said, 'You've had due warning, legally and otherwise, Mr. Williams. This
is our right of way, bought and paid for, as we can prove when the
matter gets into the courts. You mustn't be surprised if we take
whatever steps may be necessary to recover what belongs to us.'"
"Force?" queried the Missourian, with a glint of the border-fighter's
fire in his eyes.
"Maybe. But we're ready for that. Did you know that Smith loaded half a
dozen cases of Winchesters on a motor-truck yesterday, and had them sent
out here?"
"No!"
"He did--and told me to say nothing about it. It seems that he ordered
them some time ago from an arms agency in Denver. That fellow foresees
everything, Colonel."
Dexter Baldwin had climbed into his car and was making ready to turn it
for the run back to town.
"If I were you, Bartley, I believe I'd open up those gun boxes and pass
the word among as many of the men as you think you can trust with rifles
in their hands. I'll tell Smith--and Bob Stillings."
Colonel Baldwin made half of his promise good, the half relating to the
company's attorney, as soon as he reached Brewster. But the other half
had to remain in abeyance. Smith was not in his office, and no one
seemed to know where he had gone. The colonel shrewdly suspected that
Miss Richlander was making another draft upon the secretary's time, and
he said as much to Starbuck, later in the day, when the mine owner
sauntered into the High Line headquarters and proceeded to roll the
inevitable cigarette.
"Not any, this time, Colonel," was Starbuck's rebuttal. "You've missed
it by a whole row of apple-trees. Miss Rich-dollars is over at the
hotel. I saw her at luncheon with the Stantons less than an hour ago."
"You haven't seen Smith, have you?"
"No; but I know where he is. He's out in the country, somewhere, taking
the air in Dick Maxwell's runabout. I wanted to borrow the wagon myself,
and Dick told me he had already lent it to Smith."
"We're needing him," said the colonel shortly, and then he told Starbuck
of the newest development in the paper-railroad scheme of obstruction.
From that the talk drifted to a discussion of Kinzie's latest attitude.
By this time there had been an alarming number of stock sales by small
holders, all of them handled by the Brewster City National, and it was
plainly evident that Kinzie had finally gone over to the enemy and was
buying--as cheaply as possible--for some unnamed customer. This had been
Stanton's earliest expedient; to "bear" the stock and to buy up the
control; and he was apparently trying it again.
"If they keep it up, they can wear us out by littles, and we'll break
our necks finishing the dam and saving the franchise only to turn it
over to them in the round-up," said the colonel dejectedly. "I've talked
until I'm hoarse, but you can't talk marrow into an empty bone, Billy. I
used to think we had a fairly good bunch of men in with us, but in these
last few days I've been changing my mind at a fox-trot. These hedgers'll
promise you anything on top of earth to your face, and then go straight
back on you the minute you're out of sight."
The remainder of the day, up to the time when the offices were closing
and the colonel was making ready to go home, passed without incident. In
Smith's continued absence, Starbuck had offered to go to the dam to
stand a night-watch with Williams against a possible surprise by the
right-of-way claimants; and Stillings, who had been petitioning for an
injunction, came up to report progress just as Baldwin was locking his
desk.
"The judge has taken it under advisement, but that is as far as he would
go to-day," said the lawyer. "It's simply a bald steal, of course, and
unless they ring in crooked evidence on us, we can show it up in court.
But that would mean more delay, and delay is the one thing we can't
stand. I'm sworn to uphold the law, and I can't counsel armed
resistance. Just the same, I hope Williams has his nerve with him."
"He has; and I haven't lost mine, yet," snapped a voice at the door; and
Smith came in, dust-covered and swarthy with the grime of the wind-swept
grass-lands. Out of the pocket of his driving coat he drew a thick
packet of papers and slapped it upon the drawn-down curtain of Baldwin's
desk. "There you are," he went on gratingly. "Now you can tell Mr. David
Kinzie to go straight to hell with his stock-pinching, and the more
money he puts into it, the more somebody's going to lose!"
"My Lord, John!--what have you done?" demanded Baldwin.
"I've shown 'em what it means to go up against a winner!" was the
half-triumphant, half-savage exultation. "I have put a crimp in that
fence-climbing banker of yours that will last him for one while! I've
secured thirty-day options, at par, on enough High Line stock to swing a
clear majority if Kinzie should buy up every other share there is
outstanding. It has taken me all day, and I've driven a thousand miles,
but the thing is done."
"But, John! If anything should happen, and we'd have to make good on
those options.... The Lord have mercy! It would break the last man of
us!"
"We're not going to let things happen!" was the gritting rejoinder.
"I've told you both a dozen times that I'm in this thing to win! You
take care of those options, Stillings; they're worth a million dollars
to somebody. Lock 'em up somewhere and then forget where they are. Now
I'm going to hunt up Mr. Crawford Stanton--before I eat or sleep!"
"Easy, John; hold up a minute!" the colonel broke in soothingly; and
Stillings, more practical, closed the office door silently and put his
back against it. "This is a pretty sudden country, but there is some
sort of a limit, you know," the big Missourian went on. "What's your
idea in going to Stanton?"
"I mean to give him twelve hours in which to pack his trunk and get out
of Brewster and the Timanyoni. If he hasn't disappeared by to-morrow
morning----"
Stillings was signalling in dumb show to Baldwin. He had quietly opened
the door and was crooking his finger and making signs over his shoulder
toward the corridor. Baldwin saw what was wanted, and immediately shot
his desk cover open and turned on the lights.
"That last lot of steel and cement vouchers was made out yesterday,
John," he said, slipping the rubber band from a file of papers in the
desk. "If you'll take time to sit down here and run 'em over, and put
your name on 'em, I'll hold Martin long enough to let him get the checks
in to-night's mail. Those fellows in St. Louis act as if they are
terribly scared they won't get their money quick enough, and I've been
holding the papers for you all day. I'll be back after a little."
Smith dragged up the president's big swing-chair and planted himself in
it, and an instant later he was lost to everything save the columns of
figures on the vouchers. Stillings had let himself out, and when the
colonel followed him, the lawyer cautiously closed the door of the
private office, and edged Baldwin into the corridor.
"We've mighty near got a madman to deal with in there, Colonel," he
whispered, when the two were out of ear-shot. "I was watching his eyes
when he said that about Stanton, and they fairly blazed. I meant to tell
you more about that racket last night in the _Herald_ office; I heard
the inside of it this afternoon from Murphey. Smith went in and held the
whole outfit up with a gun, and Murphey says he beat Allen over the head
with it. He's going to kill somebody, if we don't look out."
Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
"He's acting like a locoed thoroughbred that's gone outlaw," he said.
"Do you reckon he's sure-enough crazy, Bob?"
"Only in the murder nerve. This deal with the options shows that he's
all to the good on the business side. That was the smoothest trick
that's been turned in any stage of this dodging fight with the big
fellows. It simply knocks Kinzie's rat-gnawing game dead. If there were
only somebody who could calm Smith down a little and bring him to
reason--somebody near enough to him to dig down under his shell and get
at the real man that used to be there when he first took hold with
us----"
"A woman?" queried Baldwin, frowning disapproval in anticipation of what
Stillings might be going to suggest.
"A woman for choice, of course. I was thinking of this young woman over
at the Hophra House; the one he has been running around with so much
during the past few days. She is evidently an old flame of his, and
anybody can see with half an eye that she has a pretty good grip on him.
Suppose we go across the street and give her an invitation to come and
do a little missionary work on Smith. She looks level-headed and
sensible enough to take it the way it's meant."
It is quite possible that the colonel's heart-felt relief at Stillings's
suggestion of Miss Richlander instead of another woman went some little
distance toward turning the scale for the transplanted Missourian.
Stillings was a lawyer and had no scruples, but the colonel had them in
just proportion to his Southern birth and breeding.
"I don't like to drag a woman into it, any way or shape, Bob," he
protested; and he would have gone on to say that he had good reason to
believe that Miss Richlander's influence over Smith might not be at all
of the meliorating sort, but Stillings cut him short.
"There need be no 'dragging.' The young woman doubtless knows the
business situation as well as we do--he has probably told her all about
it--and if she cares half as much for Smith as she seems to, she'll be
glad to chip in and help to cool him down. We can be perfectly plain and
outspoken with her, I'm sure; she evidently knows Smith a whole lot
better than we do. It's a chance, and we'd better try it. He's good for
half an hour or so with those vouchers."
Two minutes later, Colonel Dexter Baldwin, with Stillings at his elbow,
was at the clerk's desk in the Hophra House sending a card up to Miss
Richlander's rooms. Five minutes beyond that, the boy came back to say
that Miss Richlander was out auto-driving with Mr. and Mrs. Stanton. The
clerk, knowing Baldwin well, eyebrowed his regret and suggested a wait
of a few minutes.
"They'll certainly be in before long," he said. "Mrs. Stanton has never
been known to miss the dinner hour since she came to us. She is as
punctual as the clock."
Baldwin, still ill at ease and reluctant, led the way to a pair of
chairs in the writing alcove of the lobby; two chairs commanding a clear
view of the street entrance. Sitting down to wait with what patience
they could summon, neither of the two men saw a gray automobile, driven
by a young woman, come to a stand before the entrance of the Kinzie
Building on the opposite side of the street. And, missing this, they
missed equally the sight of the young woman alighting from the machine
and disappearing through the swinging doors opening into the bank
building's elevator lobby.
XXIII
The Arrow to the Mark
Smith, concentrating abstractedly, as his habit was, upon the work in
hand, was still deep in the voucher-auditing when the office door was
opened and a small shocked voice said: "Oh, _wooh_! how you startled me!
I saw the light, and I supposed, of course, it was Colonel-daddy. Where
is he?"
Smith pushed the papers aside and looked up scowling.
"Your father? He was here a minute ago, with Stillings. Isn't he out in
the main office?"
"No, there is no one there."
"Martin is there," he said, contradicting her bluntly. And then: "Your
father said he'd be back. You've come to take him home?"
She nodded and came to sit in a chair at the desk-end, saying:
"Don't let me interrupt you, please. I'll be quiet."
"I don't mean to let anything interrupt me until I have finished what I
have undertaken to do; I'm past all that, now."
"So you told me two evenings ago," she reminded him gently, adding: "And
I have heard about what you did last night."
"About the newspaper fracas? You don't approve of anything like that, of
course. Neither did I, once. But you were right in what you said the
other evening out at the dam; there is no middle way. You know what the
animal tamers tell us about the beasts. I've had my taste of blood.
There are a good many men in this world who need killing. Crawford
Stanton is one of them, and I'm not sure that Mr. David Kinzie isn't
another."
"I can't hear what you say when you talk like that," she objected,
looking past him with the gray eyes veiled.
"Do you want me to lie down and let them put the steam-roller over me?"
he demanded irritably. "Is that your ideal of the perfect man?"
"I didn't say any such thing as that, did I?"
"Perhaps not, in so many words. But you meant it."
"What I said, and what I meant, had nothing at all to do with Timanyoni
High Line and its fight for life," she said calmly, recalling the
wandering gaze and letting him see her eyes. "I was thinking altogether
of one man's attitude toward his world."
"That was night before last," he put in soberly. "I've gone a long way
since night before last, Corona."
"I know you have. Why doesn't daddy come back?"
"He'll come soon enough. You're not afraid to be here alone with me, are
you?"
"No; but anybody might be afraid of the man you are going to be."
His laugh was as mirthless as the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
"You needn't put it in the future tense. I have already broken with
whatever traditions there were left to break with. Last night I
threatened to kill Allen, and, perhaps, I should have done it if he
hadn't begged like a dog and dragged his wife and children into it."
"I know," she acquiesced, and again she was looking past him.
"And that isn't all. Yesterday, Kinzie set a trap for me and baited it
with one of his clerks. For a little while it seemed as if the only way
to spring the trap was for me to go after the clerk and put a bullet
through him. It wasn't necessary, as it turned out, but if it had
been----"
"Oh, you couldn't!" she broke in quickly. "I can't believe that of you!"
"You think I couldn't? Let me tell you of a thing that I have done.
Night before last, in less than an hour after you sat and talked with me
at the dam, Verda Richlander had a wire from a young fellow who wants to
marry her. He had found out that she was here in Brewster, and the wire
was to tell her that he was coming in that night on the delayed 'Flyer.'
She asked me to meet him and tell him she had gone to bed. He is a
miserable little wretch; a sort of sham reprobate; and she has never
cared for him, except to keep him dangling with a lot of others. I told
her I wouldn't meet him, and she knew very well that I couldn't meet
him--and stay out of jail. Are you listening?"
"I'm trying to."
"It was the pinch, and I wasn't big enough--in your sense of the
word--to meet it. I saw what would happen. If Tucker Jibbey came here,
Stanton would pounce upon him at once; and Jibbey, with a drink or two
under his belt, would tell all he knew. I fought it all out while I was
waiting for the train. It was Jibbey's effacement, or the end of the
world for me, and for Timanyoni High Line."
Dexter Baldwin's daughter was not of those who shriek and faint at the
apparition of horror. But the gray eyes were dilating and her breath was
coming in little gasps when she said:
"I _can't_ believe it! You are not going to tell me that you met this
man as a friend, and then----"
"No; it didn't quite come to a murder in cold blood, though I thought it
might. I had Maxwell's runabout, and I got Jibbey into it. He thought I
was going to drive him to the hotel. After we got out of town he grew
suspicious, and there was a struggle in the auto. I--I had to beat him
over the head to make him keep quiet; I thought for the moment that I
had killed him, and I knew, then, just how far I had gone on the road
I've been travelling ever since a certain night in the middle of last
May. The proof was in the way I felt; I wasn't either sorry or
horror-stricken; I was merely relieved to think that he wouldn't trouble
me, or clutter up the world with his worthless presence any longer."
"But that wasn't your real self!" she expostulated.
"What was it, then?"
"I don't know--I only know that it wasn't you. But tell me: did he die?"
"No."
"What have you done with him?"
"Do you know the old abandoned Wire-Silver mine at Little Butte?"
"I knew it before it was abandoned, yes."
"I was out there one Sunday afternoon with Starbuck. The mine is
bulkheaded and locked, but one of the keys on my ring fitted the lock,
and Starbuck and I went in and stumbled around for a while in the dark
tunnels. I took Jibbey there and locked him up. He's there now."
"Alone in that horrible place--and without food?"
"Alone, yes; but I went out yesterday and put a basket of food where he
could get it."
"What are you going to do with him?"
"I am going to leave him there until after I have put Stanton and Kinzie
and the other buccaneers safely out of business. When that is done, he
can go; and I'll go, too."
She had risen, and at the summing-up she turned from him and went aside
to the one window to stand for a long minute gazing down into the
electric-lighted street. When she came back her lips were pressed
together and she was very pale.
"When I was in school, our old psychology professor used to try to tell
us about the underman; the brute that lies dormant inside of us and is
kept down only by reason and the super-man. I never believed it was
anything more than a fine-spun theory--until now. But now I know it is
true."
He spread his hands.
"I can't help it, can I?"
"The man that you are now can't help it; no. But the man that you could
be--if he would only come back--" she stopped with a little
uncontrollable shudder and sat down again, covering her face with her
hands.
"I'm going to turn Jibbey loose--after I'm through," he vouchsafed.
She took her hands away and blazed up at him suddenly, with her face
aflame.
"Yes! after you are safe; after there is no longer any risk in it for
you! That is worse than if you had killed him--worse for you, I mean.
Oh, _can't_ you see? It's the very depth of cowardly infamy!"
He smiled sourly. "You think I'm a coward? They've been calling me
everything else but that in the past few days."
"You _are_ a coward!" she flashed back. "You have proved it. You
daren't go out to Little Butte to-night and get that man and bring him
to Brewster while there is yet time for him to do whatever it is that
you are afraid he will do!"
Was it the quintessence of feminine subtlety, or only honest rage and
indignation, that told her how to aim the armor-piercing arrow? God, who
alone knows the secret workings of the woman heart and brain, can tell.
But the arrow sped true and found its mark. Smith got up stiffly out of
the big swing-chair and stood glooming down at her.
"You think I did it for myself?--just to save my own worthless hide?
I'll show you; show you all the things that you say are now impossible.
Did you bring the gray roadster?"
She nodded briefly.
"Your father is coming back; I hear the elevator-bell. I am going to
take the car, and I don't want to meet him. Will you say what is
needful?"
She nodded again, and he went out quickly. It was only a few steps down
the corridor to the elevator landing, and the stair circled the caged
elevator-shaft to the ground floor. Smith halted in the darkened corner
of the stairway long enough to make sure that the colonel, with
Stillings and a woman in an automobile coat and veil--a woman who
figured for him in the passing glance as Corona's mother--got off at the
office floor. Then he ran down to the street level, cranked the gray
roadster and sprang in to send the car rocketing westward.
XXIV
A Little Leaven
The final touch of sunset pink had long since faded from the high
western sky-line, and the summer-night stars served only to make the
darkness visible along the road which had once been the stage route down
the Timanyoni River and across to the mining-camp of Red Butte. Smith,
slackening speed for the first time in the swift valley-crossing flight,
twisted the gray roadster sharply to the left out of the road, and eased
it across the railroad track to send it lurching and bumping over the
rotting ties of an old branch-line spur from which the steel had been
removed, and which ran in a course roughly paralleling the
eastward-facing front of a forested mountain.
Four miles from the turn out of the main road, at a point on the spur
right of way where a washed-out culvert made farther progress with the
car impossible, he shut off the power and got down to continue his
journey afoot. Following the line of the abandoned spur, he came, at the
end of another mile, to the deserted shacks of the mining plant which
the short branch railroad had been built to serve; a roofless
power-house, empty ore platforms dry-rotting in disuse, windowless bunk
shanties, and the long, low bulk of a log-built commissary. The mine
workings were tunnel-driven in the mountainside, and a crooked ore track
led out to them. Smith followed the ore track until he came to the
bulkheaded entrance flanked by empty storage bins, and to the lock of a
small door framed in the bulkheading he applied a key.
It was pitch dark beyond the door, and the silence was like that of the
grave. Smith had brought a candle on his food-carrying visit of the day
before, and, groping in its hiding-place just outside of the door, he
found and lighted it, holding it sheltered in his cupped hand as he
stepped into the black void beyond the bulkhead. With the feeble flame
making little more than a dim yellow nimbus in the gloom, he looked
about him. There was no sign of occupancy save Jibbey's suitcase lying
where it had been flung on the night of the assisted disappearance. But
of the man himself there was no trace.
Smith stumbled forward into the black depths and the chill of the place
laid hold upon him and shook him like the premonitory shiver of an
approaching ague. What if the darkness and solitude had been too much
for Jibbey's untried fortitude and the poor wretch had crawled away into
the dismal labyrinth to lose himself and die? The searcher stopped and
listened. In some far-distant ramification of the mine he could hear the
_drip, drip_, of underground water, but when he shouted there was no
response save that made by the echoes moaning and whispering in the
stoped-out caverns overhead.
Shielding the flickering candle again, Smith went on, pausing at each
branching side-cutting to throw the light into the pockets of darkness.
Insensibly he quickened his pace until he was hastening blindly through
a maze of tunnels and cross driftings, deeper and still deeper into the
bowels of the great mountain. Coming suddenly at the last into the
chamber of the dripping water, he found what he was searching for, and
again the ague chill shook him. There were no apparent signs of life in
the sodden, muck-begrimed figure lying in a crumpled heap among the
water pools.
"Jibbey!" he called: and then again, ignoring the unnerving,
awe-inspiring echoes rustling like flying bats in the cavernous
overspaces: "_Jibbey!_"
The sodden heap bestirred itself slowly and became a man sitting up to
blink helplessly at the light and supporting himself on one hand.
"Is that you, Monty?" said a voice tremulous and broken; and then: "I
can't see. The light blinds me. Have you come to fi-finish the job?"
"I have come to take you out of this; to take you back with me to
Brewster. Get up and come on."
The victim of Smith's ruthlessness struggled stiffly to his feet. Never
much more than a physical weakling, and with his natural strength wasted
by a life of dissipation, the blow on the head with the pistol butt and
the forty-eight hours of sharp hardship and privation had cut deeply
into his scanty reserves.
"Did--did Verda send you to do it?" he queried.
"No; she doesn't know where you are. She thinks you stopped over
somewhere on your way west. Come along, if you want to go back with me."
Jibbey stumbled away a step or two and flattened himself against the
cavern wall. His eyes were still staring and his lips were drawn back to
show his teeth.
"Hold on a minute," he jerked out. "You're not--not going to wipe it
all out as easy as that. You've taken my gun away from me, but I've got
my two hands yet. Stick that candle in a hole in the wall and look out
for yourself. I'm telling you, right now, that one or the other of us is
going to stay here--and stay dead!"
"Don't be a fool!" Smith broke in. "I didn't come here to scrap with
you."