Smith asked himself the question,
and figured the big Missouri colonel's magnificent anger if it should be
asked of him. That thought and another--the thought of what Corona would
say and think if he should surrender--turned the scale.
"No, Mr. Kinzie; we'll not compromise while I have anything to say about
it; we'll fight it to a finish," he said abruptly; and with that he went
out through the crowded anteroom and so back to his desk in the
up-stairs offices.
XIX
Two Women
For one day and yet another after the minatory interview with David
Kinzie, Smith fought mechanically, developing the machine-like
doggedness of the soldier who sees the battle going irresistibly against
him and still smites on in sheer desperation.
As if the night of fiascos had been the turning-point, he saw the
carefully built reorganization structure, reared by his own efforts upon
the foundation laid by Colonel Baldwin and his ranchmen associates,
falling to pieces. In spite of all he could do, the panic of
stock-selling continued; the city council, alarmed by the persistent
story of the unsafety of the dam, was threatening to cancel the lighting
contract with Timanyoni High Line; and Kinzie, though he was doing
nothing openly, had caused the word about the proposed compromise with
the Escalante people to be passed far and wide among the Timanyoni
stockholders, together with the intimation that disaster could be
averted now only by prompt action and the swift effacement of their
rule-or-ruin secretary and treasurer.
"They're after you, John," was the way the colonel put it at the close
of the second day of back-slippings. "They say you're fiddlin' while
Rome's a-burnin'. Maybe you know what they mean by that; I don't."
Smith did know. During the two days of stress, Miss Verda had been very
exacting. There had been another night at the theatre and much
time-killing after meals in the parlors of the Hophra House. Worse
still, there had been a daylight auto trip about town and up to the dam.
The victim was writhing miserably under the price-paying, but there
seemed to be no help for it. With Kinzie and Stanton working together,
with Debritt gone only as far as Red Butte and promising to return, and
with Josiah Richlander still within easy reach at the Topaz mines, he
stood in hourly peril of the explosion, and a single written line from
Verda to her father would light the match. Smith could find no word
bitter enough to fitly characterize the depths into which he had sunk.
It was the newest phase of the metamorphosis. Since the night of Verda
Richlander's arrival in Brewster, he had not seen Corona; he was
telling himself that he had forfeited the right to see her. Out of the
chaotic wreck of things but one driving motive had survived, and it had
grown to the stature of an obsession: the determination to wring victory
out of defeat for Timanyoni High Line; to fall, if he must fall,
fighting to the last gasp and with his face to the enemy.
"I know," he said, replying, after the reflective pause, to the charge
passed on by Colonel Dexter. "There is a friend of mine here from the
East, and I have been obliged to show her some attention, so they say I
am neglecting my job. They are also talking it around that I am your
Jonah, and saying that your only hope is to pitch me overboard."
"That's Dave Kinzie," growled the Missourian. "He seems to have it in
for you, some way. He was trying to tell me this afternoon that I ought
not to take you out to the ranch any more until you loosen up and tell
us where you came from. I told him to go and soak his addled old head in
a bucket of water!"
"Nevertheless, he was right," Smith returned gloomily. Then: "I am about
at the end of my rope, Colonel--the rope I warned you about when you
brought me here and put me into the saddle; and I'm trying desperately
to hang on until my job's done. When it is done, when Timanyoni High
Line can stand fairly on its own feet and fight its own battles, I'm
gone."
"Oh, no, you're not," denied the ranchman-president in generous protest.
"I don't know--you've never told us--what sort of a kettle of hot water
you've got into, but you have made a few solid friends here in the
Timanyoni, John, and they are going to stand by you. And--just to show
Dave Kinzie that nobody cares a whoop for what he says--you come on out
home with me to-night and get away from this muddle for a few minutes.
It'll do you a heap of good; you know it always does."
Smith shook his head reluctantly but firmly.
"Never again, Colonel. It can only be a matter of a few days now, and
I'm not going to pull you, and your wife and daughter, into the
limelight if I can help it."
Colonel Dexter got out of his chair and walked to the office window.
When he came back it was to say: "Are they sure-enough chasing you,
John?--for something that you have done? Is that what you're trying to
tell me?"
"That is it--and they are nearly here. Now you know at least one of the
reasons why I can't go with you to-night."
"I'll be shot if I do!" stormed the generous one. "I promised the Missus
I'd bring you."
"You must make my excuses to her; and to Corona you may say that I am
once more carrying a gun. She will understand."
"Which means, I take it, that you've been telling Corry more than you've
told the rest of us. That brings on more talk, John. I haven't said a
word before, have I?"
"No."
"Well, I'm going to say it now: I've got only just one daughter in the
wide, wide world, John."
Smith stood up and put his hands behind him, facing the older man
squarely.
"Colonel, I'd give ten years of my life, this minute, if I might go with
you to Hillcrest this evening and tell Corona what I have been wanting
to tell her ever since I have come to know what her love might make of
me. The fact that I can't do it is the bitterest thing I have ever had
to face, or can ever be made to face."
Colonel Baldwin fell back into his swing-chair and thrust his hands into
his pockets.
"It beats the Dutch how things tangle themselves up for us poor mortals
every little so-while," he commented, after a frowning pause. And then:
"You haven't said anything like that to Corry, have you?"
"No."
"That was white, anyway. And now I suppose the other woman--this Miss
Rich-some-thing-or-other over at the hotel--has come and dug you up and
got you on the end of her trail-rope. That's the way it goes when a man
mixes and mingles too much. You never can tell--"
"Hold on," Smith interposed. "Whatever else I may be, I'm not that kind
of a scoundrel. I don't owe Miss Richlander anything that I can't pay
without doing injustice to the woman I love. But in another way I am a
scoundrel, Colonel. For the past two days I have been contemptible
enough to play upon a woman's vanity merely for the sake of keeping her
from talking too much."
The grizzled old ranchman shook his head sorrowfully.
"I didn't think that of you, John; I sure didn't. Why, that's what you
might call a low-down, tin-horn sort of a game."
"It is just that, and I know it as well as you do. But it's the price I
have to pay for my few days of grace. Miss Richlander knows the
Stantons; they've made it their business to get acquainted with her.
One word from her to Crawford Stanton, and a wire from him to my home
town in the Middle West would settle me."
The older man straightened himself in his chair, and his steel-gray eyes
blazed suddenly.
"Break away from 'em, John!" he urged. "Break it off short, and let 'em
all do their damnedest! Away along at the first, Williams and I both
said you wasn't a crooked crook, and I'm believing it yet. When it comes
to the show-down, we'll all fight for you, and they'll have to bring a
derrick along if they want to snatch you out of the Timanyoni. You go
over yonder to the Hophra House and tell that young woman that the
bridle's off, and she can talk all she wants to!"
"No," said Smith shortly. "I know what I am doing, and I shall go on as
I have begun. It's the only way. Matters are desperate enough with us
now, and if I should drop out----"
The telephone-bell was ringing, and Baldwin twisted his chair to bring
himself within reach of the desk set. The message was a brief one and at
its finish the ranchman-president was frowning heavily.
"By Jupiter! it does seem as if the bad luck all comes in a bunch!" he
protested. "Williams was rushing things just a little too fast, and
they've lost a whole section of the dam by stripping the forms before
the concrete was set. That puts us back another twenty-four hours, at
least. Don't that beat the mischief?"
Smith reached for his hat. "It's six o'clock," he said; "and Williams's
form-strippers have furnished one more reason why I shouldn't keep Miss
Richlander waiting for her dinner." And with that he cut the talk short
and went his way.
Brewster being only a one-night stand on the long playing circuit
between Denver and the Pacific coast, there was an open date at the
opera-house, and with a blank evening before her, the Olympian beauty,
making the _tete-a-tete_ dinner count for what it would, tightened her
hold upon the one man available, demanding excitement. Nothing else
offering, she suggested an evening auto drive, and Smith dutifully
telephoned Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, and borrowed a
runabout.
Being left to his own choice of routes after the start was made, he
headed the machine up the river road, and the drive paused at the dam.
Craving a new sensation, Miss Richlander had it in full measure when the
machine had been braked to a stop at the construction camp. Williams,
hoarse from much shouting and haggard-eyed for want of sleep, was
driving his men fiercely in a fight against time. The night rise in the
river had already set in, and the slumped section of concrete had left a
broad gap through which the water threatened to pour, endangering not
only the power-house directly beneath it, but also the main structure of
the dam itself.
The stagings were black with men hurrying back and forth under the glare
of the electrics, and the concrete gangs were laboring frantically to
clear the wreck made by the crumbling mass, to the end that the
carpenters might bulkhead the gap with timbers and planks to hold back
the rising flood. The mixers had stopped temporarily, but the machinery
was held in readiness to go into action the moment the debris should be
removed and the new forms locked into place. Every now and then one of
Williams's assistants, a red-headed young fellow with a voice like a
fog-horn, took readings of the climbing river level from a gauge in the
slack water, calling out the figures in a singsong chant: "Nineteen
_six_! Nineteen six and a _quarter_! Nineteen six and a _half_!"
"Get a move, you fellows there on the stage!" yelled Williams. "She's
coming up faster than usual to-night! Double pay if you get that
bulkhead in before the tide wets your feet!"
Smith felt as if he ought to get out of the car and help, but there was
nothing he could do. Miss Richlander had been silent for the better part
of the drive from town, but now she began to talk.
"So this is what you left Lawrenceville for, is it, Montague?" she said,
knitting her perfect brows at the hubbub and strife. "If I were not
here, I believe you would be down there, struggling with the rest of
them."
"I certainly should," he answered briefly, adding: "not that I should be
of much use."
"There are a good many easier ways of making money," she offered,
including the entire industrial strife in the implied detraction.
"This is a man's way, asking for all--and the best--there is in a man,"
he asserted. "You can't understand, of course; you have eaten the bread
of profits and discount and interest all your life. But here is
something really creative. The world will be the richer for what is
being done here; more mouths can be filled and more backs clothed. That
is the true test of wealth, and the only test."
"And you are willing to live in a raw wilderness for the sake of having
a part in these crudities?"
"I may say that I had no choice, at first; it was this or nothing. But I
may also say that whatever the future may do to me, I shall always have
it to remember that for a little time I was a man, and not a tailor's
model."
"Is that the way you are thinking now of your former life?" she gibed.
"It is the truth. The man you knew in Lawrenceville cared more for the
set of a coat, for the color of a tie, for conventional ease and the
little luxuries, than he did for his soul. And nobody thought enough of
him to kick him alive and show him that he was strangling the only part
of him that was at all worth saving."
"If your point of view appeals to me, as perhaps it does--as possibly it
would to any woman who can appreciate masculinity in a man, even though
it be of the crudest--the life that is giving it to you certainly does
not," she replied, with a little lip-curling of scorn. Then: "You
couldn't bring your wife to such a place as Brewster, Montague."
He had no answer for this, and none was needed. Williams had caught
sight of the auto, and he came up, wiping his face with a red
handkerchief.
"I thought it must be you," he said to Smith. "Thank the Lord, we're
going to escape, this one more time! The bulkhead's in, and we'll be
dumping concrete in another fifteen minutes. But it was a narrow
squeak--an awful narrow squeak!"
Smith turned to his companion, saw permission in her eyes, and
introduced Williams. Somewhat to Smith's surprise, Miss Verda evinced a
suddenly awakened interest in the engineer and in his work, making him
tell the story of the near-disaster. While he was telling it, the roar
of another auto rose above the clamor on the stagings and Colonel
Baldwin's gray roadster drew up beside the borrowed runabout. Smith gave
one glance at the small, trimly coated figure in the mechanician's seat
and ground his teeth in helpless fury.
In what followed he had little part or lot. Miss Richlander wished to
see the construction battle at shorter range, and Williams was opening
the door of the runabout. The colonel was afoot and was helping his
daughter to alight. Smith swore a silent oath to keep his place, and he
did it; but Williams was already introducing Baldwin and Corona to Miss
Richlander. There was a bit of commonplace talk, and then the quartet
walked down the embankment and out upon the finished portion of the dam,
Williams explaining the near-disaster as they went.
Smith sat back behind the pilot-wheel of the runabout and waited. Not
for a king's ransom would he have joined the group on the dam. He
suspected shrewdly that Verda had already heard of Corona through the
Stantons; that she was inwardly rejoicing at the new hold upon him which
chance had flung in her way. At the end of Williams's fifteen minutes
the rattle and grind of the mixers began. When the stream of concrete
came pouring through the high-tilted spouts, Smith looked to see the
colonel and Williams bringing the two women back to the camp level. What
the light of the masthead arcs showed him was the figure of one of the
women returning alone, while the two men and the other woman went on
across the stagings to the farther river bank where the battery of
mixers fed the swiftly moving lift.
Smith did not get out to go and meet the returning figure; his courage
was not of that quality. But he could not pretend to be either asleep or
dead when Corona came up between the two cars and spoke to him.
"You have nothing whatever to take back," she said, smiling up at him
from her seat on the running-board of the roadster. "She is all you said
she was--and more. She is gorgeously beautiful!"
Smith flung his freshly lighted cigar away and climbed out to sit beside
her.
"What do you think of me?" he demanded bluntly.
"What should I think? Didn't I scold you for running away from her that
first evening? I am glad you thought better of it afterward."
"I am not thinking better of it at all--in the way you mean."
"But Miss Richlander is," was the quiet reply.
"You have a right to say anything you please; and after it is all said,
to say it again. I am not the man you have been taking me for; not in
any respect. Your father knows now, and he will tell you."
"Colonel-daddy has told me one thing--the thing you told him to tell me.
And I am sorry--sorry and disappointed."
He smiled morosely. "Billy Starbuck calls the Timanyoni a half-reformed
gun-country, and from the very first he has been urging me to 'go
heeled,' as he phrases it."
"It isn't the mere carrying of a gun," she protested. "With most men
that would be only a prudent precaution for the leader in a fight like
this one you are making. But it means more than that to you; it means a
complete change of attitude toward your kind. Tell me if I am wrong."
"No; you are right. The time is coming when I shall be obliged to kill
somebody. And I think I shall rather welcome it."
"Now you have gone so far away that I can hardly see you," she said
softly. "'Once in a blue moon,' you said, the impossible might happen.
It _did_ happen in your case, didn't it?--giving you a chance to grow
and expand and to break with all the old traditions, whatever they were.
And the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose.
You have all the abilities; you can reach out and take what other men
have to beg for. Once you thought you would take only the best, and then
you grew so fast that we could hardly keep you in sight. But now you are
meaning to take the worst."
"I don't understand," he said soberly.
"You will understand some day," she asserted, matching his sober tone.
"When that time comes, you will know that the only great men are those
who love their fellow men; who are too big to be little; who can fight
without hatred; who can die, if need be, that others may live."
"My God!" said the man, and though he said it under his breath there
was, pent up in the two words, the cry of a soul in travail; a soul to
whom its own powers have suddenly been revealed, together with its lost
opportunities and its crushing inability to rise to the heights
supernal.
"It came too soon--if I could only have had a little more time," he was
saying; but at that, the colonel and Williams came up, bringing Miss
Richlander, and the heart-mellowing moment was gone.
Smith drove the borrowed runabout back to town in sober silence, and the
glorious beauty in the seat beside him did not try to make him talk.
Perhaps she, too, was busy with thoughts of her own. At all events, when
Smith had helped her out of the car at the hotel entrance and had seen
her as far as the elevator, she thanked him half absently and took his
excuse, that he must return the runabout to Maxwell's garage, without
laying any further commands upon him.
Just as he was turning away, a bell-boy came across from the clerk's
desk with a telegram for Miss Richlander. Smith had no excuse for
lingering, but with the air thick with threats he made the tipping of
the boy answer for a momentary stop-gap. Miss Verda tore the envelope
open and read the enclosure with a fine-lined little frown coming and
going between her eyes.
"It's from Tucker Jibbey," she said, glancing up at Smith. "Some one has
told him where we are, and he is following us. He says he'll be here on
the evening train. Will you meet him and tell him I've gone to bed?"
At the mention of Jibbey, the money-spoiled son of the man who stood
next to Josiah Richlander in the credit ratings, and Lawrenceville's
best imitation of a _flaneur_, Smith's first emotion was one of relief
at the thought that Jibbey would at least divide time with him in the
entertainment of the bored beauty; then he remembered that Jibbey had
once considered him a rival, and that the sham "rounder's" presence in
Brewster would constitute a menace more threatening than all the others
put together.
"I can't meet Tucker," he said bluntly. "You know very well I can't."
"That's so," was the quiet reply. "Of course, you can't. What will you
do when he comes?--run away?"
"No; I can't do that, either. I shall keep out of his way, if I can. If
he finds me and makes any bad breaks, he'll get what's coming to him. If
he's worth anything to you, you'll put him on the stage in the morning
and send him up into the mountains to join your father."
"The idea!" she laughed. "He's not coming out here to see father. Poor
Tucker! If he could only know what he is in for!" Then: "It is beginning
to look as if you might have to go still deeper in debt to me, Montague.
There is one more thing I'd like to do before I leave Brewster. If I'll
promise to keep Tucker away from you, will you drive me out to the
Baldwins' to-morrow afternoon? I want to see the colonel's fine horses,
and he has invited me, you know."
Smith's eyes darkened.
"There is a limit, Verda, and you've reached it," he said quickly. "If
the colonel invited you to Hillcrest, it was because you didn't leave
him any chance not to. I resign in favor of Jibbey," and with that he
handed her into the waiting elevator and said: "Good night."
XX
Tucker Jibbey
Though it was a working man's bedtime when Smith put Miss Richlander
into the elevator at the Hophra House and bade her good night, he knew
that there would be no sleep for him until he had made sure of the
arrival or non-arrival of the young man who, no less certainly than
Josiah Richlander or Debritt, could slay him with a word. Returning the
borrowed runabout to its garage, he went to the railroad station and
learned that the "Flyer" from the East was over four hours late. With
thirty minutes to spare, he walked the long train platform, chewing an
extinct cigar and growing more and more desperate at each pacing turn.
With time to weigh and measure the probabilities, he saw what would come
to pass. Verda Richlander might keep her own counsel, or she might not;
but in any event, Stanton would be quick to identify Jibbey as a
follower of Verda's, and so, by implication, a man who would be
acquainted with Verda's intimates. Smith recalled Jibbey's varied
weaknesses. If Verda should get hold of him first, and was still
generous enough to warn him against Stanton, the blow might be delayed.
But if Stanton should be quick enough, and cunning enough to play upon
Jibbey's thirst, the liquor-loosened tongue would tell all that it knew.
In such a crisis the elemental need rises up to thrust all other
promptings, ethical or merely prudent, into the background. Smith had
been profoundly moved by Corona Baldwin's latest appeal to such
survivals of truth and honor and fair-dealing as the strange
metamorphosis and the culminating struggle against odds had left him.
But in any new birth it is inevitable that the offspring of the man that
was shall be at first--like all new-born beings--a pure savage, guided
only by instinct. And of the instincts, that of self-preservation easily
overtops all others.
Smith saw how suddenly the pit of disaster would yawn for him upon
Jibbey's arrival, and the compunctions stirred by Corona's plea for the
higher ideals withdrew or were crushed in the turmoil. He had set his
hand to the plough and he would not turn back. It was Jibbey's
effacement in some way, or his own, he told himself, for he had long
since determined that he would never be taken alive to be dragged back
to face certain conviction in the Lawrenceville courts and a living
death in the home State penitentiary.