all these weeks, John, never knowing what minute was going to be the
next. Now I know what you meant when you hinted around about this Miss
Rich-pastures. She knows you and she could give you away if she wanted
to. Has she done it, John?"
"No; but her father has. Kinzie sent one of his clerks out to the Topaz
to hunt up the old man. Kinzie hasn't done anything, himself, I guess;
Miss Richlander told me that much; but Stanton has got hold of the end
of the thread, and, while I don't know it definitely, it is practically
certain he has sent a wire. If the Brewster police are not looking for
me at this moment, they will be shortly. That brings us back to this
High Line knock-out. As the matter stands, I'm the one man in our outfit
who has absolutely nothing to lose. I am an officer of the company, and
no legal notice has been served upon me. Can you fill out the remainder
of the order?"
"No, I'll be switched if I can!"
"Then I'll fill it for you. So far as I know--legally, you
understand--this raid has never been authorized by the courts; at least,
that is what I'm going to assume until the proper papers have been
served on me. Therefore I am free to strike one final blow for the
colonel and his friends, and I'm going to do it, if I can dodge the
police long enough to get action."
Starbuck's tilting chair righted itself with a crash.
"You've thought it all out?--just how to go at it?"
"Every move; and every one of them a straight bid for a second
penitentiary sentence."
"All right," said the mine owner briefly. "Count me in."
"For information only," was the brusque reply. "You have a stake in the
country and a good name to maintain. I have nothing. But you can tell
me a few things. Are our workmen still on the ground?"
"Yes. Ginty said there were only a few stragglers who came to town with
him. Most of the two shifts are staying on to get their pay--or until
they find out that they aren't going to get it."
"And the colonel and Williams: the marshal is holding them out at the
dam?"
"Uh-huh; locked up in the office shack, Ginty says."
"Good. I shan't need the colonel, but I shall need Williams. Now another
question: you know Sheriff Harding fairly well, don't you? What sort of
a man is he?"
"Square as a die, and as nervy as they make 'em. When he gets a warrant
to serve, he'll bring in his man, dead or alive."
"That's all I'll ask of him. Now go and find me an auto, and then you
can fade away and get ready to prove a good, stout _alibi_."
"Yes--like fits I will!" retorted the mine owner. "I told you once,
John, that I was in this thing to a finish, and I meant it. Go on giving
your orders."
"Very well; you've had your warning. The next thing is the auto. I want
to catch Judge Warner before he goes to bed. I'll telephone while
you're getting a car."
Starbuck had no farther to go than to the garage where he had put up his
new car, and when he got it and drove to the Kinzie Building, Smith came
out of the shadow of the entrance to mount beside him.
"Drive around to the garage again and let me try another 'phone," was
the low-spoken request. "My wire isn't working."
The short run was quickly made, and Smith went to the garage office. A
moment later a two-hundred-pound policeman strolled up to put a huge
foot on the running-board of the waiting auto. Starbuck greeted him as a
friend.
"Hello, Mac. How's tricks with you to-night?"
"Th' tricks are even, an' I'm tryin' to take th' odd wan," said the big
Irishman. "'Tis a man named Smith I'm lookin' for, Misther Starbuck--J.
Mon-tay-gue Smith; th' fi-nanshal boss av th' big ditch comp'ny. Have ye
seen 'um?"
Starbuck, looking over the policeman's shoulder, could see Smith at the
telephone in the garage office. Another man might have lost his head,
but the ex-cow-puncher was of the chosen few whose wits sharpen handily
in an emergency.
"He hangs out at the Hophra House a good part of the time in the
evenings," he replied coolly. "Hop in and I'll drive you around."
Three minutes later the threatening danger was a danger pushed a little
way into the future, and Starbuck was back at the garage curb waiting
for Smith to come out. Through the window he saw Smith replacing the
receiver on its hook, and a moment afterward he was opening the car door
for his passenger.
"Did you make out to raise the judge?" he inquired, as Smith climbed in.
"Yes. He will meet me at his chambers in the court-house as soon as he
can drive down from his house."
"What are you hoping to do, John? Judge Warner is only a circuit judge;
he can't set an order of the United States court aside, can he?"
"No; but there is one thing that he can do. You may remember that I had
a talk with him this morning at his house. I was trying then to cover
all the chances, among them the possibility that Stanton would jump in
with a gang of armed thugs at the last minute. We are going to assume
that this is what has been done."
Starbuck set the car in motion and sent it spinning out of the side
street, around the plaza, and beyond to the less brilliantly
illuminated residence district--which was not the shortest way to the
court-house.
"You mustn't pull Judge Warner's leg, John," he protested, breaking the
purring silence after the business quarter had been left behind; "he's
too good a man for that."
"I shall tell him the exact truth, so far as we know it," was the quick
reply. "There is one chance in a thousand that we shall come out of this
with the law--as well as the equities--on our side. I shall tell the
judge that no papers have been served on us, and, so far as I know, they
haven't. What are you driving all the way around here for?"
"This is one of the times when the longest way round is the shortest way
home," Starbuck explained. "The bad news you were looking for 'has
came'. While you were 'phoning in the garage I put one policeman
wise--to nothing."
"He was looking for me?"
"Sure thing--and by name. We'll fool around here in the back streets
until the judge has had time to show up. Then I'll drop you at the
court-house and go hustle the sheriff for you. You'll want Harding, I
take it?"
"Yes. I'm taking the chance that only the city authorities have been
notified in my personal affair--not the county officers. It's a long
chance, of course; I may be running my neck squarely into the noose. But
it's all risk, Billy; every move in this night's game. Head up for the
court-house. The judge will be there by this time."
Two minutes beyond this the car was drawing up to the curb on the
mesa-facing side of the court-house square. There were two lighted
windows in the second story of the otherwise darkened building, and
Smith sprang to the sidewalk.
"Go now and find Harding, and have him bring one trusty deputy with him:
I'll be ready by the time you get back," he directed; but Starbuck
waited until he had seen Smith safely lost in the shadows of the
pillared court-house entrance before he drove away.
XXXI
A Race to the Swift
Since Sheriff Harding had left his office in the county jail and had
gone home to his ranch on the north side of the river some hours
earlier, not a little precious time was consumed in hunting him up.
Beyond this, there was another delay in securing the deputy. When
Starbuck's car came to a stand for a second time before the
mesa-fronting entrance of the court-house, Smith came quickly across the
walk from the portal.
"Mr. Harding," he began abruptly, "Judge Warner has gone home and he has
made me his messenger. There is a bit of sharp work to be done, and
you'll need a strong posse. Can you deputize fifteen or twenty good men
who can be depended upon in a fight and rendezvous them on the
north-side river road in two hours from now?"
The sheriff, a big, bearded man who might have sat for the model of one
of Frederic Remington's frontiersmen, took time to consider. "Is it a
scrap?" he asked.
"It is likely to be. There are warrants to be served, and there will
most probably be resistance. Your posse should be well armed."
"We'll try for it," was the decision. "On the north-side river road, you
say? You'll want us mounted?"
"It will be better to take horses. We could get autos, but Judge Warner
agrees with me that the thing had better be done quietly and without
making too much of a stir in town."
"All right," said the man of the law. "Is that all?"
"No, not quite all. The first of the warrants is to be served here in
Brewster--upon Mr. Crawford Stanton. Your deputy will probably find him
at the Hophra House. Here is the paper: it is a bench warrant of
commitment on a charge of conspiracy, and Stanton is to be locked up.
Also you are to see to it that your jail telephone is out of order; so
that Stanton won't be able to make any attempt to get a hearing and bail
before to-morrow."
"That part of it is mighty risky," said Harding. "Does the judge know
about that, too?"
"He does; and for the ends of pure justice, he concurs with me--though,
of course, he couldn't give a mandatory order."
The sheriff turned to his jail deputy, who had descended from the rumble
seat in the rear.
"You've heard the dope, Jimmie," he said shortly. "Go and get His Nobs
and lock him up. And if he wants to be yelling 'Help!' and sending for
his lawyer or somebody, why, the telephone's takin' a lay-off. _Savvy?_"
The deputy nodded and turned upon his heel, stuffing the warrant for
Stanton's arrest into his pocket as he went. Smith swung up beside
Starbuck, saying: "In a couple of hours, then, Mr. Harding; somewhere
near the bridge approach on the other side of the river."
Starbuck had started the motor and was bending forward to adjust the oil
feed when the sheriff left them.
"You seem to have made a ten-strike with Judge Warner," the
ex-cow-puncher remarked, replacing the flash-lamp in its seat pocket.
"Judge Warner is a man in every inch of him; but there is something
behind this night's work that I don't quite understand," was the quick
reply. "I had hardly begun to state the case when the judge interrupted
me. 'I know,' he said. 'I have been waiting for you people to come and
ask for relief.' What do you make of that, Billy?"
"I don't know; unless somebody in Stanton's outfit has welshed. Shaw
might have done it. He has been to Bob Stillings, and Stillings says he
is sore at Stanton for some reason. Shaw was trying to get Stillings to
agree to drop the railroad case against him, and Bob says he made some
vague promise of help in the High Line business if the railroad people
would agree not to prosecute."
"There is a screw loose somewhere; I know by the way Judge Warner took
hold. When I proposed to swear out the warrant for Stanton's arrest, he
said, 'I can't understand, Mr. Smith, why you haven't done this before,'
and he sat down and filled out the blank. But we can let that go for the
present. How are you going to get me across the river without taking me
through the heart of the town and giving the Brewster police a shy at
me?"
Starbuck's answer was wordless. With a quick twist of the pilot wheel he
sent the car skidding around the corner, using undue haste, as it
seemed, since they had two hours before them. A few minutes farther
along the lights of the town had been left behind and the car was
speeding swiftly westward on a country road paralleling the railway
track; the road over which Smith had twice driven with the kidnapped
Jibbey.
"I'm still guessing," the passenger ventured, when the last of the
railroad distance signals had flashed to the rear. And then: "What's the
frantic hurry, Billy?"
Starbuck was running with the muffler cut out, but now he cut it in and
the roar of the motor sank to a humming murmur.
"I thought so," he remarked, turning his head to listen. "You didn't
notice that police whistle just as we were leaving the court-house, did
you?--nor the answers to it while we were dodging through the suburbs?
Somebody has marked us down and passed the word, and now they're chasing
us with a buzz-wagon. Don't you hear it?"
By this time Smith could hear the sputtering roar of the following car
only too plainly.
"It's a big one," he commented. "You can't outrun it, Billy; and,
besides, there is nowhere to run to in this direction."
Again Starbuck's reply translated itself into action. With a skilful
touch of the controls he sent the car ahead at top speed, and for a
matter of ten miles or more held a diminishing lead in the race through
sheer good driving and an accurate knowledge of the road and its
twistings and turnings. Smith knew little of the westward half of the
Park which they were approaching, and the little was not encouraging.
Beyond Little Butte and the old Wire Silver mine the road they were
traversing would become a cart track in the mountains; and there was no
outlet to the north save by means of the railroad bridge at Little Butte
station.
Throughout the race the pursuers had been gradually gaining, and by the
time the forested bulk of Little Butte was outlining itself against the
clouded sky on the left, the headlights of the oncoming police car were
in plain view to the rear. Worse still, there were three grade crossings
of the railroad track just ahead in the stretch of road which rounded
the toe of the mountain; and from somewhere up the valley and beyond the
railroad bridge came the distance-softened whistle of a train.
Starbuck set a high mark for himself as a courageous driver of
motor-cars when he came to the last of the three road crossings. Jerking
the car around sharply at the instant of track-crossing, he headed
straight out over the ties for the railroad bridge. It was a courting of
death. To drive the bridge at racing speed was hazardous enough, but to
drive it thus in the face of a down-coming train seemed nothing less
than madness.
It was after the car had shot into the first of the three bridge spans
that the pursuers pulled up and opened fire. Starbuck bent lower over
his wheel, and Smith clutched for handholds. Far up the track on the
north side of the river a headlight flashed in the darkness, and the
hoarse blast of a locomotive, whistling for the bridge, echoed and
re-echoed among the hills.
Starbuck, tortured because he could not remember what sort of an
approach the railway track made to the bridge on the farther side, drove
for his life. With the bridge fairly crossed he found himself on a high
embankment; and the oncoming train was now less than half a mile away.
To turn out on the embankment was to hurl the car to certain
destruction. To hold on was to take a hazardous chance of colliding with
the train. Somewhere beyond the bridge approach there was a road; so
much Starbuck could recall. If they could reach its crossing before the
collision should come----
They did reach it, by what seemed to Smith a margin of no more than the
length of the heavy freight train which went jangling past them a scant
second or so after the car had been wrenched aside into the obscure mesa
road. They had gone a mile or more on the reverse leg of the long
down-river detour before Starbuck cut the speed and turned the wheel
over to his seat-mate.
"Take her a minute while I get the makings," he said, dry-lipped,
feeling in his pockets for tobacco and the rice-paper. Then he added:
"Holy Solomon! I never wanted a smoke so bad in all my life!"
Smith's laugh was a chuckle.
"Gets next to you--after the fact--doesn't it? That's where we split. I
had my scare before we hit the bridge, and it tasted like a mouthful of
bitter aloes. Does this road take us back up the river?"
"It takes us twenty miles around through the Park and comes in at the
head of Little Creek. But we have plenty of time. You told Harding two
hours, didn't you?"
"Yes; but I must have a few minutes at Hillcrest before we get action,
Billy."
Starbuck took the wheel again and said nothing until the roundabout race
had been fully run and he was easing the car down the last of the hills
into the Little Creek road. There had been three-quarters of an hour of
skilful driving over a bad road to come between Smith's remark and its
reply, but Starbuck apparently made no account of the length of the
interval.
"You're aiming to go and see Corry?" he asked, while the car was
coasting to the hill bottom.
"Yes."
With a sudden flick of the controls and a quick jamming of the brakes,
Starbuck brought the car to a stand just as it came into the level road.
"We're man to man here under the canopy, John; and Corry Baldwin hasn't
got any brother," he offered gravely. "I'm backing you in this business
fight for all I'm worth--for Dick Maxwell's sake and the colonel's, and
maybe a little bit for the sake of my own ante of twenty thousand. And
I'm ready to back you in this old-home scrap with all the money you'll
need to make your fight. But when it comes to the little girl it's
different. Have you any good and fair right to hunt up Corry Baldwin
while things are shaping themselves up as they are?"
Since Smith had made the acquaintance of the absolute ego he had
acquired many things new and strange, among them a great ruthlessness in
the pursuit of the desired object, and an equally large carelessness for
consequences past the instant of attainment. None the less, he met the
shrewd inquisition fairly.
"Give it a name," he said shortly.
"I will: I'll give it the one you gave it a while back. You said you
were an outlaw, on two charges: embezzlement and assault. We'll let the
assault part of it go. Even a pretty humane sort of fellow may have to
kill somebody now and then and call it all in the day's work. But the
other thing doesn't taste good."
"I didn't embezzle anything, Billy. I thought I made that plain."
"So you did. But you also made it plain that the home court would be
likely to send you up for it, guilty or not guilty. And with a thing
like that hanging over you ... you see, I know Corry Baldwin, John. If
you put it up to her to-night, and she happens to fall in with your side
of it--which is what you're aiming to make her do--all hell won't keep
her from going back home with you and seeing you through!"
"Good God, Billy! If I thought she loved me well enough to do that! But
think a minute. It may easily happen that this is my last chance. I may
never see her again. I said I wouldn't tell her--that I loved her too
well to tell her ... but now the final pinch has come, and I----"
"And that isn't all," Starbuck went on relentlessly. "There's this Miss
Rich-acres. You say there's nothing to it, there, but you've as good as
admitted that she's been lying to Dave Kinzie for you. Your hands ain't
clean, John; not clean enough to let you go to Hillcrest to-night."
Smith groped in his pockets, found a cigar and lighted it. Perhaps he
was recalling his own words spoken to Verda Richlander only a few hours
earlier: "_Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the
shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?_" And yet that was just what
he was about to do--or had been about to do.
"Pull out to the side of the road and we'll kill what time there is to
kill right here," he directed soberly. And then: "What you say is right
as right, Billy. Once more, I guess, I was locoed for the minute. Forget
it; and while you're about it, forget Miss Richlander, too. Luckily for
her, she is out of it--as far out of it as I am."
XXXII
Freedom
The Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its upper and lower reaches,
becomes a placid river of the plain at Brewster, dividing its flow among
sandy islets, and broadening in its bed to make the long bridge
connecting the city with the grass-land mesas a low, trestled causeway.
On the northern bank of the river the Brewster street, of which the
bridge is a prolongation, becomes a country road, forking a few hundred
yards from the bridge approach to send one of its branchings northward
among the Little Creek ranches and another westward up the right bank of
the stream.
At this fork of the road, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the night
of alarms, Sheriff Harding's party of special deputies began to
assemble; mounted ranchmen for the greater part, summoned by the rural
telephones and drifting in by twos and threes from the outlying
grass-lands. Under each man's saddle-flap was slung the regulation
weapon of the West--a scabbarded repeating rifle; and the small troop
bunching itself in the river road looked serviceably militant and
businesslike.
While Harding was counting his men and appointing his lieutenants an
automobile rolled silently down the mesa road from the north and came to
a stand among the horses. The sheriff drew rein beside the car and spoke
to one of the two occupants of the double seat, saying:
"Well, Mr. Smith, we're all here."
"How many?" was the curt question.
"Twenty."
"Good. Here is your authority"--handing the legal papers to the officer.
"Before we go in you ought to know the facts. A few hours ago a man
named M'Graw, calling himself a deputy United States marshal and
claiming to be acting under instructions from Judge Lorching's court in
Red Butte, took possession of our dam and camp. On the even chance that
he isn't what he claims to be, we are going to arrest him and every man
in his crowd. Are you game for it?"
"I'm game to serve any papers that Judge Warner's got the nerve to
issue," was the big man's reply.
"That's the talk; that's what I hoped to hear you say. We may have the
law on our side, and we may not; but we certainly have the equities.
Was Stanton arrested?"
"He sure was. Strothers found him in the Hophra House bar, and the line
of talk he turned loose would have set a wet blanket afire. Just the
same, he had to go along with Jimmie and get himself locked up."
"That is the first step; now if you're ready, we'll take the next."
Harding rode forward to marshal his troop, and when the advance began
Starbuck shut off his car lamps and held his place at the rear of the
straggling column, juggling throttle and spark until the car kept even
pace with the horses and the low humming of the motor was
indistinguishable above the muffled drumming of hoof-beats.
For the first mile or so the midnight silence was unbroken save by the
subdued progress noises and the murmurings of the near-by river in its
bed. Once Smith took the wheel while Starbuck rolled and lighted a
cigarette, and once again, in obedience to a word from the mine owner,
he turned the flash-light upon the gasolene pressure-gauge. In the
fulness of time it was Starbuck who harked back to the talk which had
been so abruptly broken off at the waiting halt in the Little Creek
road.
"Let's not head into this ruction with an unpicked bone betwixt us,
John," he began gently. "Maybe I said too much, back yonder at the foot
of the hill."
"No; you didn't say too much," was the low-toned reply. And then:
"Billy, I've had a strange experience this summer; the strangest a man
ever lived through, I believe. A few months ago I was jerked out of my
place in life and set down in another place where practically everything
I had learned as a boy and man had to be forgotten. It was as if my life
had been swept clean of everything that I knew how to use--like a house
gutted of its well-worn and familiar furniture, and handed back to its
tenant to be refitted with whatever could be found and made to serve. I
don't know that I'm making it understandable to you, but----"
"Yes, you are," broke in the man at the wheel. "I've had to turn two or
three little double somersaults myself in the years that are gone."
"They used to call me 'Monty-Boy,' back there in Lawrenceville, and I
fitted the name," Smith went on. "I was neither better nor worse than
thousands of other home-bred young fellows just like me, nor different
from them in any essential way. I had my little tin-basin round of work
and play, and I lived in it. I've spent half an hour, many a time, in a
shop picking out the exactly right shade in a tie to wear with the socks
that I had, perhaps, spent another half-hour in selecting."
"I'm getting you," said Starbuck, not without friendly sympathy. "Go
on."