HELGA STRAWN PLAYS THE GAME
The winter which had begun unusually early, battled fiercely for eight
weeks in the mountain fastnesses, and went down in grumbling defeat
before an early spring. And, as the stern face of the Sierra was
hidden under the snow that robed the higher peaks in royal ermine and
drifted sixty feet in the deeper cañons, so was the vital thing in the
lives of Wayne Shandon and Wanda Leland covered by silence and secrecy.
Each day was tense and eager to them; to the world whose prying eyes
could not penetrate through the barricade of winter it was as though
those lives were stagnating.
Wanda delivered Wayne's letter safely and promptly to Brisbane, the San
Francisco lawyer. She took her mother into the secret, she told her
mother everything now, for the close companionship of last winter had
borne its fruit of warm sympathy, and the two women went out of the
valley, ostensibly to spend a few weeks shopping and visiting in San
Francisco. The letter never left the girl's person until, in a private
room, it was placed in the hands of Brisbane.
Brisbane's wise old eyes looked at her shrewdly from behind the mask of
his clean shaven face, the greatest poker face, men said, that had ever
gone its inscrutable way up and down the city of fogs and wet winds.
He had asked his few questions in an absent-minded sort of fashion
which disappointed and distressed the girl. He evinced not a whit more
interest than he would have done in watching a stranger stamp the mud
off his feet, or, for that matter, than he would have shown had the
roof broken into flames over his head. But he took the case.
Upon a storm filled night, as black as ebony, Brisbane met Wayne
Shandon in White Rock. A man lived there, whom Shandon could trust, an
old friend of his father, and at his house the meeting was held with
little difficulty or danger. In less than two hours Brisbane had put
himself in possession of all the facts which Shandon could give him
that bore upon the matter in hand. There was the germ of a case
against Hume he admitted, but it would have to grow considerably to be
worth anything to a jury. Yes, the crooked work in the foreclosure of
the mortgage would help a little; not much though. He would attend to
the mortgage, taking Shandon's note for the amount, and would see that
it was paid off immediately. As to advising Shandon as to the best
thing to do now, the lawyer smiled one of his rare, noncommittal smiles.
"By avoiding arrest in the first place," he said drily, "you put
yourself in wrong with any jury in the world. But you've done it
already. I can't see now that it makes much difference whether you go
and give yourself up or whether you keep on the dodge. If you prefer
this sort of thing to a nice warm jail, why suit yourself my boy!"
He would see further that the shrewdest detective in the City was fully
instructed and put on the case immediately. Finally he gave Shandon a
letter from Wanda in which she promised to return to the valley as soon
as possible, shook hands as warmly as his absent minded manner would
permit and went to bed.
Through the winter the various threads of men's destinies, golden and
black, gay and sombre, too fine for human eye to see, too strong for
human might to break, were being woven into the intricate pattern of
life and fate. Though miles lay between the many men whose lives were
unalterably mingled, though each man went selfishly or unselfishly
about his own pursuits, although each fashioned daily his life for the
day, still the mills of God were grinding, the looms were weaving, and
grist and kernel, warp and woof found their way from the individual
existences into the scheme of the whole.
Dart had left with Mrs. Leland and Wanda and made a straight line to
Big Bill and Little Saxon. He made it his own special business in life
to see that no knockout stuff was slipped into the horse's oats, that
no slippery gent got the show to put Little Saxon out of the game. He
even took the precaution to partition off a tiny room for himself in
the hay loft above Little Saxon's stall, where he spent the nights
dozing and snatching up the ancient shot gun down the muzzle of which
his enthusiastic fingers had rammed enough buck shot to explode the
piece and blow himself as well as any unhappy intruder into that land
from which there is no return.
Big Bill, acting foreman now, took upon himself the unremitting work of
making the racehorse fit. Nearly as good a man as Shandon with
animals, he continued through the winter the task that had been little
more than begun. The fact that the man who had first proposed the
races which were to be run off in the Spring, was a fugitive, accused
of a grave crime, had aroused much sensational talk and newspaper
babble, but it had increased rather than lessened interest and new
entries were being daily arranged. Big Bill assured those who cared to
ask that the race would be run, that Shandon would have come in and
been cleared of any charges against him long before June, and that
there would be no change in plans. And though he sometimes doubted the
statement he made so bluntly he let no single day pass without adding
to Little Saxon's education.
MacKelvey was taciturn. But he was not the man to give up a quest once
begun. He grew irritable under the sting of Sledge Hume's sneers and
Martin Leland's regular weekly enquiries; but he pushed his work
tirelessly. As is always the case when the law wants a fugitive there
were many conflicting and empty reports, that would have aided had they
been true but which only hampered since they were not. A report that
Wayne Shandon had been seen boarding a train in Reno was followed three
days later by two other rumours, one claiming that he was on a ranch
just out of San Jose, the other that he had been recognised ten days
ago in Los Angeles. Each report with the vaguest hint of truth in it
MacKelvey hunted down doggedly, and the wires into El Toyon from both
directions were kept busy. It was the opinion of many people that
Shandon had long ago made good his escape and had gone abroad; it was
held by many a mild mannered man or timid old maid that he was even now
the head of a lawless gang terrorising whatever near or distant city or
countryside the most lurid headlines came from; not a few people shook
their heads and prophesied that when the Spring thaw came the body of a
reckless, blood tainted monster would be found where it had been hurled
in desperation from a high cliff. The sheriff's own personal opinion,
known only to the sheriff, perhaps came as close to the truth as any
man's.
Of all the men and women who knew him, perhaps none evinced less
concern in Wayne Shandon's fate than Helga Strawn. She had something
else to do. Looking ahead far and carefully, doing nothing hastily,
planning and shaping her way, with Sledge Hume and her lost interest in
the Dry Lands always looming large in the foreground of her thoughts,
she was already supplying her quota of grist to the great invisible
mills. She bought, upon her own initiative, a small farm just on the
edge of Hume's land, investing ten thousand dollars in it, and came
there to live. She bought conservatively at twenty dollars an acre.
If the project, now involved in uncertainty, were perfected her land
would be worth from two to five times what she had paid for it. On the
other hand, if nothing came of the campaign for irrigation, it was
always worth twenty dollars. It was Helga Strawn's way to play safe.
She saw much of Sledge Hume. Or rather she allowed Sledge Hume to see
much of her. The same thing with a variation, and that variation
important in the woman's shrewd eyes. Hume had no means of knowing how
much money she possessed, but he did know that she had paid out ten
thousand dollars in cash. He knew also that she was a woman. In his
eyes, never clearsighted from the mote of conceit and the dust of
arrogant superiority, a woman was a fool. He needed money, he wanted
money, her money as well as another's. He had gone far already in the
project that would make him a rich man if it succeeded; he was going
further. If litigation now were to raise its long wall against him he
meant to surmount the wall or tunnel under it. He had gone too far to
stop; his money was invested; he wanted more money to invest with it.
While he made the woman his study she coolly dissected his character,
not satisfied with the composite, both patient and shrewd in her
analysis. While he sought to read her, handicapped by his prejudice,
she spelled the letters of the man's soul.
She came to see, after the first few days, that Hume's one working
theory of life was that of the survival of the fittest. Eminently fit
himself, capable physically in strong, clean body, mentally in cool,
calculating, single purposed brain, morally in a code of ethics which
resolved all considerations to his working theory of life, he looked
down upon other lives than his own from the passionless heights of a
supreme impudence. In most things he was unusually frank, bluntly
honest. Wanting no man to give him a place in the world which he felt
thoroughly competent to secure for himself, he curried favour nowhere,
fawned upon no one. Frankly satisfied with himself as he had made
himself, he had no desire, seeing no need, to pretend to be other than
he was. Egotism, approximating the absolute, made him careless, even
contemptuous, of the opinion of others. His mental attitude might
perhaps be likened to that of the colossally mad man of Europe, the
only man of whom he was ever known to speak in words of approval. "I
and God did this thing!" the Emperor had said. So Hume might have
said, "I and the rest of the world."
The free stride of his activities was not restricted by any form of
what he would have called squeamishness. The means were incidental,
intrinsically negligible; he justified them by the end for which he
strove. That end was unvarying. From this grew the man's power, such
as it was.
That end took him, in moments which otherwise would have been empty, to
Helga Strawn. She had made her little home cosy and comfortable, the
living room almost luxurious. She wore rare gowns, painstakingly
chosen; she kept him waiting when he called; she received him with
indifference. She seemed to grow as frank with him as he with her, and
often enough the frankness was genuine. She told him coolly at the
outset that she knew he would swindle her out of her money if he got
the chance and that he was not going to get the chance. She informed
him that she did not trust him but that that need make no difference in
their relations; if she became convinced that the project were safe she
would go into it as deeply as any one.
She treated Sledge Hume very much as he treated the rest of the world;
and she noted with keen relish that her treatment irritated him. She
already knew the man well enough to be sure that he would come again
the sooner, and more frequently, to force her by the very dominance of
his virile personality to see him as he saw himself, in a word as her
superior.
As only a very clever woman could have done she drew him out to talk
about himself, about his motives. She listened always in apparent cool
indifference, always in keen, hard interest under the surface she chose
to wear. She never forgot that she had sold to him for twenty-five
thousand dollars property for which she would not now accept twice that
amount and which he would not relinquish for such a sum. She never
forgot that, legally, she had no hope of regaining it. But there would
be a way, when she came to know the man utterly, when she came to feel
out every nerve of his moral being. She tried to make him talk freely
about himself by the one method which must remain infallible as long as
Sledge Hume was Sledge Hume, by cool criticism of him.
One day as they idled in her living room she told him abruptly that he
was the most selfish man she had ever known. Her smile, as near a
sneer as a smile may be and not become unlovely, the tapping of her
French slipper, did not cease during his rather lengthy rejoinder.
"Selfish?" he had answered roughly. "Of course I am. Who isn't? You
mean that I am the only man you know who isn't afraid to say so! All
creation is selfish; selfishness is the keynote of progress, of
evolution, of any sort of success. It begins with the lowest forms of
life where each single celled unit takes what it needs for its own
good; it is the thing which keeps life in the four footed world; it is
the highest concern of the priest who while he pretends to serve mere
man and a mythological Saviour never loses sight of his own reward at
the end of it. It is the basic principle underlying all religion; take
out of it the personal, selfish consideration, 'Be good and you can go
to Heaven! be bad and go to Hell!' and your whole religion falls to
pieces. Take selfishness out of the world and the world will stagnate
and rot."
"I have never heard you wax so eloquent in your own defence!"
"I am not defending myself, I am explaining. I am showing you the
difference between yourself and me. I see things as they are; you look
at them obliquely. You wouldn't admit it, but you are as selfish as I
am."
"The difference is that you are the more honest?"
"Both with myself and the world, yes."
"You pride yourself on your honesty?"
"I don't take the trouble to dissimulate."
"You have never done anything which you have kept hidden?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I have never found it necessary to make the world my father confessor."
"Do you wish me to regard you as what people call an honest man, Mr.
Hume? Aren't you telling me that to put money in your own pocket you
would do what people call a dishonourable act?"
"You are the only woman I have ever met who has any claim to brains,"
he answered, paying the compliment in his blunt, rough fashion. "Don't
you know me well enough to realise that I don't ask people to set my
standards for me? Don't you know a man, when you see him, big enough
to set his own standards?"
She came to see that the man was not without a rough hewn sort of
greatness, that in his way as he had said, he was a big man. He bred
in her strange, dual emotions. In the beginning she had felt for him
only the cold hatred of which the woman was thoroughly capable;
gradually and begrudgingly she began to feel an equally cold admiration
for the strength of the man. She told herself that that admiration was
utterly impersonal, that it arose from the fact that Hume was in
reality stronger than other men she knew, that it was possible for her
to acknowledge it because she did have brains, as he had said. It was
an admiration which, she judged coolly, need in no way lessen her
hatred for him, which rather would intensify it.
Throughout the winter she strove with single purpose to slip into the
man's confidence. Having recognised Hume's peculiar strength, having
sought his weaknesses, knowing that he was no man's or woman's fool,
she did not make a fool of herself by giving him an inkling of her
intentions. When she was most interested it was her role to appear
most indifferent; here was the one vulnerable point her searching
fingers had found in the shell of his egoism. Indifference piqued him.
It was as though she had gathered three armies and hurled them at him.
From the centre she attacked with indifference, striving to draw his
attention from other points. She massed two distinct flanking
movements stealthily. Upon one side she brought to bear upon a keen
brain a brain as keen; upon the other she calmly deployed the charm of
her regal beauty. The man had seemed a machine, emotionless. But
since he was human, since blood, Hume blood though it was, ran through
his veins, he must have emotions like other men. They might be hidden,
they might be of stunted, pale growth. In one case she would uncover
them, in another she would develop. Already she admired him as a
vital, compelling force. She would make him admire a similar force In
her; she would make him admire the physical perfection of her. She was
a woman, she was amply endowed with brain and instinct and beauty. And
she was far too shrewd to overlook a single weapon which lay at her
hand.
The eternal looms were weaving, the warp of her being, the woof of his
being were drawn into the intricate pattern of human destiny. Smiles
and tears, hopes and fears, emotions of which a man is unconscious,
ambitions and failures, achievements--all go into the invisible fabric.
Already Sledge Hume and Helga Strawn had come to find something to
admire in each other. The short sight of a clever man and a clever
woman could not discern what lay at the end. And the end was rushing
upon them with tremendous speed.