here because I sent for him to make a final attempt to swing him over to
the compromise. You are doing me the greatest possible injustice!"
Stanton rose and made ready to go.
"I think that would be rather hard to do, Kinzie," he flung back.
"Nobody loves a trimmmer. But in the present case you are not going to
lose anything. We'll take your stock at par, as I promised you we
would."
It was at this crisis that David Kinzie showed himself as the exponent
of the saying that every man has his modicum of saving grace, by smiting
upon the arm of his chair and glaring up at the promoter.
"There's another promise of yours that you've got to remember, too,
Stanton," he argued hoarsely. "You've got to hold Dexter Baldwin
harmless!"
Stanton's smile was a mask of pure malice. "I've made you no definite
promise as to that; but you shall have one now. I'll promise to break
Baldwin in two and throw him and his ranchmen backers out of the
Timanyoni. That's what you get for playing fast and loose with two
people at the same time. When you look over your paying teller's
statement for the day, you'll see that I have withdrawn our account from
your tin-horn money shop. Good-day."
Five minutes later the promoter was squared before his own desk in the
office across the street and was hastily scribbling a telegram while a
messenger boy waited. It was addressed to Sheriff Macauley, at
Lawrenceville, and the wording of it showed how completely Stanton was
ignoring Banker Kinzie's investigations.
Your man Montague Smith is here, known as John Smith, secretary
and treasurer Timanyoni High Line Company. Wire authority quick
to chief police Brewster for his arrest and send deputy with
requisition. Rush or you lose him.
CRAWFORD STANTON.
He let the boy go with this, but immediately set to work on another
which was addressed to the great man whose private car, returning from
the Pacific Coast, was due to reach Denver by the evening Union Pacific
train. This second message he translated laboriously into cipher,
working it out word by word from a worn code book taken from the safe.
But the copy from which he translated, and which, after the cipher was
made, he carefully destroyed, read thus:
The obstacle is removed. M'Graw and his men will take
possession to-night and hold until we can make the turn.
Stanton.
XXIX
The Flesh-Pots of Egypt
Convinced by Verda Richlander's telephone message to the construction
camp that he stood in no immediate danger, Smith spent the heel of the
afternoon in the High Line offices, keeping in wire touch with
Stillings, whom he had sent on a secret mission to Red Butte, and with
Williams at the dam.
Colonel Baldwin, as he learned from Martin, had gone to attend the
funeral of one of his neighbors, and was thus, for the moment, out of
reach. Smith told himself that the colonel's presence or absence made
little difference. The High Line enterprise was on the knees of the
gods. If Williams could pull through in time, if the river-swelling
storms should hold off, if Stanton should delay his final raid past the
critical hour--and there was now good reason to hope that all of these
contingencies were probable--the victory was practically won.
But in another field the fighting secretary, denying himself in the
privacy of his office to everybody but Martin, found small matter for
rejoicing. It was one of life's ironies that the metamorphosis which had
shown him, among other things, the heights and depths of a pure
sentiment had apparently deprived him of the power to awaken it in the
woman he loved.
It was thus that he was interpreting Corona Baldwin's attitude. She had
recognized the transformation as a thing in process, and had been
interested in it as a human experiment. Though it was chiefly owing to
her beckoning that he had stepped out of the working ranks at the
construction camp, he felt that he had never measured up to her ideals,
and that her influence over him, so far as it was exerted consciously,
was as impersonal as that of the sun on a growing plant. She had wished
objectively to see the experiment succeed, and had been willing to use
such means as had come to hand to make it succeed. For this cause, he
concluded, with a curiously bitter taste in his mouth, her interest in
the human experiment was his best warrant for shutting the door upon his
love dream. Sentiment, the world over, has little sympathy with
laboratory processes, and the woman who loves does not apply acid tests
and call the object of her love a coward.
Letting the sting of the epithet have its full effect, he admitted that
he was a coward. He had lacked the finer quality of courage when he had
spirited Jibbey away, and he was lacking it again, now, in accepting the
defensive alliance with Verda Richlander. He had not shown himself at
the hotel since his return from the long drive with Starbuck, and the
reason for it was that he knew his relations with Verda had now become
an entanglement from which he was going to find it exceedingly difficult
to release himself. She had served him, had most probably lied for him;
and he assured himself, again with the bitter taste in his mouth, that
there would be a price to pay.
It is through such doors of disheartenment that temptation finds its
easiest entrance. For a dismal hour the old life, with its conventional
enjoyments and limitations, its banalities, its entire freedom from the
prickings of the larger ambitions and its total blindness on the side of
broadening horizons and higher ideals, became a thing most ardently to
be desired, a welcome avenue of escape from the toils and turmoils and
the growing-pains of all the metamorphoses. What if a return to it
should still be possible? What if, surrendering himself voluntarily, he
should go back to Lawrenceville and fight it out with Watrous Dunham in
the courts? Was there not more than an even chance that Dunham had
offered the large reward for his apprehension merely to make sure that
he would not return? Was it not possible that the thing the crooked
president least desired was an airing of his iniquitous business methods
in the courts?
Smith closed his desk at six o'clock and went across to the hotel to
dress for dinner. The day of suspense was practically at an end and
disaster still held aloof; was fairly outdistanced in the race, as it
seemed. Williams's final report had been to the effect that the
concrete-pouring was completed, and the long strain was off. Smith went
to his rooms, and, as once before and for a similar reason, he laid his
dress clothes out on the bed. He made sure that he would be required to
dine with Verda Richlander, and he was stripping his coat when he heard
a tap at the door and Jibbey came in.
"Glad rags, eh?" said the _blase_ one, with a glance at the array on the
bed. "I've just run up to tell you that you needn't. Verda's dining with
the Stantons, and she wants me to keep you out of sight until afterward.
By and by, when she's foot-loose, she wants to see you in the
mezzanine. Isn't there some quiet little joint where we two can go for a
bite? You know the town, and I don't."
Smith put his coat on and together they circled the square to
Frascati's, taking a table in the main cafe. While they were giving
their dinner order, Starbuck came in and joined them, and Smith was
glad. For reasons which he could scarcely have defined, he was relieved
not to have to talk to Jibbey alone, and Starbuck played third hand
admirably, taking kindly to the sham black sheep, and filling him up, in
quiet, straight-faced humor, with many and most marvellous tales of the
earlier frontier.
At the end of the meal, while Jibbey was still content to linger,
listening open-mouthed to Starbuck's romancings, Smith excused himself
and returned to the hotel. He had scarcely chosen his lounging-chair in
a quiet corner of the mezzanine before Miss Richlander came to join him.
"It has been a long day, hasn't it?" she began evenly. "You have been
busy with your dam, I suppose, but I--I have had nothing to do but to
think, and that is something that I don't often allow myself to do. You
have gone far since that night last May when you telephoned me that you
would come up to the house later--and then broke your promise,
Montague."
"In a way, I suppose I have," he admitted.
"You have, indeed. You are a totally different man."
"In what way, particularly?"
"In every conceivable way. If one could believe in transmigration, one
would say that you had changed souls with some old, hard-hitting,
rough-riding ancestor. Mr. Stanton has just been telling me the story of
how, when you first came here, you fought barehanded with three miners
somewhere back in the hills."
A bleak little smile of reminiscence wrinkled at the corners of the
fighter's eyes.
"Did he tell you that I knocked them out--all three of them?" he asked.
"He said you beat them shamefully; and I tried to imagine you doing such
a thing, and couldn't. Have your ambitions changed, too?"
"I am not sure now that I had any ambitions in that other life."
"Oh, yes, you had," she went on smoothly. "In the 'other life', as you
call it, you would have been quite willing to marry a woman who could
assure you a firm social standing and money enough to put you on a
footing with other men of your capabilities. You wouldn't be willing to
do that now, would you?--leaving the sentiment out as you used to leave
it out then?"
"No, I hardly think I should."
Her laugh was musically low and sweet, and only mildly derisive.
"You are thinking that it is change of environment, wider horizons, and
all that, which has changed you, Montague; but I know better. It is a
woman, and, as you may remember, I have met her--twice." Then, with a
faint glow of spiteful fire in the magnificent eyes: "How can you make
yourself believe that she is pretty?"
He shrugged one shoulder in token of the utter uselessness of discussion
in that direction.
"Sentiment?" he queried. "I think we needn't go into that, at this late
day, Verda. It is a field that neither of us entered, or cared to enter,
in the days that are gone. If I say that Corona Baldwin has--quite
unconsciously on her part, I must ask you to believe--taught me what
love means, that ought to be enough."
Again she was laughing softly.
"You seem to have broadly forgotten the old proverb about a woman
scorned. What have you to expect from me after making such an admission
as that?"
Smith pulled himself together and stood the argument firmly upon its
unquestionable footing.
"Let us put all these indirections aside and be for the moment merely a
man and a woman, as God made us, Verda," he said soberly. "You know, and
I know, that there was never any question of love involved in our
relations past and gone. We might have married, but in that case neither
of us would have gotten or exacted anything more than the conventional
decencies and amenities. We mustn't try to make believe at this late
day. You had no illusions about me when I was Watrous Dunham's hired
man; you haven't any illusions about me now."
"Perhaps not," was the calm rejoinder. "And yet to-day I have lied to
save you from those who are trying to crush you."
"I told you not to do that," he rejoined quickly.
"I know you did; and yet, when you went away this morning you knew
perfectly well that I was going to do it if I should get the
opportunity. Didn't you, Montague?"
He nodded slowly; common honesty demanded that much.
"Very well; you accepted the service, and I gave it freely. Mr. Kinzie
believes now that you are another Smith--not the one who ran away from
Lawrenceville last May. Tell me: would the other woman have done as much
if the chance had fallen to her?"
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I hope not," but he did not say
it. Instead, he said: "But you don't really care, Verda; in the way you
are trying to make me believe you do."
"Possibly not; possibly I am wholly selfish in the matter and am only
looking for some loophole of escape."
"Escape? From whom?"
She looked away and shook her head. "From Watrous Dunham, let us say.
You didn't suspect that, did you? It is so, nevertheless. My father
desires it; and I suppose Watrous Dunham would like to have my
money--you know I have something in my own right. Perhaps this may help
to account for some other things--for your trouble, for one. You were in
his way, you see. But never mind that: there are other matters to be
considered now. Though Mr. Kinzie has been put off the track, Mr.
Stanton hasn't. I have earned Mr. Stanton's ill-will because I wouldn't
tell him about you, and this evening, at table, he took it out on me."
"In what way?"
"He gave me to understand, very plainly, that he had done something;
that there was a sensation in prospect for all Brewster. He was so
exultantly triumphant that it fairly frightened me. The fact that he
wasn't afraid to show some part of his hand to me--knowing that I would
be sure to tell you--makes me afraid that the trap has already been set
for you."
"In other words, you think he has gone over Kinzie's head and has
telegraphed to Lawrenceville?"
"Montague, I'm almost certain of it!"
Smith stood up and put his hands behind him.
"Which means that I have only a few hours, at the longest," he said
quietly. And then: "There is a good bit to be done, turning over the
business of the office, and all that: I've been putting it off from day
to day, saying that there would be time enough to set my house in order
after the trap had been sprung. Now I am like the man who has put off
the making of his will until it is too late. Will you let me thank you
very heartily and vanish?"
"What shall you do?" she asked.
"Set my house in order, as I say--as well as I can in the time that
remains. There are others to be considered, you know."
"Oh; the plain-faced little ranch girl among them, I suppose?"
"No; thank God, she is out of it entirely--in the way you mean," he
broke out fervently.
"You mean that you haven't spoken to her--yet?"
"Of course I haven't. Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me
with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?"
"But you are not really guilty."
"That doesn't make any difference: Watrous Dunham will see to it that I
get what he has planned to give me."
She was tapping an impatient tattoo on the carpet with one shapely foot.
"Why don't you turn this new leaf of yours back and go home and fight it
out with Watrous Dunham, once for all?" she suggested.
"I shall probably go, fast enough, when Macauley or one of his deputies
gets here with the extradition papers," he returned. "But as to fighting
Dunham, without money----"
She looked up quickly, and this time there was no mistaking the meaning
of the glow in the magnificent brown eyes.
"Your friends have money, Montague--plenty of it. All you have to do is
to say that you will defend yourself. I am not sure that Watrous Dunham
couldn't be made to take your place in the prisoner's dock, or that you
couldn't be put in his place in the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. You
have captured Tucker Jibbey, and that means Tucker's father; and my
father--well, when it comes to the worst, my father always does what I
want him to. It's his one weakness."
For one little instant Smith felt the solid ground slipping from beneath
his feet. Here was a way out, and his quick mentality was showing him
that it was a perfectly feasible way. As Verda Richlander's husband and
Josiah Richlander's son-in-law, he could fight Dunham and win. And the
reward: once more he could take his place in the small Lawrenceville
world, and settle down to the life of conventional good report and ease
which he had once thought the acme of any reasonable man's aspirations.
But at the half-yielding moment a word of Corona Baldwin's flashed into
his brain and turned the scale: "It _did_ happen in your case ... giving
you a chance to grow and expand, and to break with all the old
traditions ... and the break left you free to make of yourself what you
should choose." It was the reincarnated Smith who met the look in the
beautiful eyes and made answer.
[Illustration: "Your friends have money, Montague--plenty of it."]
"No," was the sober decision; and then he gave his reasons. "If I could
do what you propose, I shouldn't be worth the powder it would take to
drive a bullet through me, Verda, for now, you see, I know what love
means. You say I have changed, and I _have_ changed: I can imagine the
past-and-gone J. Montague jumping at the chance you are offering. But
the mill will never grind with the water that is past: I'll take what is
coming to me, and try to take it like a man. Good-night--and good-by."
And he turned his back upon the temptation and went away.
Fifteen minutes later he was in his office in the Kinzie Building,
trying in vain to get Colonel Baldwin on the distance wire; trying
also--and also in vain--to forget the recent clash and break with Verda
Richlander. He had called it a temptation at the moment, but perhaps it
was scarcely that. It was more like a final effort of the man who had
been to retransform the man who was. For a single instant the doors of
all his former ambitions had stood open. He saw how Josiah Richlander's
money and influence, directed by Verda's compelling demands, could be
used to break Dunham; and that done, all the rest would be easy, all the
paths to the success he had once craved would be made smooth.
On the other hand, there was everything to lose, and nothing, as the
world measures results, to be gained. In a few hours at the furthest the
good name he had earned in Brewster would be hopelessly lost, and, so
far as human foresight could prefigure, there was nothing ahead but loss
and bitter disgrace. In spite of all this, while the long-distance
"central" was still assuring him that the Hillcrest wire was busy, he
found time to be fiercely glad that the choice had been only a choice
offered and not a choice accepted. For love's sake, if for no higher
motive, he would go down like a man, fighting to the end for the right
to live and think and love as a man.
He was jiggling the switch of the desk 'phone for the twentieth time in
the effort to secure the desired line of communication with Baldwin when
a nervous step echoed in the corridor and the door opened to admit
William Starbuck. There was red wrath in the mine owner's ordinarily
cold eyes when he flung himself into a chair and eased the nausea of his
soul in an outburst of picturesque profanity.
"The jig's up--definitely up, John," he was saying, when his speech
became lucid enough to be understood. "We know now what Stanton's 'other
string' was. A half-hour ago, a deputy United States marshal, with a
posse big enough to capture a town, took possession of the dam and
stopped the work. He says it's a court order from Judge Lorching at Red
Butte, based on the claims of that infernal paper railroad!"
Smith pushed the telephone aside.
"But it's too late!" he protested. "The dam is completed; Williams
'phoned me before I went to dinner. All that remains to be done to save
the charter is to shut the spillways and let the water back up so that
it will flow into the main ditch!"
"Right there's where they've got us!" was the rasping reply. "They won't
let Williams touch the spillway gates, and they're not going to let him
touch them until after we have lost out on the time limit! Williams's
man says they've put the seal of the court on the machinery and have
posted armed guards everywhere. Wouldn't that make you run around in
circles and yelp like a scalded dog?"
XXX
A Strong Man Armed
When the full meaning of Stanton's _coup_ had thus set itself forth in
terms unmistakable, Smith put his elbows on the desk and propped his
head in his hands. It was not the attitude of dejection; it was rather a
trance-like rigor of concentration, with each and all of the newly
emergent powers once more springing alive to answer the battle-call. At
the desk-end Starbuck sat with his hands locked over one knee, too
disheartened to roll a cigarette, normal solace for all woundings less
than mortal. After a minute or two Smith jerked himself around to face
the news-bringer.
"Does Colonel Baldwin know?" he asked.
"Sure! That's the worst of it. Didn't I tell you? After he got back from
Stuart's funeral he drove out to the dam, reaching the works just ahead
of the trouble. When M'Graw and the posse outfit showed up, the colonel
got it into his head that the whole thing was merely another trick of
Stanton's--a fake. Ginty, the quarry boss, brought the news to town. He
says there was a bloody mix-up, and at the end of it the colonel and
Williams were both under arrest for resisting the officers."
Smith nodded thoughtfully. "Of course; that was just what was needed.
With the president and the chief of construction locked up, and the
wheels blocked for the next twenty-four hours, our charter will be
gone."
"This world and another, and then the fireworks," Starbuck threw in.
"With the property all roped up in a law tangle, and those stock options
of yours due to fall in, it looks as if a few prominent citizens of the
Timanyoni would have to take to the high grass and the tall timber. It
sure does, John."
"The colonel was not entirely without his warrant for putting up a
fight," Smith went on, after another reflective minute. "Do you know,
Billy, I have been expecting something of this kind--and expecting it to
be a fake. That's why I sent Stillings to Red Butte; to keep watch of
Judge Lorching's court. Stillings was to 'phone me if Lorching issued an
order."
"And he hasn't phoned you?"
"No; but that doesn't prove anything. The order may have been issued,
and Stillings may have tried to let us know. There are a good many ways
in which a man's mouth may be stopped--when there are no scruples on the
other side."
"Then you think there is no doubt that the court order is straight, and
that this man M'Graw is really a deputy marshal and has the law for what
he is doing?"
"In the absence of any proof to the contrary, we are obliged to believe
it--or at least to accept it. But we're not dead yet.... Billy, it's
running in my mind that we've got to go out there and clean up Mr.
M'Graw and his crowd."
Starbuck threw up his hands and made a noise like a dry wagon-wheel.
"Holy smoke!--go up against the whole United States?" he gasped.
Smith's grin showed his strong, even teeth.
"Starbuck, you remember what I told you one night?--the night I dragged
you up to my rooms in the hotel and gave you a hint of the reason why I
had no business to make love to Corona Baldwin?"
"Yep."
"Well, the time has come when I may as well fill out the blanks in the
story for you. The night I left my home city in the Middle West I was
called down to the bank of which I was the cashier and was shown how I
was going to be dropped into a hole for a hundred thousand dollars of
the bank's money; a loan which I had made as cashier in the absence of
the president, but which had been authorized, verbally, by the president
before he went away."
"A scapegoat, eh? There have been others. Go on."
"It was a frame-up, all around. The loan had been made to a friend of
mine for the express purpose of smashing him--that was the president's
object in letting it go through. Unluckily, I held a few shares of stock
in my friend's company: and there you have it. Unless the president
would admit that he had authorized the loan, I was in for an offense
that could be easily twisted into embezzlement."
"The president stacked the cards on you?"
"He did. It was nine o'clock at night and we were alone together in the
bank. He wanted me to shoulder the blame and run away; offered me money
to go with. One word brought on another; and finally, when I dared him
to press the police-alarm button, he pulled a gun on me. I hit him, just
once, Billy, and he dropped like a stone."
"Great Moses!--dead?"
"I thought he was. His heart had stopped, and I couldn't get him up.
Picture it, if you can--but you can't. I had never struck a man in anger
before in all my life. My first thought was to go straight to the police
station and make a clean breast of it. Then I saw how impossible it was
going to be to dodge the penitentiary, and I bolted; jumped a
freight-train and hoboed my way out of town. Two days later I got hold
of a newspaper and found that I hadn't killed Dunham; but I was
outlawed, just the same, and there was a reward offered."