"My Lord, John! – what have you done?" demanded Baldwin.
"I've shown 'em what it means to go up against a winner!" was the half-triumphant, half-savage exultation. "I have put a crimp in that fence-climbing banker of yours that will last him for one while! I've secured thirty-day options, at par, on enough High Line stock to swing a clear majority if Kinzie should buy up every other share there is outstanding. It has taken me all day, and I've driven a thousand miles, but the thing is done."
"But, John! If anything should happen, and we'd have to make good on those options… The Lord have mercy! It would break the last man of us!"
"We're not going to let things happen!" was the gritting rejoinder. "I've told you both a dozen times that I'm in this thing to win! You take care of those options, Stillings; they're worth a million dollars to somebody. Lock 'em up somewhere and then forget where they are. Now I'm going to hunt up Mr. Crawford Stanton – before I eat or sleep!"
"Easy, John; hold up a minute!" the colonel broke in soothingly; and Stillings, more practical, closed the office door silently and put his back against it. "This is a pretty sudden country, but there is some sort of a limit, you know," the big Missourian went on. "What's your idea in going to Stanton?"
"I mean to give him twelve hours in which to pack his trunk and get out of Brewster and the Timanyoni. If he hasn't disappeared by to-morrow morning – "
Stillings was signalling in dumb show to Baldwin. He had quietly opened the door and was crooking his finger and making signs over his shoulder toward the corridor. Baldwin saw what was wanted, and immediately shot his desk cover open and turned on the lights.
"That last lot of steel and cement vouchers was made out yesterday, John," he said, slipping the rubber band from a file of papers in the desk. "If you'll take time to sit down here and run 'em over, and put your name on 'em, I'll hold Martin long enough to let him get the checks in to-night's mail. Those fellows in St. Louis act as if they are terribly scared they won't get their money quick enough, and I've been holding the papers for you all day. I'll be back after a little."
Smith dragged up the president's big swing-chair and planted himself in it, and an instant later he was lost to everything save the columns of figures on the vouchers. Stillings had let himself out, and when the colonel followed him, the lawyer cautiously closed the door of the private office, and edged Baldwin into the corridor.
"We've mighty near got a madman to deal with in there, Colonel," he whispered, when the two were out of ear-shot. "I was watching his eyes when he said that about Stanton, and they fairly blazed. I meant to tell you more about that racket last night in the Herald office; I heard the inside of it this afternoon from Murphey. Smith went in and held the whole outfit up with a gun, and Murphey says he beat Allen over the head with it. He's going to kill somebody, if we don't look out."
Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
"He's acting like a locoed thoroughbred that's gone outlaw," he said. "Do you reckon he's sure-enough crazy, Bob?"
"Only in the murder nerve. This deal with the options shows that he's all to the good on the business side. That was the smoothest trick that's been turned in any stage of this dodging fight with the big fellows. It simply knocks Kinzie's rat-gnawing game dead. If there were only somebody who could calm Smith down a little and bring him to reason – somebody near enough to him to dig down under his shell and get at the real man that used to be there when he first took hold with us – "
"A woman?" queried Baldwin, frowning disapproval in anticipation of what Stillings might be going to suggest.
"A woman for choice, of course. I was thinking of this young woman over at the Hophra House; the one he has been running around with so much during the past few days. She is evidently an old flame of his, and anybody can see with half an eye that she has a pretty good grip on him. Suppose we go across the street and give her an invitation to come and do a little missionary work on Smith. She looks level-headed and sensible enough to take it the way it's meant."
It is quite possible that the colonel's heart-felt relief at Stillings's suggestion of Miss Richlander instead of another woman went some little distance toward turning the scale for the transplanted Missourian. Stillings was a lawyer and had no scruples, but the colonel had them in just proportion to his Southern birth and breeding.
"I don't like to drag a woman into it, any way or shape, Bob," he protested; and he would have gone on to say that he had good reason to believe that Miss Richlander's influence over Smith might not be at all of the meliorating sort, but Stillings cut him short.
"There need be no 'dragging.' The young woman doubtless knows the business situation as well as we do – he has probably told her all about it – and if she cares half as much for Smith as she seems to, she'll be glad to chip in and help to cool him down. We can be perfectly plain and outspoken with her, I'm sure; she evidently knows Smith a whole lot better than we do. It's a chance, and we'd better try it. He's good for half an hour or so with those vouchers."
Two minutes later, Colonel Dexter Baldwin, with Stillings at his elbow, was at the clerk's desk in the Hophra House sending a card up to Miss Richlander's rooms. Five minutes beyond that, the boy came back to say that Miss Richlander was out auto-driving with Mr. and Mrs. Stanton. The clerk, knowing Baldwin well, eyebrowed his regret and suggested a wait of a few minutes.
"They'll certainly be in before long," he said. "Mrs. Stanton has never been known to miss the dinner hour since she came to us. She is as punctual as the clock."
Baldwin, still ill at ease and reluctant, led the way to a pair of chairs in the writing alcove of the lobby; two chairs commanding a clear view of the street entrance. Sitting down to wait with what patience they could summon, neither of the two men saw a gray automobile, driven by a young woman, come to a stand before the entrance of the Kinzie Building on the opposite side of the street. And, missing this, they missed equally the sight of the young woman alighting from the machine and disappearing through the swinging doors opening into the bank building's elevator lobby.
XXIII
The Arrow to the Mark
Smith, concentrating abstractedly, as his habit was, upon the work in hand, was still deep in the voucher-auditing when the office door was opened and a small shocked voice said: "Oh, wooh! how you startled me! I saw the light, and I supposed, of course, it was Colonel-daddy. Where is he?"
Smith pushed the papers aside and looked up scowling.
"Your father? He was here a minute ago, with Stillings. Isn't he out in the main office?"
"No, there is no one there."
"Martin is there," he said, contradicting her bluntly. And then: "Your father said he'd be back. You've come to take him home?"
She nodded and came to sit in a chair at the desk-end, saying:
"Don't let me interrupt you, please. I'll be quiet."
"I don't mean to let anything interrupt me until I have finished what I have undertaken to do; I'm past all that, now."
"So you told me two evenings ago," she reminded him gently, adding: "And I have heard about what you did last night."
"About the newspaper fracas? You don't approve of anything like that, of course. Neither did I, once. But you were right in what you said the other evening out at the dam; there is no middle way. You know what the animal tamers tell us about the beasts. I've had my taste of blood. There are a good many men in this world who need killing. Crawford Stanton is one of them, and I'm not sure that Mr. David Kinzie isn't another."
"I can't hear what you say when you talk like that," she objected, looking past him with the gray eyes veiled.
"Do you want me to lie down and let them put the steam-roller over me?" he demanded irritably. "Is that your ideal of the perfect man?"
"I didn't say any such thing as that, did I?"
"Perhaps not, in so many words. But you meant it."
"What I said, and what I meant, had nothing at all to do with Timanyoni High Line and its fight for life," she said calmly, recalling the wandering gaze and letting him see her eyes. "I was thinking altogether of one man's attitude toward his world."
"That was night before last," he put in soberly. "I've gone a long way since night before last, Corona."
"I know you have. Why doesn't daddy come back?"
"He'll come soon enough. You're not afraid to be here alone with me, are you?"
"No; but anybody might be afraid of the man you are going to be."
His laugh was as mirthless as the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
"You needn't put it in the future tense. I have already broken with whatever traditions there were left to break with. Last night I threatened to kill Allen, and, perhaps, I should have done it if he hadn't begged like a dog and dragged his wife and children into it."
"I know," she acquiesced, and again she was looking past him.
"And that isn't all. Yesterday, Kinzie set a trap for me and baited it with one of his clerks. For a little while it seemed as if the only way to spring the trap was for me to go after the clerk and put a bullet through him. It wasn't necessary, as it turned out, but if it had been – "
"Oh, you couldn't!" she broke in quickly. "I can't believe that of you!"
"You think I couldn't? Let me tell you of a thing that I have done. Night before last, in less than an hour after you sat and talked with me at the dam, Verda Richlander had a wire from a young fellow who wants to marry her. He had found out that she was here in Brewster, and the wire was to tell her that he was coming in that night on the delayed 'Flyer.' She asked me to meet him and tell him she had gone to bed. He is a miserable little wretch; a sort of sham reprobate; and she has never cared for him, except to keep him dangling with a lot of others. I told her I wouldn't meet him, and she knew very well that I couldn't meet him – and stay out of jail. Are you listening?"
"I'm trying to."
"It was the pinch, and I wasn't big enough – in your sense of the word – to meet it. I saw what would happen. If Tucker Jibbey came here, Stanton would pounce upon him at once; and Jibbey, with a drink or two under his belt, would tell all he knew. I fought it all out while I was waiting for the train. It was Jibbey's effacement, or the end of the world for me, and for Timanyoni High Line."
Dexter Baldwin's daughter was not of those who shriek and faint at the apparition of horror. But the gray eyes were dilating and her breath was coming in little gasps when she said:
"I can't believe it! You are not going to tell me that you met this man as a friend, and then – "
"No; it didn't quite come to a murder in cold blood, though I thought it might. I had Maxwell's runabout, and I got Jibbey into it. He thought I was going to drive him to the hotel. After we got out of town he grew suspicious, and there was a struggle in the auto. I – I had to beat him over the head to make him keep quiet; I thought for the moment that I had killed him, and I knew, then, just how far I had gone on the road I've been travelling ever since a certain night in the middle of last May. The proof was in the way I felt; I wasn't either sorry or horror-stricken; I was merely relieved to think that he wouldn't trouble me, or clutter up the world with his worthless presence any longer."
"But that wasn't your real self!" she expostulated.
"What was it, then?"
"I don't know – I only know that it wasn't you. But tell me: did he die?"
"No."
"What have you done with him?"
"Do you know the old abandoned Wire-Silver mine at Little Butte?"
"I knew it before it was abandoned, yes."
"I was out there one Sunday afternoon with Starbuck. The mine is bulkheaded and locked, but one of the keys on my ring fitted the lock, and Starbuck and I went in and stumbled around for a while in the dark tunnels. I took Jibbey there and locked him up. He's there now."
"Alone in that horrible place – and without food?"
"Alone, yes; but I went out yesterday and put a basket of food where he could get it."
"What are you going to do with him?"
"I am going to leave him there until after I have put Stanton and Kinzie and the other buccaneers safely out of business. When that is done, he can go; and I'll go, too."
She had risen, and at the summing-up she turned from him and went aside to the one window to stand for a long minute gazing down into the electric-lighted street. When she came back her lips were pressed together and she was very pale.
"When I was in school, our old psychology professor used to try to tell us about the underman; the brute that lies dormant inside of us and is kept down only by reason and the super-man. I never believed it was anything more than a fine-spun theory – until now. But now I know it is true."
He spread his hands.
"I can't help it, can I?"
"The man that you are now can't help it; no. But the man that you could be – if he would only come back – " she stopped with a little uncontrollable shudder and sat down again, covering her face with her hands.
"I'm going to turn Jibbey loose – after I'm through," he vouchsafed.
She took her hands away and blazed up at him suddenly, with her face aflame.
"Yes! after you are safe; after there is no longer any risk in it for you! That is worse than if you had killed him – worse for you, I mean. Oh, can't you see? It's the very depth of cowardly infamy!"
He smiled sourly. "You think I'm a coward? They've been calling me everything else but that in the past few days."
"You are a coward!" she flashed back. "You have proved it. You daren't go out to Little Butte to-night and get that man and bring him to Brewster while there is yet time for him to do whatever it is that you are afraid he will do!"
Was it the quintessence of feminine subtlety, or only honest rage and indignation, that told her how to aim the armor-piercing arrow? God, who alone knows the secret workings of the woman heart and brain, can tell. But the arrow sped true and found its mark. Smith got up stiffly out of the big swing-chair and stood glooming down at her.
"You think I did it for myself? – just to save my own worthless hide? I'll show you; show you all the things that you say are now impossible. Did you bring the gray roadster?"
She nodded briefly.
"Your father is coming back; I hear the elevator-bell. I am going to take the car, and I don't want to meet him. Will you say what is needful?"
She nodded again, and he went out quickly. It was only a few steps down the corridor to the elevator landing, and the stair circled the caged elevator-shaft to the ground floor. Smith halted in the darkened corner of the stairway long enough to make sure that the colonel, with Stillings and a woman in an automobile coat and veil – a woman who figured for him in the passing glance as Corona's mother – got off at the office floor. Then he ran down to the street level, cranked the gray roadster and sprang in to send the car rocketing westward.
XXIV
A Little Leaven
The final touch of sunset pink had long since faded from the high western sky-line, and the summer-night stars served only to make the darkness visible along the road which had once been the stage route down the Timanyoni River and across to the mining-camp of Red Butte. Smith, slackening speed for the first time in the swift valley-crossing flight, twisted the gray roadster sharply to the left out of the road, and eased it across the railroad track to send it lurching and bumping over the rotting ties of an old branch-line spur from which the steel had been removed, and which ran in a course roughly paralleling the eastward-facing front of a forested mountain.
Four miles from the turn out of the main road, at a point on the spur right of way where a washed-out culvert made farther progress with the car impossible, he shut off the power and got down to continue his journey afoot. Following the line of the abandoned spur, he came, at the end of another mile, to the deserted shacks of the mining plant which the short branch railroad had been built to serve; a roofless power-house, empty ore platforms dry-rotting in disuse, windowless bunk shanties, and the long, low bulk of a log-built commissary. The mine workings were tunnel-driven in the mountainside, and a crooked ore track led out to them. Smith followed the ore track until he came to the bulkheaded entrance flanked by empty storage bins, and to the lock of a small door framed in the bulkheading he applied a key.
It was pitch dark beyond the door, and the silence was like that of the grave. Smith had brought a candle on his food-carrying visit of the day before, and, groping in its hiding-place just outside of the door, he found and lighted it, holding it sheltered in his cupped hand as he stepped into the black void beyond the bulkhead. With the feeble flame making little more than a dim yellow nimbus in the gloom, he looked about him. There was no sign of occupancy save Jibbey's suitcase lying where it had been flung on the night of the assisted disappearance. But of the man himself there was no trace.
Smith stumbled forward into the black depths and the chill of the place laid hold upon him and shook him like the premonitory shiver of an approaching ague. What if the darkness and solitude had been too much for Jibbey's untried fortitude and the poor wretch had crawled away into the dismal labyrinth to lose himself and die? The searcher stopped and listened. In some far-distant ramification of the mine he could hear the drip, drip, of underground water, but when he shouted there was no response save that made by the echoes moaning and whispering in the stoped-out caverns overhead.
Shielding the flickering candle again, Smith went on, pausing at each branching side-cutting to throw the light into the pockets of darkness. Insensibly he quickened his pace until he was hastening blindly through a maze of tunnels and cross driftings, deeper and still deeper into the bowels of the great mountain. Coming suddenly at the last into the chamber of the dripping water, he found what he was searching for, and again the ague chill shook him. There were no apparent signs of life in the sodden, muck-begrimed figure lying in a crumpled heap among the water pools.
"Jibbey!" he called: and then again, ignoring the unnerving, awe-inspiring echoes rustling like flying bats in the cavernous overspaces: "Jibbey!"
The sodden heap bestirred itself slowly and became a man sitting up to blink helplessly at the light and supporting himself on one hand.
"Is that you, Monty?" said a voice tremulous and broken; and then: "I can't see. The light blinds me. Have you come to fi-finish the job?"
"I have come to take you out of this; to take you back with me to Brewster. Get up and come on."
The victim of Smith's ruthlessness struggled stiffly to his feet. Never much more than a physical weakling, and with his natural strength wasted by a life of dissipation, the blow on the head with the pistol butt and the forty-eight hours of sharp hardship and privation had cut deeply into his scanty reserves.
"Did – did Verda send you to do it?" he queried.
"No; she doesn't know where you are. She thinks you stopped over somewhere on your way west. Come along, if you want to go back with me."
Jibbey stumbled away a step or two and flattened himself against the cavern wall. His eyes were still staring and his lips were drawn back to show his teeth.
"Hold on a minute," he jerked out. "You're not – not going to wipe it all out as easy as that. You've taken my gun away from me, but I've got my two hands yet. Stick that candle in a hole in the wall and look out for yourself. I'm telling you, right now, that one or the other of us is going to stay here – and stay dead!"
"Don't be a fool!" Smith broke in. "I didn't come here to scrap with you."
"You'd better – and you'd better make a job of it while you're about it!" shrieked the castaway, lost now to everything save the biting sense of his wrongs. "You've put it all over me – knocked my chances with Verda Richlander and shut me up here in this hell-hole to go mad-dog crazy! If you let me get out of here alive I'll pay you back, if it's the last thing I ever do on top of God's green earth! You'll go back to Lawrenceville with the bracelets on! You'll – " red rage could go no farther in mere words and he flung himself in feeble fierceness upon Smith, clutching and struggling and waking the grewsome echoes again with frantic, meaningless maledictions.
Smith dropped the candle to defend himself, but he did not strike back; wrapping the madman in a pinioning grip, he held him helpless until the vengeful ecstasy had exhausted itself. When it was over, and Jibbey had been released, gasping and sobbing, to stagger back against the tunnel wall, Smith groped for the candle and found and relighted it.
"Tucker," he said gently, "you are more of a man than I took you to be – a good bit more. And you needn't break your heart because you can't handle a fellow who is perfectly fit, and who weighs half as much again as you do. Now that you're giving me a chance to say it, I can tell you that Verda Richlander doesn't figure in this at all. I'm not going to marry her, and she didn't come out here in the expectation of finding me."
"Then what does figure in it?" was the dry-lipped query.
"It was merely a matter of self-preservation. There are men in Brewster who would pay high for the information you might give them about me."
"You might have given me a hint and a chance, Monty. I'm not all dog!"
"That's all past and gone. I didn't give you your chance, but I'm going to give it to you now. Let's go – if you're fit to try it."
"Wait a minute. If you think, because you didn't pull your gun just now and drop me and leave me to rot in this hole, if you think that squares the deal – "
"I'm not making any conditions," Smith interposed. "There are a number of telegraph offices in Brewster, and for at least two days longer I shall always be within easy reach."
Jibbey's anger flared up once more.
"You think I won't do it? You think I'll be so danged glad to get to some place where they sell whiskey that I'll forget all about it and let you off? Don't you make any mistake, Monty Smith! You can't knock me on the head and lock me up as if I were a yellow dog. I'll fix you!"
Smith made no reply. Linking his free arm in Jibbey's, he led the way through the mazes, stopping at the tunnel mouth to blow out the candle and to pick up Jibbey's suitcase. In the open air the freed captive flung his arms abroad and drank in a deep breath of the clean, sweet, outdoor air. "God!" he gasped; "how good it is!" and after that he tramped in sober silence at Smith's heels until they reached the automobile.
It took some little careful manœuvring to get the roadster successfully turned on the railroad embankment, and Jibbey stood aside while Smith worked with the controls. Past this, he climbed into the spare seat, still without a word, and the rough four miles over the rotting cross-ties were soon left behind. At the crossing of the railroad main track and the turn into the highway, the river, bassooning deep-toned among its bowlders, was near at hand, and Jibbey spoke for the first time since they had left the mine mouth.
"I'm horribly thirsty, Monty. That water in the mine had copper or something in it, and I couldn't drink it. You didn't know that, did you? – when you put me in there, I mean? Won't you stop the car and let me go stick my face in that river?"
The car was brought to a stand and Jibbey got out to scramble down the river bank in the starlight. Obeying some inner prompting which he did not stop to analyze, Smith left his seat behind the wheel and walked over to the edge of the embankment where Jibbey had descended. The path to the river's margin was down the steep slope of a rock fill made in widening the highway to keep it clear of the railroad track. With the glare of the roadster's acetylenes turned the other way, Smith could see Jibbey at the foot of the slope lowering himself face downward on his propped arms to reach the water. Then, for a single instant, the murderous underman rose up and laughed. For in that instant, Jibbey, careless in his thirst, lost his balance and went headlong into the torrent.
