suddenly, it grew and expanded and took on added rooms and spaces that
I'd never dreamed of. I've had to fill it up as best I could, Billy: I
couldn't put back any of the old things; they were so little and trivial
and childish. And some of the things I've been putting in are fearfully
raw and crude. I've just had to do the best I could--with an empty
house. I found that I had a body that could stand man-sized hardship,
and a kind of savage nerve that could give and take punishment, and a
soul that could drive both body and nerve to the limit. Also, I've found
out what it means to love a woman."
Starbuck checked the car's speed a little more to keep it well in the
rear of the ambling cavalcade.
"That's your one best bet, John," he said soberly.
"It is. I've cleaned out another room since you called me down back
yonder in the Little Creek road, Starbuck. I can't trust my own leadings
any more; they are altogether too primitive and brutal; so I'm going to
take hers. She'd send me into this fight that is just ahead of us, and
all the other fights that are coming, with a heart big enough to take in
the whole world. She said I'd understand, some day; that I'd know that
the only great man is one who is too big to be little; who can fight
without hating; who can die to make good, if that is the only way that
offers."
"That's Corry Baldwin, every day in the week, John. They don't make 'em
any finer than she is," was Starbuck's comment. And then: "I'm beginning
to kick myself for not letting you go and have one more round-up with
her. She's doing you good, right along."
"You didn't stop me," Smith affirmed; "you merely gave me a chance to
stop myself. It's all over now, Billy, and my little race is about run.
But whatever happens to me, either this night, or beyond it, I shall be
a free man. You can't put handcuffs on a soul and send it to prison, you
know. That is what Corona was trying to make me understand; and I
couldn't--or wouldn't."
Harding had stopped to let the auto come up. Over a low hill just ahead
the pole-bracketed lights at the dam were starring themselves against
the sky, and the group of horsemen was halting at the head of the
railroad trestle which marked the location of the north side unloading
station.
From the halt at the trestle head, Harding sent two of his men forward
to spy out the ground. Returning speedily, these two men reported that
there were no guards on the north bank of the river, and that the
stagings, which still remained in place on the down-stream face of the
dam, were also unguarded. Thereupon Harding made his dispositions. Half
of the posse was to go up the northern bank, dismounted, and rush the
camp by way of the stagings. The remaining half, also on foot, was to
cross at once on the railroad trestle, and to make its approach by way
of the wagon road skirting the mesa foot. At an agreed-upon signal, the
two detachments were to close in upon the company buildings in the
construction camp, trusting to the surprise and the attack from opposite
directions to overcome any disparity in numbers.
At Smith's urgings, Starbuck went with the party which crossed by way of
the railroad trestle, Smith himself accompanying the sheriff's
detachment. With the horses left behind under guard at the trestle head,
the up-river approach was made by both parties simultaneously, though in
the darkness, and with the breadth of the river intervening, neither
could see the movements of the other. Smith kept his place beside
Harding, and to the sheriff's query he answered that he was unarmed.
"You've got a nerve," was all the comment Harding made, and at that they
topped the slight elevation and came among the stone debris in the
north-side quarries.
From the quarry cutting the view struck out by the camp mastheads was
unobstructed. The dam and the uncompleted power-house, still figuring to
the eye as skeleton masses of form timbering, lay just below them, and
on the hither side the flooding torrent thundered through the spillway
gates, which had been opened to their fullest capacity. Between the
quarry and the northern dam-head ran the smooth concreted channel of the
main ditch canal, with the water in the reservoir lake still lapping
several feet below the level of its entrance to give assurance that,
until the spillways should be closed, the charter-saving stream would
never pour through the canal.
On the opposite side of the river the dam-head and the camp street were
deserted, but there were lights in the commissary, in the office shack,
and in Blue Pete Simms's canteen doggery. From the latter quarter sounds
of revelry rose above the spillway thunderings, and now and again a
drunken figure lurched through the open door to make its way uncertainly
toward the rank of bunk-houses.
Harding was staring into the farther nimbus of the electric rays, trying
to pick up some sign of the other half of his posse, when Smith made a
suggestion.
"Both of your parties will have the workmen's bunk-houses in range, Mr.
Harding, and we mustn't forget that Colonel Baldwin and Williams are
prisoners in the timekeeper's shack. If the guns have to be used----"
"There won't be any wild shooting, of the kind you're thinking of,"
returned the sheriff grimly. "There ain't a single man in this posse
that can't hit what he aims at, nine times out o' ten. But here's hopin'
we can gather 'em in without the guns. If they ain't lookin' for us----"
The interruption was the whining song of a jacketed bullet passing
overhead, followed by the crack of a rifle. "Down, boys!" said the
sheriff softly, setting the example by sliding into the ready-made
trench afforded by the dry ditch of the outlet canal; and as he said it
a sharp fusillade broke out, with fire spurtings from the commissary
building and others from the mesa beyond to show that the surprise was
balked in both directions.
"They must have had scouts out," was Smith's word to the sheriff, who
was cautiously reconnoitring the newly developed situation from the
shelter of the canal trench. "They are evidently ready for us, and that
knocks your plan in the head. Your men can't cross these stagings under
fire."
"Your 'wops' are all right, anyway," said Harding. "They're pouring out
of the bunk-houses and that saloon over there and taking to the hills
like a flock o' scared chickens." Then to his men: "Scatter out, boys,
and get the range on that commissary shed. That's where most of the
rustlers are _cached_."
Two days earlier, two hours earlier, perhaps, Smith would have begged a
weapon and flung himself into the fray with blood lust blinding him to
everything save the battle demands of the moment. But now the final
mile-stone in the long road of his metamorphosis had been passed and
the darksome valley of elemental passions was left behind.
"Hold up a minute, for God's sake!" he pleaded hastily. "We've got to
give them a show, Harding! The chances are that every man in that
commissary believes that M'Graw has the law on his side--and we are not
sure that he hasn't. Anyway, they don't know that they are trying to
stand off a sheriff's posse!"
Harding's chuckle was sardonic. "You mean that we'd ought to go over
yonder and read the riot act to 'em first? That might do back in the
country where you came from. But the man that can get into that camp
over there with the serving papers now 'd have to be armor-plated, I
reckon."
"Just the same, we've got to give them their chance!" Smith insisted
doggedly. "We can't stand for any unnecessary bloodshed--_I_ won't stand
for it!"
Harding shrugged his heavy shoulders. "One round into that sheet-iron
commissary shack'll bring 'em to time--and nothing else will. I hain't
got any men to throw away on the dew-dabs and furbelows."
Smith sprang up and held out his hand.
"You have at least one man that you can spare, Mr. Harding," he
snapped. "Give me those papers. I'll go over and serve them."
At this the big sheriff promptly lost his temper.
"You blamed fool!" he burst out. "You'd be dog-meat before you could get
ten feet away from this ditch!"
"Never mind: give me those papers. I'm not going to stand by quietly and
see a lot of men shot down on the chance of a misunderstanding!"
"Take 'em, then!" rasped Harding, meaning nothing more than the calling
of a foolish theorist's bluff.
Smith caught at the warrants, and before anybody could stop him he was
down upon the stagings, swinging himself from bent to bent through a
storm of bullets coming, not from the commissary, but from the saloon
shack on the opposite bank--a whistling shower of lead that made every
man in the sheriff's party duck to cover.
How the volunteer process-server ever lived to get across the bridge of
death no man might know. Thrice in the half-minute dash he was hit; yet
there was life enough left to carry him stumbling across the last of the
staging bents; to send him reeling up the runway at the end and across
the working yard to the door of the commissary, waving the folded
papers like an inadequate flag of truce as he fell on the door-step.
After that, all things were curiously hazy and undefined for him; blind
clamor coming and going as the noise of a train to a dozing traveller
when the car doors are opened and closed. There was the tumult of a
fierce battle being waged over him; a deafening rifle fire and the
_spat-spat_ of bullets puncturing the sheet-iron walls of the
commissary. In the midst of it he lost his hold upon the realities, and
when he got it again the warlike clamor was stilled and Starbuck was
kneeling beside him, trying, apparently, to deprive him of his clothes
with the reckless slashings of a knife.
Protesting feebly and trying to rise, he saw the working yard filled
with armed men and the returning throng of laborers; saw Colonel Baldwin
and Williams talking excitedly to the sheriff; then he caught the eye of
the engineer and beckoned eagerly with his one available hand.
"Hold still, until I can find out how dead you are!" gritted the
rough-and-ready surgeon who was plying the clothes-ripping knife. But
when Williams came and bent down to listen, Smith found a voice, shrill
and strident and so little like his own that he scarcely recognized it.
"Call 'em out--call the men out and start the gate machinery!" he panted
in the queer, whistling voice which was, and was not, his own.
"Possess--possession is nine points of the law--that's what Judge Warner
said: the spillways, Bartley--shut 'em quick!"
"The men are on the job and the machinery is starting right now," said
Williams gently. "Don't you hear it?" And then to Starbuck: "For
Heaven's sake, do something for him, Billy--anything to keep him with us
until a doctor can get here!"
Smith felt himself smiling foolishly.
"I don't need any doctor, Bartley; what I need is a new ego: then I'd
stand some sha--some chance of finding--" he looked up appealingly at
Starbuck--"what is it that I'd stand some chance of finding, Billy? I--I
can't seem to remember."
Williams turned his face away and Starbuck tightened his benumbing grip
upon the severed artery in the bared arm from which he had cut the
sleeve. Smith seemed to be going off again, but he suddenly opened his
eyes and pointed frantically with a finger of the one serviceable hand.
"Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield, and he's going
to dy-dynamite the dam!"
Clinging to consciousness with a grip that not even the blood loss could
break, Smith saw Williams spring to his feet and give the alarm; saw
three or four of the sheriff's men drop their weapons and hurl
themselves upon another man who was trying to make his way unnoticed to
the stagings with a box of dynamite on his shoulder. Then he felt the
foolish smile coming again when he looked up at Starbuck.
"Don't let them hurt him, Billy; him nor Simms nor Lanterby, nor that
other one--the short-hand man--I--I can't remember his name. They're
just poor tools; and we've got to--to fight without hating, and--and--"
foolish witlessness was enveloping him again like a clinging garment and
he made a masterful effort to throw it off. "Tell the little girl--tell
her--you know what to tell her, Billy; about what I tried to do. Harding
said I'd get killed, but I remembered what she said, and I didn't care.
Tell her I said that that one minute was worth living for--worth all it
cost."
The raucous blast of a freak auto horn ripped into the growling murmur
of the gate machinery, and a dust-covered car pulled up in front of the
commissary. Out of it sprang first the doctor with his instrument bag,
and, closely following him, two plain-clothes men and a Brewster
police captain in uniform. Smith looked up and understood.
[Illustration: "Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield,
and he's going to dy-dynamite the dam!"]
"They're just--a little--too late, Billy, don't you think?" he quavered
weakly. "I guess--I guess I've fooled them, after all." And therewith he
closed his eyes wearily upon all his troubles and triumphings.
XXXIII
In Sunrise Gulch
William Starbuck drew the surgeon aside after the first aid had been
rendered, and Smith, still unconscious, had been carried from the
makeshift operating-table in the commissary to Williams's cot in the
office shack.
"How about it, Doc?" asked the mine owner bluntly.
The surgeon shook his head doubtfully.
"I can't say. The arm and the shoulder won't kill him, but that one in
the lung is pretty bad; and he has lost a lot of blood."
"Still, he may pull through?"
"He may--with good care and nursing. But if you want my honest opinion,
I'm afraid he won't make it. He'll be rather lucky if he doesn't make
it, won't he?"
Starbuck remembered that the doctor had come out in the auto with the
police captain and the two plain-clothes men.
"Hackerman has been talking?" he queried.
The surgeon nodded. "He told me on the way out that Smith was a
fugitive from justice; that he'd be likely to get ten years or more when
they took him back East. If I were in Smith's place, I'd rather pass out
with a bullet in my lung. Wouldn't you?"
Starbuck was frowning sourly. "Suppose you make it a case of suspended
judgment, Doc," he suggested. "The few of us here who know anything
about it are giving John the benefit of the doubt. I've got a few
thousand dollars of my own money that says he isn't guilty; and if he
makes a live of it, they'll have to show me, and half a dozen more of
us, before they can send him over the road."
"He knew they were after him?"
"Sure thing; and he had all the chance he needed to make his get-away.
He wouldn't take it; thought he owed a duty to the High Line
stockholders. He's a man to tie to, Doc. He was shot while he was trying
to get between and stop the war and keep others from getting killed."
"It's a pity," said the surgeon, glancing across at the police captain
to whom Colonel Baldwin was appealing. "They'll put him in the hospital
cell at the jail, and that will cost him whatever slender chance he
might otherwise have to pull through."
Starbuck looked up quickly. "Tell 'em he can't be moved, Doc Dan," he
urged suddenly. And then: "You're Dick Maxwell's family physician, and
Colonel Dexter's, and mine. Surely you can do that much for us?"
"I can, and I will," said the surgeon promptly, and then he went to join
Baldwin and the police captain, who were still arguing. What he said was
brief and conclusive; and a little later, when the autos summoned from
town by Sheriff Harding came for their lading of prisoners, Smith was
left behind, with two of M'Graw's men who were also past moving. In the
general clearing of the field Starbuck and Williams stayed behind to
care for the wounded, and one of the plain-clothes men remained to stand
guard.
* * * * *
Three days after the wholesale arrest at the dam, Brewster gossip had
fairly outworn itself telling and retelling the story of how the High
Line charter had been saved; of how Crawford Stanton's bold ruse of
hiring an ex-train-robber to impersonate a federal-court officer had
fallen through, leaving Stanton and his confederates, ruthlessly
abandoned by their unnamed principals, languishing bailless in jail; of
how Smith, the hero of all these occasions, was still lying at the
point of death in the office shack at the construction camp, and David
Kinzie, once more in keen pursuit of the loaves and fishes, was combing
the market for odd shares of the stock which was now climbing swiftly
out of reach. But at this climax of exhaustion--or satiety--came a
distinctly new set of thrills, more titillating, if possible, than all
the others combined.
It was on the morning of the third day that the _Herald_ announced the
return of Mr. Josiah Richlander from the Topaz; and in the marriage
notices of the same issue the breakfast-table readers of the newspapers
learned that the multimillionaire's daughter had been privately married
the previous evening to Mr. Tucker Jibbey. Two mining speculators, who
had already made Mr. Jibbey's acquaintance, were chuckling over the news
in the Hophra House grill when a third late breakfaster, a man who had
been sharing Stanton's office space as a broker in improved ranch lands,
came in to join them.
"What's the joke?" inquired the newcomer; and when he was shown the
marriage item he nodded gravely. "That's all right; but the _Herald_ man
didn't get the full flavor of it. It was a sort of runaway match, it
seems; the fond parent wasn't invited or consulted. The boys in the
lobby tell me that the old man had a fit when he came in this morning
and a _Herald_ reporter showed him that notice and asked for more dope
on the subject."
"I don't see that the fond parent has any kick coming," said the one who
had sold Jibbey a promising prospect hole on Topaz Mountain two days
earlier. "The young fellow's got all kinds of money."
"I know," the land broker put in. "But they're whispering it around that
Mr. Richlander had other plans for his daughter. They also say that
Jibbey wouldn't stay to face the music; that he left on the midnight
train last night a few hours after the wedding, so as not to be among
those present when the old man should blow in."
"What?"--in a chorus of two--"left his wife?"
"That's what they say. But that's only one of the new and startling
things that isn't in the morning papers. Have you heard about Smith?--or
haven't you been up long enough yet?"
"I heard yesterday that he was beginning to mend," replied the
breakfaster on the left; the one who had ordered bacon and eggs, with
the bacon cooked to a cinder.
"You're out of date," this from the dealer in ranches. "You know the
story that was going around about his being an escaped convict, or
something of that sort? It gets its 'local color' this morning. There's
a sheriff here from back East somewhere--came in on the early train;
name's Macauley, and he's got the requisition papers. But Smith's fooled
him good and plenty."
Again the chorus united in an eager query.
"How?"
"He died last night--a little past midnight. They say they're going to
bury him out at the dam--on the job that he pulled through and stood on
its feet. One of Williams's quarrymen drifted in with the story just a
little while ago. I'm here to bet you even money that the whole town
goes to the funeral."
"Great gosh!" said the man who was crunching the burnt bacon. "Say,
that's tough, Bixby! I don't care what he'd run away from back East; he
was a man, right. Harding has been telling everybody how Smith wouldn't
let the posse open fire on that gang of hold-ups last Friday night; how
he chased across on the dam stagings alone and unarmed to try to serve
the warrants on 'em and make 'em stop firing. It was glorious, but it
wasn't war."
To this the other mining man added a hard word. "Dead," he gritted; "and
only a few hours earlier the girl had taken snap judgment on him and
married somebody else! That's the woman of it!"
"Oh, hold on, Stryker," the ranch broker protested. "Don't you get too
fierce about that. There are two strings to that bow and the longest and
sorriest one runs out to Colonel Baldwin's place on Little Creek, I'm
thinking. The Richlander business was only an incident. Stanton told me
that much."
As the event proved, the seller of ranch lands would have lost his bet
on the funeral attendance. For some unknown reason the notice of Smith's
death did not appear in the afternoon papers, and only a few people went
out in autos to see the coffin lowered by Williams's workmen into a
grave on the mesa behind the construction camp; a grave among others
where the victims of an early industrial accident at the dam had been
buried. Those who went out from town came back rather scandalized. There
had been a most hard-hearted lack of the common formalities, they said;
a cheap coffin, no minister, no mourners, not even the poor fellow's
business associates in the company he had fought so hard to save from
defeat and extinction. It was a shame!
With this report passing from lip to lip in Brewster, another bit of
gossip to the effect that Starbuck and Stillings had gone East with the
disappointed sheriff, "to clear Smith's memory," as the street-talk had
it, called forth no little comment derogatory. As it chanced, the two
mining speculators and Bixby, the ranch seller, met again in the Hophra
House cafe at the dinner-table on the evening of the funeral day, and
Stryker, the captious member of the trio, was loud in his criticisms of
the High Line people.
"Yes!" he railed; "a couple of 'em will go on a junketing trip East to
'clear his memory,' after they've let their 'wops' at the dam bury him
like a yellow dog! I thought better than that of Billy Starbuck, and a
whole lot better of Colonel Dexter. And this Richlander woman; they say
she'd known him ever since he and she were school kids together; she
went down and took the train with her father just about the time they
were planting the poor devil among the sagebrush roots up there on that
bald mesa!"
"I'm disappointed, too," confessed the dealer in improved ranch lands.
"I certainly thought that if nobody else went, the little girl from the
Baldwin place would be out there to tell him good-by. But she wasn't."
* * * * *
Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by without
incident other than the indictment by the grand jury of Crawford
Stanton, Barney M'Graw, and a number of others on a charge of
conspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of the grand
_battue_ in which Sheriff Harding had figured as the master of the hunt,
had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery in
the lately finished power-house.
Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni a
wandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike in
Sunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty years
earlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely,
the tale-bringer confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike;
but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading to
the old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he had
seen smoke arising.
As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was not at fault.
On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, clad
in serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy Stetson and buff top-boots
in good countenance by riding astride in a man's saddle, was pushing her
mount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little rise
the abandoned camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravel
sprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and its
crumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitable
entirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch.
At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and shaded her eyes with
a gauntleted hand. On a bench beside the door of the single tenanted
cabin a man was sitting, and she saw him stand to answer her hand-wave.
A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in a
sling and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands,
was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, but
she pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing at
him out of a pair of slate-gray eyes and saying: "How often have I got
to tell you that you simply _can't_ help a woman out of a man's saddle?"
The man smiled at that.
"It's automatic," he returned. "I shall never get over wanting to help
you, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I can go?"
Flinging the bridle-reins over the head of the wiry little cow-pony
which was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creek
valley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sit
down.
"You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?" she
teased, sitting beside him. "Every time I come it's always the same
thing: 'When can I go?' You're not well yet."