fifteen minutes more his fate would be decided. The station baggage and
express handlers were beginning to trundle their loaded trucks out
across the platform to be in readiness for the incoming train. There was
still time enough, but none to spare. Smith passed through the station
quickly and on the town side of the building took a cab. "Benkler's,"
was his curt order to the driver; and three minutes later he was telling
the night man at the garage that he had come back to borrow Maxwell's
runabout again, and urging haste in the refilling of the tanks.
The delayed "Flyer" was whistling in when Smith drove the runabout to
the station, and he had barely time to back the machine into place in
the cab rank and to hurry out to the platform before the train came
clattering down over the yard switches. Since all the debarking
passengers had to come through the archway exit from the track platform,
Smith halted at a point from which he could pass them in review. The
day-coach people came first, and after them a smaller contingent from
the sleepers. At the tail of the straggling procession Smith saw his
man, a thin-faced, hollow-eyed young fellow with an unlighted cigarette
hanging from his loose lower lip. Smith marked all the little details:
the rakish hat, the flaming-red tie, the russet-leather suitcase with
its silver identification tag. Then he placed himself squarely in the
young man's way.
Jibbey's stare was only momentary. With a broad-mouthed grin he dropped
the suitcase and thrust out a hand.
"Well, well--Monty, old sport! So this is where you ducked to, is it? By
Jove, it's no wonder Bart Macauley couldn't get a line on you! How are
tricks, anyway?"
Smith was carefully refusing to see the out-stretched hand. And it asked
for a sudden tightening of the muscles of self-possession to keep him
from looking over his shoulder to see if any of Stanton's shadow men
were at hand.
"Verda got your telegram, and she asked me to meet you," he rejoined
crisply. "Also, to make her excuses for to-night: she has gone to bed."
"So that's the way the cat's jumping, is it?" said the imitation black
sheep, the grin twisting itself into a leer. "_She_ got a line on you,
even if Macauley couldn't. By Gad! I guess I didn't get out here any too
soon."
Smith ignored the half-jealous pleasantry. "Bring your grip," he
directed. "I have an auto here and we'll drive."
Being a stranger in a strange city, Jibbey could not know that the hotel
was only three squares distant. For the same cause he was entirely
unsuspicious when Smith turned the car to the right out of the cab rank
and took a street leading to the western suburb. But when the pavements
had been left behind, together with all the town lights save an
occasional arc-lamp at a crossing, and he was trying for the third time
to hold a match to the hanging cigarette, enough ground had been covered
to prompt a question.
"Hell of a place to call itself a city, if anybody should ask you," he
chattered. "Much of this to worry through?"
Smith bent lower over the tiller-wheel, advancing the spark and opening
the throttle for more gas.
"A good bit of it. Didn't you know that Mr. Richlander is out in the
hills, buying a mine?"
Tucker Jibbey was rapid only in his attitude toward the world of
decency; the rapidity did not extend to his mental processes. The suburb
street had become a country road, the bridge over the torrenting Gloria
had thundered under the flying wheels, and a great butte, black in its
foresting from foot to summit, was rising slowly among the western stars
before his small brain had grasped the relation of cause to effect.
"Say, here, Monty--dammit all, you hold on! Verda isn't with Old
Moneybags; she's staying at the hotel in town. I wired and found out
before I left Denver. Where in Sam Hill are you taking me to?"
Smith made no reply other than to open the cut-out and to put his foot
on the accelerator. The small car leaped forward at racing speed and
Jibbey clutched wildly at the wheel.
"Stop her--stop her!" he shrilled. "Lemme get out!"
Smith had one hand free and it went swiftly to his hip pocket. A second
later Jibbey's shrilling protest died away in a gurgle of terror.
"For--for God's sake, Monty--don't kill me!" he gasped, when he saw the
free hand clutching a weapon and uplifted as if to strike. "Wh--what've
I done to you?"
"I'll tell you--a little later. Keep quiet and let this wheel alone, if
you want to live long enough to find out where you're going. Quiet down,
I say, or I'll beat your damned head off!--oh, you would, would you? All
right--if you _will_ have it!"
* * * * *
It lacked only a few minutes of midnight when Smith returned the
borrowed runabout for the second time that night, sending it jerkily
through the open door of Benkler's garage and swinging stiffly from
behind the steering-wheel to thrust a bank-note into the hand of the
waiting night man.
"Wash the car down good, and be sure it's all right before Mr. Maxwell
sends around in the morning," he commanded gruffly; and then: "Take your
whisk and dust me off."
The night man had seen the figure of his tip and was nothing loath.
"Gosh!" he exclaimed, with large Western freedom; "you sure look as if
you'd been drivin' a good ways, and tol'able hard. What's this on your
sleeve? Say! it looks like blood!"
"No; it's mud," was the short reply; and after the liberal tipper had
gone, the garage man was left to wonder where, on the dust-dry roads in
the Timanyoni, the borrower of Mr. Maxwell's car had found mud deep
enough to splash him, and, further, why there was no trace of the mud on
the dust-covered car itself.
XXI
At Any Cost
Brewster, drawing its business profit chiefly from the mines in the
Topaz and upper Gloria districts, had been only moderately enthusiastic
over the original irrigation project organized by Colonel Dexter Baldwin
and the group of ranchmen who were to be directly benefited. But when
the scope of the plan was enlarged to include a new source of power and
light for the city, the scheme had become, in a broader sense, a public
utility, and Brewster had promptly awakened to the importance of its
success as a local enterprise.
The inclusion of the hydro-electric privilege in the new charter had
been a bit of far-sighted business craft on the part of the young man
whose name was now in everybody's mouth. As he had pointed out to his
new board of directors, there was an abundant excess of water, and a
modest profit on the electric plant would pay the operating expenses of
the entire system, including the irrigating up-keep and extension work.
In addition to this, a reasonable contract price for electric current to
be furnished to the city would give the project a _quasi_-public
character, at least to the extent of enlisting public sympathy on the
side of the company in the fight with the land trust.
This piece of business foresight found itself amply justified as
the race against time was narrowed down to days and hours. Though
there was spiteful opposition offered by one of the two daily
newspapers--currently charged with being subsidized by the land
trust--public sentiment as a whole, led by the other newspaper, was
strongly on the side of the local corporation. Baldwin, Maxwell,
Starbuck, and a few more of the leading spirits in Timanyoni High Line
had many friends, and Crawford Stanton found his task growing
increasingly difficult as the climax drew near.
But to a man with an iron jaw difficulties become merely incentives to
greater effort. Being between the devil, in the person of an employer
who knew no mercy, on the one hand, and the deep blue sea of failure on
the other, the promoter left no expedient untried, and the one which was
yielding the best results, thus far, was the steady undercurrent of
detraction and calamitous rumor which he had contrived to set in motion.
As we have seen, it was first whispered, and then openly asserted, that
the dam was being built too hurriedly; that its foundations were
insecure; that, sooner or later, it would be carried away in high water,
and the city and the intervening country would be flood-swept and
devastated.
Beyond this, the detractive gossip attacked the _personnel_ of the new
company. Baldwin was all right as a man, and he knew how to raise fine
horses; but what did he, or any of his associates, know about building
dams and installing hydro-electric plants? Williams, the chief engineer,
was an ex-government man, and--government projects being anathema in the
Timanyoni by reason of the restrictive rules and regulations of the
Hophra Forest Reserve--everybody knew what that meant: out-of-date
methods, red-tape detail, general inefficiency. And Smith, the young
plunger who had dropped in from nobody knew where: what could be said of
him more than that he had succeeded in temporarily hypnotizing an entire
city? Who was he? and where had the colonel found him? Was his name
really Smith, or was that only a convenient _alias_?
Having set these queries afoot in Brewster, Stanton was unwearied in
keeping them alive and pressing them home. And since such askings grow
by what they feed upon, the questions soon began to lose the
interrogatory form and to become assertions of fact. Banker Kinzie was
quoted as saying, or at least as intimating, that he had lost faith, not
only in the High Line scheme, but particularly in its secretary and
treasurer; and to this bit of gossip was added another to the effect
that Smith had grossly deceived the bank by claiming to be the
representative of Eastern capital when he was nothing more than an
adventurer trading upon the credulity and good nature of an entire
community.
To these calumniating charges it was admitted on all sides that Smith,
himself, was giving some color of truth. To those who had opposed him he
had shown no mercy, and there were plenty of defeated litigants, and
some few dropped stockholders, among the obstructors to claim that the
new High Line promoter was a bully and a browbeater; that a poor man
stood no chance in a fight with the Timanyoni Company.
On the sentimental side the charges were still graver--in the Western
point of view. In its social aspect Brewster was still in the
country-village stage, and Smith's goings and comings at Hillcrest had
been quickly marked. From that to assuming the sentimental status, with
the colonel's daughter in the title role, was a step that had already
been taken by the society editress of the _Brewster Banner_ in a veiled
hint of a forthcoming "announcement" in which "the charming daughter of
one of our oldest and most respected families" and "a brilliant young
business man from the East" were to figure as the parties in interest.
Conceive, therefore, the shock that had been given to these kindlier
gossips when Smith's visits to the Baldwin ranch ceased abruptly between
two days, and the "brilliant young business man" was seen everywhere and
always in the company of the beautiful stranger who was stopping at the
Hophra House. In its palmier day the Timanyoni had hanged a man for
less.
On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smith
gave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the business
field. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a man
suddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial,
not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the short
space of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities which
he had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing and
refinancing of the irrigation project.
"We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, at
last," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for the
bejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra cafe. "Kinzie is about
to throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam is
getting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that you
can't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up to
his office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smith
abused him first and then threw him out bodily--hurt him pretty
savagely, they say."
The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise.
"Bad temper?" she queried.
"Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take your
choice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with Miss
Richlander overnight?--or has he?"
The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were at
luncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutes
ago."
Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But an
invisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might have
drawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrenceville
magnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were not
precisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times.
"I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day,
Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the little
ranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from us
and went back to you at the autos?"
"No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say."
"But it, or something else, has changed you--very much for the worse.
Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch this
afternoon?"
"And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition?--never in this
world!"
"More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame of
mind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever do
you suppose has become of Tucker?"
"How should I know?"
"If he had come in last night, and you had met him--as I asked you
to--in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might think
you had murdered him."
It was doubtless by sheer accident that Smith, reaching at the moment
for the salad-oil, overturned his water-glass. But the small accident by
no means accounted for the sudden graying of his face under the
Timanyoni wind tan--for that or for the shaking hands with which he
seconded the waiter's anxious efforts to repair the damage. When they
were alone again, the momentary trepidation had given place to a renewed
hardness that lent a biting rasp to his voice.
"Kinzie, the suspicious old banker that I've been telling you about, is
determined to run me down," he said, changing the subject abruptly.
"I've got it pretty straight that he is planning to send one of his
clerks to the Topaz district to try and find your father."
"In the hope that father will tell what he knows about you?"
"Just that."
"Does this Mr. Kinzie know where father is to be found?"
"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."
Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.
"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making,
if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell you
that Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in trying
to make me tell him where father has gone."
"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assure
you, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach your
father--alive."
"_Ooh!_" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the rounded
shoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a much
simpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie in
some way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you do
that?"
"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"
"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said the
young woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, you
know. Father left it with me--in case I should want to communicate with
him."
Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.
"_You_ wouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of the
ultimate right and wrong, would you? _You_ wouldn't say that the only
great man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"
Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.
"Are you quoting the little ranch person?" she inquired. Then she
answered his query: "The only great men worth speaking of are the men
who win. For the lack of something better to do, I'm willing to help you
win, Montague. Contrive in some way to have that clerk sent to me. It
can come about quite casually if it is properly suggested. Most
naturally, I am the one who would know where my father is to be found.
And I have changed my mind about wanting to drive to the Baldwins'.
We'll compromise on the play--if there _is_ a play."
Two things came of this talk over the luncheon table. Smith went back to
his office and shut himself up, without going near the Brewster City
National. None the less, the expedient suggested by Verda Richlander
must have found its means of communication in some way, since at two
o'clock David Kinzie summoned the confidential clerk who had been
directed to provide himself with a livery mount and gave him his
instructions.
"I'm turning this over to you, Hoback, because you know enough to keep a
still tongue in your head. Mr. Stanton doesn't know where Mr. Richlander
is, but Mr. Richlander's daughter does know. Go over to the hotel and
introduce yourself as coming from me. Say to the daughter that it is
necessary for us to communicate with her father on a matter of important
business, and ask her if she can direct you. That's all; only don't
mention Stanton in the matter. Come back and report after you've seen
her."
This was one of the results of the luncheon-table talk; and the other
came a short half-hour further along, when the confidential clerk
returned to make his report.
"I don't know why Miss Richlander wouldn't tell Mr. Stanton," he said.
"She was mighty nice to me; made me a pencil sketch of the Topaz country
and marked the mines that her father is examining."
"Good!" said David Kinzie, with his stubbly mustache at its most
aggressive angle. "It's pretty late in the day, but you'd better make a
start and get as far as you can before dark. When you find Mr.
Richlander, handle him gently. Tell him who you are, and then ask him if
he knows anything about a man named 'Montague,' or 'Montague Smith';
ask him who he is, and where he comes from. If you get that far with
him, he'll probably tell you the rest of it."
Smith saw no more of Miss Richlander until eight o'clock in the evening,
at which time he sent his card to her room and waited for her in the
mezzanine parlors. When she came down to him, radiant in fine raiment,
he seemed not to see the bedeckings or the beauty which they adorned.
"There is a play, and I have the seats," he announced briefly.
"_Merci!_" she flung back. "Small favors thankfully received, and larger
ones in proportion; though it's hardly a favor, this time, because I
have paid for it in advance. Mr. Kinzie's young man came to see me this
afternoon."
"What did you do?"
"I gave him a tracing of my map, and he was so grateful that it made me
want to tell him that it was all wrong; that he wouldn't find father in
a month if he followed the directions."
"But you didn't!"
"No; I can play the game, when it seems worth while."
Smith was frowning thoughtfully when he led her to the elevator alcove.
"My way would have been the surer," he muttered, half to himself.
"Barbarian!" she laughed; and then: "To think that you were once a
'debutantes' darling'! Oh, yes; I know it was Carter Westfall who said
it first, but it was true enough to name you instantly for all
Lawrenceville."
Smith made no comment, and Miss Richlander did not speak again until
they were waiting in the women's lobby for the house porter to call a
cab. Then, as if she had just remembered it:
"Oh! I forgot to ask you: is the Eastern train in?"
He nodded. "It was on time this evening--for a wonder."
"And no Tucker yet! What in the world do you suppose could have happened
to him, Montague?"
The porter was announcing the theatre cab and Smith reserved his answer
until the motor hackney was rolling jerkily away toward the opera-house.
"Jibbey has probably got what was coming to him," he said grittingly. "I
don't know whether you have ever remarked it or not, but the insect of
the Jibbey breed usually finds somebody to come along and step on it,
sooner or later."
XXII
The Megalomaniac
On a day which was only sixty-odd hours short of the expiration of the
time limit fixed by the charter conditions under which the original
Timanyoni Ditch Company had obtained its franchise, Bartley Williams,
lean and sombre-eyed from the strain he had been under for many days and
nights, saw the president's gray roadster ploughing its way through the
mesa sand on the approach to the construction camp, and was glad.
"I've been trying all the morning to squeeze out time to get into town,"
he told Baldwin, when the roadster came to a stand in front of the shack
commissary. "Where is Smith?"
The colonel threw up his hand in a gesture expressive of complete
detachment.
"Don't ask me. John has gone plumb loco in these last two or three days.
It's as much as your life's worth to ask him where he has been or where
he is going or what he means to do next."
"He hasn't stopped fighting?" said the engineer, half aghast at the bare
possibility.
"Oh, no; he's at it harder than ever--going it just a shaving too
strong, is what I'd tell him, if he'd let me get near enough to shout at
him. Last night, after the theatre, he went around to the _Herald_
office, and the way they're talking it on the street, he was aiming to
shoot up the whole newspaper joint if Mark Allen, the editor, wouldn't
take back a bunch of the lies he's been publishing about the High Line.
It wound up in a scrap of some sort. I don't know who got the worst of
it, but John isn't crippled up any, to speak of, this morning--only in
his temper."
"Smith puzzles me more than a little," was Williams's comment. "It's
just as you say; for the last few days he's been acting as if he had a
grouch a mile long. Is it the old sore threatening to break out
again?--the 'lame duck' business?"
"I shouldn't wonder," said the colonel evasively. Loyal to the last, he
was not quite ready to share with Williams the half-confidence in which
Smith had admitted, by implication at least, that the waiting young
woman at the Hophra House held his future between her thumb and finger.
Williams shook his head. "I guess we'll have to stand for the grouch,
if he'll only keep busy. He has the hot end of it, trying to stop the
stampede among the stockholders, and hold up the money pinch, and keep
Stanton from springing any new razzle on us. We couldn't very well get
along without him, right now, Colonel. With all due respect to you and
the members of the board, he is the fighting backbone of the whole
outfit."
"He is that," was Baldwin's ready admission. "He is just what we've been
calling him from the first, Bartley--a three-ply, dyed-in-the-wool
wonder in his specialty. Stanton hasn't been able to make a single move
yet that Smith hasn't foreseen and discounted. He is fighting now like a
man in the last ditch, and I believe he thinks he is in the last ditch.
The one time lately when I have had anything like a straight talk with
him, he hinted at that and gave me to understand that he'd be willing to
quit and take his medicine if he could hold on until Timanyoni High Line
wins out."
"That will be only two days more," said the engineer, saying it as one
who has been counting the days in keen anxiety. And then: "Stillings
told me yesterday that we're not going to get an extension of the time
limit from the State authorities."
"No; that little fire went out, blink, just as Smith said it would.
Stanton's backers have the political pull--in the State, as well as in
Washington. They're going to hold us to the letter of the law."
"Let 'em do it. We'll win out yet--if we don't run up against one or
both of the only two things I'm afraid of now: high water, or the
railroad call down."
"The water is pushing you pretty hard?"
"It's touch and go every night now. A warm rain in the mountains--well,
I won't say that it would tear us up, because I don't believe it would,
or could; but it would delay us, world without end."
"And the railroad grab? Have you heard anything more about that?"
"That is what I was trying to get to town for; to talk the railroad
business over with you and Stillings and Smith. They've had a gang here
this morning; a bunch of engineers, with a stranger, who gave his name
as Hallowell, in charge. They claimed to be verifying the old survey,
and Hallowell notified me formally that our dam stood squarely in their
right of way for a bridge crossing of the river."
"They didn't serve any papers on you, did they?" inquired the colonel
anxiously.