The Real Man

XXI

At Any Cost

Brewster, drawing its business profit chiefly from the mines in the Topaz and upper Gloria districts, had been only moderately enthusiastic over the original irrigation project organized by Colonel Dexter Baldwin and the group of ranchmen who were to be directly benefited. But when the scope of the plan was enlarged to include a new source of power and light for the city, the scheme had become, in a broader sense, a public utility, and Brewster had promptly awakened to the importance of its success as a local enterprise.

The inclusion of the hydro-electric privilege in the new charter had been a bit of far-sighted business craft on the part of the young man whose name was now in everybody's mouth. As he had pointed out to his new board of directors, there was an abundant excess of water, and a modest profit on the electric plant would pay the operating expenses of the entire system, including the irrigating up-keep and extension work. In addition to this, a reasonable contract price for electric current to be furnished to the city would give the project a quasi-public character, at least to the extent of enlisting public sympathy on the side of the company in the fight with the land trust.

This piece of business foresight found itself amply justified as the race against time was narrowed down to days and hours. Though there was spiteful opposition offered by one of the two daily newspapers – currently charged with being subsidized by the land trust – public sentiment as a whole, led by the other newspaper, was strongly on the side of the local corporation. Baldwin, Maxwell, Starbuck, and a few more of the leading spirits in Timanyoni High Line had many friends, and Crawford Stanton found his task growing increasingly difficult as the climax drew near.

But to a man with an iron jaw difficulties become merely incentives to greater effort. Being between the devil, in the person of an employer who knew no mercy, on the one hand, and the deep blue sea of failure on the other, the promoter left no expedient untried, and the one which was yielding the best results, thus far, was the steady undercurrent of detraction and calamitous rumor which he had contrived to set in motion. As we have seen, it was first whispered, and then openly asserted, that the dam was being built too hurriedly; that its foundations were insecure; that, sooner or later, it would be carried away in high water, and the city and the intervening country would be flood-swept and devastated.

Beyond this, the detractive gossip attacked the personnel of the new company. Baldwin was all right as a man, and he knew how to raise fine horses; but what did he, or any of his associates, know about building dams and installing hydro-electric plants? Williams, the chief engineer, was an ex-government man, and – government projects being anathema in the Timanyoni by reason of the restrictive rules and regulations of the Hophra Forest Reserve – everybody knew what that meant: out-of-date methods, red-tape detail, general inefficiency. And Smith, the young plunger who had dropped in from nobody knew where: what could be said of him more than that he had succeeded in temporarily hypnotizing an entire city? Who was he? and where had the colonel found him? Was his name really Smith, or was that only a convenient alias?

Having set these queries afoot in Brewster, Stanton was unwearied in keeping them alive and pressing them home. And since such askings grow by what they feed upon, the questions soon began to lose the interrogatory form and to become assertions of fact. Banker Kinzie was quoted as saying, or at least as intimating, that he had lost faith, not only in the High Line scheme, but particularly in its secretary and treasurer; and to this bit of gossip was added another to the effect that Smith had grossly deceived the bank by claiming to be the representative of Eastern capital when he was nothing more than an adventurer trading upon the credulity and good nature of an entire community.

To these calumniating charges it was admitted on all sides that Smith, himself, was giving some color of truth. To those who had opposed him he had shown no mercy, and there were plenty of defeated litigants, and some few dropped stockholders, among the obstructors to claim that the new High Line promoter was a bully and a browbeater; that a poor man stood no chance in a fight with the Timanyoni Company.

On the sentimental side the charges were still graver – in the Western point of view. In its social aspect Brewster was still in the country-village stage, and Smith's goings and comings at Hillcrest had been quickly marked. From that to assuming the sentimental status, with the colonel's daughter in the title rôle, was a step that had already been taken by the society editress of the Brewster Banner in a veiled hint of a forthcoming "announcement" in which "the charming daughter of one of our oldest and most respected families" and "a brilliant young business man from the East" were to figure as the parties in interest. Conceive, therefore, the shock that had been given to these kindlier gossips when Smith's visits to the Baldwin ranch ceased abruptly between two days, and the "brilliant young business man" was seen everywhere and always in the company of the beautiful stranger who was stopping at the Hophra House. In its palmier day the Timanyoni had hanged a man for less.

On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smith gave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the business field. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a man suddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial, not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the short space of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities which he had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing and refinancing of the irrigation project.

"We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, at last," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for the bejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra café. "Kinzie is about to throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam is getting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that you can't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up to his office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smith abused him first and then threw him out bodily – hurt him pretty savagely, they say."

The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise.

"Bad temper?" she queried.

"Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take your choice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with Miss Richlander overnight? – or has he?"

The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were at luncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutes ago."

Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But an invisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might have drawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrenceville magnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were not precisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times.

"I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day, Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the little ranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from us and went back to you at the autos?"

"No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say."

"But it, or something else, has changed you – very much for the worse. Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch this afternoon?"

"And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition? – never in this world!"

"More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame of mind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever do you suppose has become of Tucker?"

"How should I know?"

"If he had come in last night, and you had met him – as I asked you to – in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might think you had murdered him."

It was doubtless by sheer accident that Smith, reaching at the moment for the salad-oil, overturned his water-glass. But the small accident by no means accounted for the sudden graying of his face under the Timanyoni wind tan – for that or for the shaking hands with which he seconded the waiter's anxious efforts to repair the damage. When they were alone again, the momentary trepidation had given place to a renewed hardness that lent a biting rasp to his voice.

"Kinzie, the suspicious old banker that I've been telling you about, is determined to run me down," he said, changing the subject abruptly. "I've got it pretty straight that he is planning to send one of his clerks to the Topaz district to try and find your father."

"In the hope that father will tell what he knows about you?"

"Just that."

"Does this Mr. Kinzie know where father is to be found?"

"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."

Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.

"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making, if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell you that Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in trying to make me tell him where father has gone."

"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assure you, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach your father – alive."

"Ooh!" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the rounded shoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a much simpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie in some way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you do that?"

"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"

"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said the young woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, you know. Father left it with me – in case I should want to communicate with him."

Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.

"You wouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of the ultimate right and wrong, would you? You wouldn't say that the only great man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"

Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.

"Are you quoting the little ranch person?" she inquired. Then she answered his query: "The only great men worth speaking of are the men who win. For the lack of something better to do, I'm willing to help you win, Montague. Contrive in some way to have that clerk sent to me. It can come about quite casually if it is properly suggested. Most naturally, I am the one who would know where my father is to be found. And I have changed my mind about wanting to drive to the Baldwins'. We'll compromise on the play – if there is a play."

Two things came of this talk over the luncheon table. Smith went back to his office and shut himself up, without going near the Brewster City National. None the less, the expedient suggested by Verda Richlander must have found its means of communication in some way, since at two o'clock David Kinzie summoned the confidential clerk who had been directed to provide himself with a livery mount and gave him his instructions.

"I'm turning this over to you, Hoback, because you know enough to keep a still tongue in your head. Mr. Stanton doesn't know where Mr. Richlander is, but Mr. Richlander's daughter does know. Go over to the hotel and introduce yourself as coming from me. Say to the daughter that it is necessary for us to communicate with her father on a matter of important business, and ask her if she can direct you. That's all; only don't mention Stanton in the matter. Come back and report after you've seen her."

This was one of the results of the luncheon-table talk; and the other came a short half-hour further along, when the confidential clerk returned to make his report.

"I don't know why Miss Richlander wouldn't tell Mr. Stanton," he said. "She was mighty nice to me; made me a pencil sketch of the Topaz country and marked the mines that her father is examining."

"Good!" said David Kinzie, with his stubbly mustache at its most aggressive angle. "It's pretty late in the day, but you'd better make a start and get as far as you can before dark. When you find Mr. Richlander, handle him gently. Tell him who you are, and then ask him if he knows anything about a man named 'Montague,' or 'Montague Smith'; ask him who he is, and where he comes from. If you get that far with him, he'll probably tell you the rest of it."

Smith saw no more of Miss Richlander until eight o'clock in the evening, at which time he sent his card to her room and waited for her in the mezzanine parlors. When she came down to him, radiant in fine raiment, he seemed not to see the bedeckings or the beauty which they adorned.

"There is a play, and I have the seats," he announced briefly.

"Merci!" she flung back. "Small favors thankfully received, and larger ones in proportion; though it's hardly a favor, this time, because I have paid for it in advance. Mr. Kinzie's young man came to see me this afternoon."

"What did you do?"

"I gave him a tracing of my map, and he was so grateful that it made me want to tell him that it was all wrong; that he wouldn't find father in a month if he followed the directions."

"But you didn't!"

"No; I can play the game, when it seems worth while."

Smith was frowning thoughtfully when he led her to the elevator alcove.

"My way would have been the surer," he muttered, half to himself.

"Barbarian!" she laughed; and then: "To think that you were once a 'débutantes' darling'! Oh, yes; I know it was Carter Westfall who said it first, but it was true enough to name you instantly for all Lawrenceville."

Smith made no comment, and Miss Richlander did not speak again until they were waiting in the women's lobby for the house porter to call a cab. Then, as if she had just remembered it:

"Oh! I forgot to ask you: is the Eastern train in?"

He nodded. "It was on time this evening – for a wonder."

"And no Tucker yet! What in the world do you suppose could have happened to him, Montague?"

The porter was announcing the theatre cab and Smith reserved his answer until the motor hackney was rolling jerkily away toward the opera-house.

"Jibbey has probably got what was coming to him," he said grittingly. "I don't know whether you have ever remarked it or not, but the insect of the Jibbey breed usually finds somebody to come along and step on it, sooner or later."

XXII

The Megalomaniac

On a day which was only sixty-odd hours short of the expiration of the time limit fixed by the charter conditions under which the original Timanyoni Ditch Company had obtained its franchise, Bartley Williams, lean and sombre-eyed from the strain he had been under for many days and nights, saw the president's gray roadster ploughing its way through the mesa sand on the approach to the construction camp, and was glad.

"I've been trying all the morning to squeeze out time to get into town," he told Baldwin, when the roadster came to a stand in front of the shack commissary. "Where is Smith?"

The colonel threw up his hand in a gesture expressive of complete detachment.

"Don't ask me. John has gone plumb loco in these last two or three days. It's as much as your life's worth to ask him where he has been or where he is going or what he means to do next."

"He hasn't stopped fighting?" said the engineer, half aghast at the bare possibility.

"Oh, no; he's at it harder than ever – going it just a shaving too strong, is what I'd tell him, if he'd let me get near enough to shout at him. Last night, after the theatre, he went around to the Herald office, and the way they're talking it on the street, he was aiming to shoot up the whole newspaper joint if Mark Allen, the editor, wouldn't take back a bunch of the lies he's been publishing about the High Line. It wound up in a scrap of some sort. I don't know who got the worst of it, but John isn't crippled up any, to speak of, this morning – only in his temper."

"Smith puzzles me more than a little," was Williams's comment. "It's just as you say; for the last few days he's been acting as if he had a grouch a mile long. Is it the old sore threatening to break out again? – the 'lame duck' business?"

"I shouldn't wonder," said the colonel evasively. Loyal to the last, he was not quite ready to share with Williams the half-confidence in which Smith had admitted, by implication at least, that the waiting young woman at the Hophra House held his future between her thumb and finger.

Williams shook his head. "I guess we'll have to stand for the grouch, if he'll only keep busy. He has the hot end of it, trying to stop the stampede among the stockholders, and hold up the money pinch, and keep Stanton from springing any new razzle on us. We couldn't very well get along without him, right now, Colonel. With all due respect to you and the members of the board, he is the fighting backbone of the whole outfit."

"He is that," was Baldwin's ready admission. "He is just what we've been calling him from the first, Bartley – a three-ply, dyed-in-the-wool wonder in his specialty. Stanton hasn't been able to make a single move yet that Smith hasn't foreseen and discounted. He is fighting now like a man in the last ditch, and I believe he thinks he is in the last ditch. The one time lately when I have had anything like a straight talk with him, he hinted at that and gave me to understand that he'd be willing to quit and take his medicine if he could hold on until Timanyoni High Line wins out."

"That will be only two days more," said the engineer, saying it as one who has been counting the days in keen anxiety. And then: "Stillings told me yesterday that we're not going to get an extension of the time limit from the State authorities."

"No; that little fire went out, blink, just as Smith said it would. Stanton's backers have the political pull – in the State, as well as in Washington. They're going to hold us to the letter of the law."

"Let 'em do it. We'll win out yet – if we don't run up against one or both of the only two things I'm afraid of now: high water, or the railroad call down."

"The water is pushing you pretty hard?"

"It's touch and go every night now. A warm rain in the mountains – well, I won't say that it would tear us up, because I don't believe it would, or could; but it would delay us, world without end."

"And the railroad grab? Have you heard anything more about that?"

"That is what I was trying to get to town for; to talk the railroad business over with you and Stillings and Smith. They've had a gang here this morning; a bunch of engineers, with a stranger, who gave his name as Hallowell, in charge. They claimed to be verifying the old survey, and Hallowell notified me formally that our dam stood squarely in their right of way for a bridge crossing of the river."

"They didn't serve any papers on you, did they?" inquired the colonel anxiously.

"No; the notice was verbal. But Hallowell wound up with a threat. He 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!"