The Real Man

XIII

The Narrow World

At the fresh newspaper reminder that his sudden bound upward from the laboring ranks to the executive headship of the irrigation project had merely made him a more conspicuous target for the man-hunters, Smith scanted himself of sleep and redoubled his efforts to put the new company on a sound and permanent footing. In the nature of things he felt that his own shrift must necessarily be short. Though his own immediate public was comparatively small, the more or less dramatic coup in Timanyoni High Line had advertised him thoroughly. He was rapidly coming to be the best-known man in Brewster, and he cherished no illusions about lost identities, or the ability to lose them, in a land where time and space have been wired and railroaded pretty well out of existence.

Moreover, Dunham's bank was a member of a protective association, and Smith knew how wide a net could be spread and drawn when any absconding employee was really wanted. The doubling of the reward gave notice that Dunham was vindictively in earnest, and in that event it would be only a question of time until some one of the hired man-hunters would hit upon the successful clew.

It was needful that he should work while the day was his in which to work; and he did work. There was still much to be done. Williams was having a threat of labor troubles at the dam, and Stillings had unearthed another possible flaw in the land titles dating back to the promotion of a certain railroad which had never gotten far beyond the paper stage and the acquiring of some of its rights of way.

Smith flung himself masterfully at the new difficulties as they arose, and earned his meed of praise from the men for whom he overcame them. But under the surface current of the hurrying business tide a bitter undertow was beginning to set in. In every characterizing change it is inevitable that there should be some loss in the scrapping of the old to make way for the new. Smith saw himself in two aspects. In one he stood as a man among men, with a promise of winning honors and wealth; with the still more ecstatic promise of being able, perhaps, to win the love of the vivifying young woman who had once touched the spring of sentiment in him – and was touching it again. In the other he was a fugitive and an outlaw, waiting only for some spreader of the net to come and tap him on the shoulder.

He took his first decided backward step on the night when he went into a hardware store and bought a pistol. The free, fair-fighting spirit which had sent him barehanded against the three claim-jumpers was gone and in its place there was a fell determination, undefined as yet, but keying itself to the barbaric pitch. With the weapon in his pocket he could look back over the transforming interspaces with a steadier eye. Truly, he had come far since that night in the Lawrenceville Bank when a single fierce gust of passion had plucked him away from all the familiar landmarks.

And as for Corona Baldwin, there were days in which he set his jaw and told himself that nothing, even if it were the shedding of blood, should stand in the way of winning her. It was his right as a man; he had done nothing to make himself the outlaw that the Lawrenceville indictment declared him to be; therefore he would fight for his chance – slay for it, if need be. But there were other days when the saner thought prevailed and he saw the pit of selfishness into which the new barbarisms were plunging him. The Baldwins were his friends, and they were accepting him in the full light of the inference that he was a man under a cloud. Could he take a further advantage of their generosity by involving them still more intimately in his own particular entanglement? He assured himself that he couldn't and wouldn't; that though he might, indeed, commit a murder when the pinch came, he was still man enough to stay away from Hillcrest.

He was holding this latter view grimly on an evening when he had worked himself haggard over the draft of the city ordinance which was to authorize the contract with the High Line Company for lights and power. It had been a day of nagging distractions. A rumor had been set afoot – by Stanton, as Smith made no doubt – hinting that the new dam would be unsafe when it should be completed; that its breaking, with the reservoir behind it, would carry death and destruction to the lowlands and even to the city. Timid stockholders, seeing colossal damage suits in the bare possibility, had taken the alarm, and Smith had spent the greater part of the day in trying to calm their fears. For this cause, and some others, he was on the ragged edge when Baldwin dropped in on his way home from the dam and protested.

"Look here, John; you're overdoing this thing world without end! It's six o'clock, man! – quitting-time. Another week of this grinding and you'll be hunting a nice, quiet cot in the railroad hospital, and then where'll we be? You break it off short, right now, and go home with me and get your dinner and a good night's rest. No, by Jupiter, I'm not going to let you off, this trip. Get your coat and hat and come along, or I'll rope you down and hog-tie you."

For once in a way, Smith found that there was no fight left in him, and he yielded, telling himself that another acceptance of the Baldwin hospitality, more or less, could make no difference. But no sooner was the colonel's gray roadster headed for the bridge across the Timanyoni than the exhilarating reaction set in. In a twinkling the business cares, and the deeper worries as well, fled away, and in their place heart-hunger was loosed. If Corona would give him this one evening, rest him, revive him, share with him some small portion of her marvellous vitality…

He did not overrate the stimulative effect of her presence; of the mere fact of propinquity. When the roadster drew up at the portico of the transplanted Missouri plantation mansion she was waiting on the steps. It was dinner-time, and she had on an evening gown of some shimmering, leafy stuff that made her look more like a wood-nymph than he had ever supposed any mere mortal woman could look. When she stood on tiptoes for her father's kiss, Smith knew the name of his malady, however much he may have blinked it before; knew its name, and knew that it would have to be reckoned with, whatever fresh involvements might be lying in wait for him behind the curtain of the days to come.

After dinner, a meal at which he ate little and was well content to satisfy the hunger of his soul by the road of the eye, Smith went out to the portico to smoke. The most gorgeous of mountain sunsets was painting itself upon the sky over the western Timanyonis, but he had no eyes for natural grandeurs, and no ears for any sound save one – the footstep he was listening for. It came at length, and he tried to look as tired as he had been when the colonel made him close his desk and leave the office; tried and apparently succeeded.

"You poor, broken-down Samson, carrying all the brazen gates of the money-Philistines on your shoulders! You had to come to us at last, didn't you? Let me be your Delilah and fix that chair so that it will be really comfortable." She said it only half mockingly, and he forgave the sarcasm when she arranged some of the hammock pillows in the easiest of the porch chairs and made him bury himself luxuriously in them.

Still holding the idea, brought over from that afternoon of the name questioning, that she had in some way discovered his true identity, Smith was watching narrowly for danger-signals when he thanked her and said:

"You say it just as it is. I had to come. But you could never be anybody's Delilah, could you? She was a betrayer, if you recollect."

He made the suggestion purposely, but it was wholly ignored, and there was no guile in the slate-gray eyes.

"You mean that you didn't want to come?"

"No; not that. I have wanted to come every time your father has asked me. But there are reasons – good reasons – why I shouldn't be here."

If she knew any of the reasons she made no sign. She was sitting in the hammock and touching one slippered toe to the flagstones for the swinging push. From Smith's point of view she had for a background the gorgeous sunset, but he could not see the more distant glories.

"We owe you much, and we are going to owe you more," she said. "You mustn't think that we don't appreciate you at your full value. Colonel-daddy thinks you are the most wonderful somebody that ever lived, and so do a lot of the others."

"And you?" he couldn't resist saying.

"I'm just plain ashamed – for the way I treated you when you were here before. I've been eating humble-pie ever since."

Smith breathed freer. Nobody but a most consummate actress could have simulated her frank sincerity. He had jumped too quickly to the small sum-in-addition conclusion. She did not know the story of the absconding bank cashier.

"I don't know why you should feel that way," he said, eager, now, to run where he had before been afraid to walk.

"I do. And I believe you wanted to shame me. I believe you gave up your place at the dam and took hold with daddy more to show me what an inconsequent little idiot I was than for any other reason. Didn't you, really?"

He laughed in quiet ecstasy at this newest and most adorable of the moods.

"Honest confession is good for the soul: I did," he boasted. "Now beat that for frankness, if you can."

"I can't," she admitted, laughing back at him. "But now you've accomplished your purpose, I hope you are not going to give up. That would be a little hard on Colonel-daddy."

"Oh, no; I'm not going to give up – until I have to."

"Does that mean more than it says?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it does."

She was silent for the length of time that it took the flaming crimson in the western sky to fade to salmon.

"I know I haven't earned the right to ask you any of the whys," she said at the end of the little pause.

"Women like you – only there are not any more of them, I think – don't have to earn things. The last time you were in the office you said enough to let me know that you and your father and Williams – all of you, in fact – suspect that I am out here under a cloud of some sort. It is true."

"And that is why you say you won't give up until you have to?"

"That is the reason; yes."

There was another little interval of silence and then she said: "I suppose you couldn't tell me – or anybody – could you?"

"I can tell you enough so that you will understand why I may not be permitted to go on and finish what I have begun in Timanyoni High Line. When I left home I thought I was a murderer."

He would not look at her to see how she was taking it, but he could not help hearing her little gasp.

"Oh!" she breathed; and then: "You say you 'thought.' Wasn't it so?"

"It happened not to be. The man didn't die. I suppose I might say that I didn't try to kill him; but that would hardly be true. At the moment, I didn't care. Have you ever felt that way? – you know what I mean, just utterly blind and reckless as to consequences?"

"I have a horrible temper, if that covers it."

"It's something like that," he conceded; "only, up to the moment when it happened I hadn't known that I had any temper. Perhaps I might say that the provocation was big enough, though the law won't say so."

The pink flush had faded out of the high western horizon and the stars were coming out one at a time. The colonel had come up from the ranch bunk-house where the men slept, and was smoking his long-stemmed corn-cob pipe on the lawn under the spreading cottonwoods. Peace was the key-note of the perfect summer night, and even for the man under the shadow of the law there was a quiet breathing space.

"I don't believe you could ever kill a man in cold blood," said the young woman in the hammock. "I'm sure you know that, yourself, and it ought to be a comfort to you."

"It might have been once, but it isn't any more."

"Why not?"

"I suppose it is because I left a good many things behind me when I ran away – besides the man I thought was dead. In that other life I never knew what it meant to fight for the things I wanted; perhaps it was because I never wanted anything very badly, or possibly it was because the things I did want came too easily."

"They are not coming so easily now?"

"No; but I'm going to have them at any cost. You will know what I mean when I say that nothing, not even human life, seems so sacred to me as it used to."

"Have you ever talked with daddy about all these things?"

"No. You don't know men very well; they don't talk about such things to one another. The average man tells some woman, if he can be lucky enough to find one who will listen."

"You haven't told me all of it," she said, after another hesitant pause. "You have carefully left the woman out of it. Was she pretty?"

Smith buried his laugh so deep that not a flicker of it came to the surface.

"Is that the open inference always? – that a man tries to kill another because there is a woman in it?"

"I merely asked you if she was pretty."

"There was a woman," he answered doggedly; "though she had nothing to do with the trouble. I was going to call on her the night I – the night the thing happened. I hope she isn't still waiting for me to ring the door-bell."

"You haven't told her where you are?"

"No; but she's not losing any sleep about that. She isn't that kind. Indeed, I'm not sure that she wouldn't turn the letter over to the sheriff, if I should write her. Let's clear this up before we go any further. It was generally understood, in the home town, you know, that we were to be married some time, though nothing definite had ever been said by either of us. There wasn't any sentiment, you understand; I was idiotic enough at the time to believe that there wasn't any such thing as sentiment. It has cost me about as much to give her up as it has cost her to give me up – and that is a little less than nothing."

Again the silence came between. The colonel was knocking his pipe bowl against a tree trunk and an interruption was threatening. When the low voice came again from the hammock it was troubled.

"You are disappointing me, now. You are taking it very lightly, and apparently you neither know nor care very much how the woman may be taking it. Perhaps there wasn't any sentiment on your part."

Smith was laughing quietly. "If you could only know Verda Richlander," he said. "Imagine the most beautiful thing you can think of, and then take the heart out of it, and – but, hold on, I can do better than that," and he drew out his watch and handed it to her with the back case opened.

She took the watch and stopped the hammock swing to let the light from the nearest window fall upon the photograph.

"She is very beautiful; magnificently beautiful," she said, returning the watch. And an instant later: "I don't see how you could say what you did about the sentiment. If I were a man – "

The colonel had mounted the steps and was coming toward them. The young woman slipped from the hammock and stood up.

"Don't go," said Smith, feeling as if he were losing an opportunity and leaving much unsaid that ought to be said. But the answer was a quiet "good night" and she was gone.

Smith went back to town with the colonel the next morning physically rested, to be sure, but in a frame of mind bordering again upon the sardonic. In the cold light of the following day, after-dinner confidences, even with the best-beloved, have a way of showing up all their puerilities and inadequacies. Two things, and two alone, stood out clearly: one was that he was most unmistakably in love with Corona Baldwin, and the other was that he had shown her the weakest side of himself by appealing like a callow boy to her sympathies.

Hence there was another high resolve not to go to Hillcrest again until he could go as a free man; a resolve which, it is perhaps needless to say, was broken thereafter as often as the colonel asked him to go. Why, in the last resort, Smith should have finally chosen another confidant in the person of William Starbuck, the reformed cow-puncher, he scarcely knew. But it was to Starbuck that he appealed for advice when the sentimental situation had grown fairly desperate.

"I've told you enough so that you can understand the vise-nip of it, Billy," he said to Starbuck one night when he had dragged the mine owner up to the bath-room suite in the Hophra House, and had told him just a little, enough to merely hint at his condition. "You see how it stacks up. I'm in a fair way to come out of this the biggest scoundrel alive – the piker who takes advantage of the innocence of a good girl. I'm not the man she thinks I am. I am standing over a volcano pit every minute of the day. If it blows up, I'm gone, obliterated, wiped out."

"Is it aiming to blow up?" asked Starbuck sagely.

"I don't know any more about that than you do. It is the kind that usually does blow up sooner or later. I've prepared for it as well as I can. What Colonel Baldwin and the rest of you needed was a financial manager, and Timanyoni High Line has its fighting chance – which was more than Timanyoni Ditch had when I took hold. If I should drop out now, you and Maxwell and the colonel and Kinzie could go on and make the fight; but that doesn't help out in this other matter."

Starbuck smoked in silence for a long minute or two before he said: "Is there another woman in it, John?"

"Yes; but not in the way you mean. It never came to anything more than a decently frank friendship, though the whole town had it put up that it was all settled and we were going to be married."

"Huh! I wonder if that's what she'd say? You say it never came to anything more than a friendship: maybe that's all right from your side of the fence. But how about the girl?"

The harassed one's smile was grimly reminiscent.

"If you knew her you wouldn't ask, Billy. She is the modern, up-to-date young woman in all that the term implies. When she marries she will give little and ask little, outside of the ordinary amenities and conventionalities."

"That's what you say; and maybe it's what you think. But when you have to figure a woman into it, you never can tell, John. Are you keeping in touch with this other girl?"

Smith shook his head.

"No; I shall probably never see her or hear from her again. Not that it matters a penny's worth to either of us. And your guess was wrong if you thought that things past are having any effect on things present. Corona Baldwin stands in a class by herself."

"She's a mighty fine little girl, John," said Starbuck slowly. "Any one of a dozen fellows I could name would give all their old shoes to swap chances with you."

"That isn't exactly the kind of advice I'm needing," was the sober rejoinder.

"No; but it was the kind you were wanting, when you tolled me off up here," laughed the ex-cow-puncher. "I know the symptoms. Had 'em myself for about two years so bad that I could wake up in the middle of the night and taste 'em. Go in and win. Maybe the great big stumbling-block you're worrying about wouldn't mean anything at all to an open-minded young woman like Corona; most likely it wouldn't."

"If she could know the whole truth – and believe it," said Smith musingly.

"You tell her the truth, and she'll take care of the believing part of it, all right. You needn't lose any sleep about that."

Smith drew a long breath and removed his pipe to say: "I haven't the nerve, Billy, and that's the plain fact. I have already told her a little of it. She knows that I – "

Starbuck broke in with a laugh. "Yes; it's a shouting pity about your nerve! You've been putting up such a blooming scary fight in this irrigation business that we all know you haven't any nerve. If I had your job in that, I'd be going around here toting two guns and wondering if I couldn't make room in the holster for another."

Smith shook his head.

"I was safe enough so long as Stanton thought I was the resident manager and promoter for a new bunch of big money in the background. But he has had me shadowed and tracked until now I guess he is pretty well convinced that I actually had the audacity to play a lone hand; and a bluffing hand, at that. That makes a difference, of course. Two days after I had climbed into the saddle here, he sent a couple of his strikers after me. I don't know just what their orders were, but they seemed to want a fight – and they got it. It was in Blue Pete's doggery, up at the camp."

"Guns?" queried Starbuck.

"Theirs; not mine, because I didn't have any. I managed to get the shooting-irons away from them before we had mixed very far."

"You're just about the biggest, long-eared, stiff-backed, stubborn wild ass of the wallows that was ever let loose in a half-reformed gun-country!" grumbled the ex-cow-man. "You're fixing to get yourself all killed up, Smith. Haven't you sense enough to see that these rustlers will rub you out in two twitches of a dead lamb's tail if they've made up their minds that you are the High Line main guy and the only one?"