Kitabı oku: «The Real Man», sayfa 17

XXVIII
The Straddler

Since Brewster was a full-fledged city, its banks closed at three o'clock. Ten minutes after the hour, which happened also to be about the same length of time after Starbuck and Smith had reached town, Mr. Crawford Stanton got himself admitted by the janitor at the side door of the Brewster City National. President Kinzie was still at his desk in his private room, and the promoter entered unannounced.

"I thought I'd hang off and give you the limit – all the time there was," he said, dropping into the debtor's chair at the desk-end. And then, with a quarrelsome rasp in his tone: "Are you getting ready to switch again?"

Though his victims often cursed the banker for his shrewd caution and his ruthless profit-takings, no one had ever accused him of timidity in a stand-up encounter.

"You've taken that tone with me before, Stanton, and I don't like it," he returned brusquely. "I've been willing to serve you, as I could, in a business matter, and I am still willing to serve you; but you may as well keep it in mind that neither you, nor the people you represent, own the Brewster City National, or any part of it, in fee simple."

"We can buy you out any minute we think we need you," retorted Stanton. "But never mind about that. Your man came back from the Topaz last night; I know, because I make it my business to keep cases on you and everybody else. You've let the better part of the day go by without saying a word, and I've drawn the only conclusion there is to draw: you're getting ready to swap sides again."

Kinzie frowned his impatience. "If I have to do business with your people much longer, Mr. Stanton, I shall certainly suggest that they put a man in charge out here who can control his temper. I have acted in perfect good faith with you from the beginning. What you say is true; our man did return from the Topaz last night. But I thought it wise to make a few investigations on my own account before we should be committed to the course you advocated, and it is fortunate for us that I did. Here is Mr. Richlander's letter."

Stanton read the letter through hastily, punctuating its final sentence with a brittle oath.

"And you've muddled over this all day, when every hour is worth more to us than your one-horse bank could earn in a year?" he rapped out. "What have you done? Have you telegraphed this sheriff?"

"No; and neither will you when I tell you the facts. I was afraid you might go off at half-cock, as usual, if I turned the matter over to you. You see what Mr. Richlander says, and you will note his description of the man Smith who is wanted in Lawrenceville. It doesn't tally in any respect with Baldwin's treasurer, and the common name aroused my suspicions at once. We had nothing to go on unless we could identify our man definitely, so I took the straightforward course and went to Miss Richlander."

Stanton's laugh was a derisive shout.

"You need a guardian, Kinzie; you do, for a fact!" he sneered. "You sit here, day in and day out, like a greedy old spider in the middle of a web, clawing in a man-fly every time the door opens, but what you don't know about women – Bah! you make my back ache! Of course, the girl pulled the wool over your eyes; any woman could do that!"

"You are not gaining anything by being abusive, Stanton. As I have said, it is fortunate for all of us that I took the matter into my own hands and used a little ordinary common sense. There are two Smiths, just as I suspected when I read Mr. Richlander's letter. Miss Richlander didn't ask me to take her word for it. She called in a young man named Jibbey, who arrived here, direct from Lawrenceville, as I understand, last evening. He is a banker's son, and he knows both Smiths. This man of Baldwin's is not the one Mr. Richlander is trying to describe in that letter."

Stanton bit the tip from a cigar and struck a light.

"Kinzie," he said, "you've got me guessing. If you are really the easy mark you are trying to tell me you are, you have no business running a bank. I'm going to be charitable and put it the other way around. You think we're going to lose out, and you are trying to throw me off the scent. You had a long talk with Colonel Baldwin this morning – I kept cases on that, too – and you figured that you'd make money by seesawing again. I'm glad to be able to tell you that you are just about twenty-four hours too late."

The round-bodied banker righted his pivot-chair with a snap and his lips were puffed out like the lips of a swimmer who sees the saving plank drifting out of reach.

"You are wrong, Stanton; altogether wrong!" he protested. "Baldwin was here because I sent for him to make a final attempt to swing him over to the compromise. You are doing me the greatest possible injustice!"

Stanton rose and made ready to go.

"I think that would be rather hard to do, Kinzie," he flung back. "Nobody loves a trimmmer. But in the present case you are not going to lose anything. We'll take your stock at par, as I promised you we would."

It was at this crisis that David Kinzie showed himself as the exponent of the saying that every man has his modicum of saving grace, by smiting upon the arm of his chair and glaring up at the promoter.

"There's another promise of yours that you've got to remember, too, Stanton," he argued hoarsely. "You've got to hold Dexter Baldwin harmless!"

Stanton's smile was a mask of pure malice. "I've made you no definite promise as to that; but you shall have one now. I'll promise to break Baldwin in two and throw him and his ranchmen backers out of the Timanyoni. That's what you get for playing fast and loose with two people at the same time. When you look over your paying teller's statement for the day, you'll see that I have withdrawn our account from your tin-horn money shop. Good-day."

Five minutes later the promoter was squared before his own desk in the office across the street and was hastily scribbling a telegram while a messenger boy waited. It was addressed to Sheriff Macauley, at Lawrenceville, and the wording of it showed how completely Stanton was ignoring Banker Kinzie's investigations.

Your man Montague Smith is here, known as John Smith, secretary and treasurer Timanyoni High Line Company. Wire authority quick to chief police Brewster for his arrest and send deputy with requisition. Rush or you lose him.

Crawford Stanton.

He let the boy go with this, but immediately set to work on another which was addressed to the great man whose private car, returning from the Pacific Coast, was due to reach Denver by the evening Union Pacific train. This second message he translated laboriously into cipher, working it out word by word from a worn code book taken from the safe. But the copy from which he translated, and which, after the cipher was made, he carefully destroyed, read thus:

The obstacle is removed. M'Graw and his men will take possession to-night and hold until we can make the turn.

Stanton.

XXIX
The Flesh-Pots of Egypt

Convinced by Verda Richlander's telephone message to the construction camp that he stood in no immediate danger, Smith spent the heel of the afternoon in the High Line offices, keeping in wire touch with Stillings, whom he had sent on a secret mission to Red Butte, and with Williams at the dam.

Colonel Baldwin, as he learned from Martin, had gone to attend the funeral of one of his neighbors, and was thus, for the moment, out of reach. Smith told himself that the colonel's presence or absence made little difference. The High Line enterprise was on the knees of the gods. If Williams could pull through in time, if the river-swelling storms should hold off, if Stanton should delay his final raid past the critical hour – and there was now good reason to hope that all of these contingencies were probable – the victory was practically won.

But in another field the fighting secretary, denying himself in the privacy of his office to everybody but Martin, found small matter for rejoicing. It was one of life's ironies that the metamorphosis which had shown him, among other things, the heights and depths of a pure sentiment had apparently deprived him of the power to awaken it in the woman he loved.

It was thus that he was interpreting Corona Baldwin's attitude. She had recognized the transformation as a thing in process, and had been interested in it as a human experiment. Though it was chiefly owing to her beckoning that he had stepped out of the working ranks at the construction camp, he felt that he had never measured up to her ideals, and that her influence over him, so far as it was exerted consciously, was as impersonal as that of the sun on a growing plant. She had wished objectively to see the experiment succeed, and had been willing to use such means as had come to hand to make it succeed. For this cause, he concluded, with a curiously bitter taste in his mouth, her interest in the human experiment was his best warrant for shutting the door upon his love dream. Sentiment, the world over, has little sympathy with laboratory processes, and the woman who loves does not apply acid tests and call the object of her love a coward.

Letting the sting of the epithet have its full effect, he admitted that he was a coward. He had lacked the finer quality of courage when he had spirited Jibbey away, and he was lacking it again, now, in accepting the defensive alliance with Verda Richlander. He had not shown himself at the hotel since his return from the long drive with Starbuck, and the reason for it was that he knew his relations with Verda had now become an entanglement from which he was going to find it exceedingly difficult to release himself. She had served him, had most probably lied for him; and he assured himself, again with the bitter taste in his mouth, that there would be a price to pay.

It is through such doors of disheartenment that temptation finds its easiest entrance. For a dismal hour the old life, with its conventional enjoyments and limitations, its banalities, its entire freedom from the prickings of the larger ambitions and its total blindness on the side of broadening horizons and higher ideals, became a thing most ardently to be desired, a welcome avenue of escape from the toils and turmoils and the growing-pains of all the metamorphoses. What if a return to it should still be possible? What if, surrendering himself voluntarily, he should go back to Lawrenceville and fight it out with Watrous Dunham in the courts? Was there not more than an even chance that Dunham had offered the large reward for his apprehension merely to make sure that he would not return? Was it not possible that the thing the crooked president least desired was an airing of his iniquitous business methods in the courts?

Smith closed his desk at six o'clock and went across to the hotel to dress for dinner. The day of suspense was practically at an end and disaster still held aloof; was fairly outdistanced in the race, as it seemed. Williams's final report had been to the effect that the concrete-pouring was completed, and the long strain was off. Smith went to his rooms, and, as once before and for a similar reason, he laid his dress clothes out on the bed. He made sure that he would be required to dine with Verda Richlander, and he was stripping his coat when he heard a tap at the door and Jibbey came in.

"Glad rags, eh?" said the blasé one, with a glance at the array on the bed. "I've just run up to tell you that you needn't. Verda's dining with the Stantons, and she wants me to keep you out of sight until afterward. By and by, when she's foot-loose, she wants to see you in the mezzanine. Isn't there some quiet little joint where we two can go for a bite? You know the town, and I don't."

Smith put his coat on and together they circled the square to Frascati's, taking a table in the main café. While they were giving their dinner order, Starbuck came in and joined them, and Smith was glad. For reasons which he could scarcely have defined, he was relieved not to have to talk to Jibbey alone, and Starbuck played third hand admirably, taking kindly to the sham black sheep, and filling him up, in quiet, straight-faced humor, with many and most marvellous tales of the earlier frontier.

At the end of the meal, while Jibbey was still content to linger, listening open-mouthed to Starbuck's romancings, Smith excused himself and returned to the hotel. He had scarcely chosen his lounging-chair in a quiet corner of the mezzanine before Miss Richlander came to join him.

"It has been a long day, hasn't it?" she began evenly. "You have been busy with your dam, I suppose, but I – I have had nothing to do but to think, and that is something that I don't often allow myself to do. You have gone far since that night last May when you telephoned me that you would come up to the house later – and then broke your promise, Montague."

"In a way, I suppose I have," he admitted.

"You have, indeed. You are a totally different man."

"In what way, particularly?"

"In every conceivable way. If one could believe in transmigration, one would say that you had changed souls with some old, hard-hitting, rough-riding ancestor. Mr. Stanton has just been telling me the story of how, when you first came here, you fought barehanded with three miners somewhere back in the hills."

A bleak little smile of reminiscence wrinkled at the corners of the fighter's eyes.

"Did he tell you that I knocked them out – all three of them?" he asked.

"He said you beat them shamefully; and I tried to imagine you doing such a thing, and couldn't. Have your ambitions changed, too?"

"I am not sure now that I had any ambitions in that other life."

"Oh, yes, you had," she went on smoothly. "In the 'other life', as you call it, you would have been quite willing to marry a woman who could assure you a firm social standing and money enough to put you on a footing with other men of your capabilities. You wouldn't be willing to do that now, would you? – leaving the sentiment out as you used to leave it out then?"

"No, I hardly think I should."

Her laugh was musically low and sweet, and only mildly derisive.

"You are thinking that it is change of environment, wider horizons, and all that, which has changed you, Montague; but I know better. It is a woman, and, as you may remember, I have met her – twice." Then, with a faint glow of spiteful fire in the magnificent eyes: "How can you make yourself believe that she is pretty?"

He shrugged one shoulder in token of the utter uselessness of discussion in that direction.

"Sentiment?" he queried. "I think we needn't go into that, at this late day, Verda. It is a field that neither of us entered, or cared to enter, in the days that are gone. If I say that Corona Baldwin has – quite unconsciously on her part, I must ask you to believe – taught me what love means, that ought to be enough."

Again she was laughing softly.

"You seem to have broadly forgotten the old proverb about a woman scorned. What have you to expect from me after making such an admission as that?"

Smith pulled himself together and stood the argument firmly upon its unquestionable footing.

"Let us put all these indirections aside and be for the moment merely a man and a woman, as God made us, Verda," he said soberly. "You know, and I know, that there was never any question of love involved in our relations past and gone. We might have married, but in that case neither of us would have gotten or exacted anything more than the conventional decencies and amenities. We mustn't try to make believe at this late day. You had no illusions about me when I was Watrous Dunham's hired man; you haven't any illusions about me now."

"Perhaps not," was the calm rejoinder. "And yet to-day I have lied to save you from those who are trying to crush you."

"I told you not to do that," he rejoined quickly.

"I know you did; and yet, when you went away this morning you knew perfectly well that I was going to do it if I should get the opportunity. Didn't you, Montague?"

He nodded slowly; common honesty demanded that much.

"Very well; you accepted the service, and I gave it freely. Mr. Kinzie believes now that you are another Smith – not the one who ran away from Lawrenceville last May. Tell me: would the other woman have done as much if the chance had fallen to her?"

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I hope not," but he did not say it. Instead, he said: "But you don't really care, Verda; in the way you are trying to make me believe you do."

"Possibly not; possibly I am wholly selfish in the matter and am only looking for some loophole of escape."

"Escape? From whom?"

She looked away and shook her head. "From Watrous Dunham, let us say. You didn't suspect that, did you? It is so, nevertheless. My father desires it; and I suppose Watrous Dunham would like to have my money – you know I have something in my own right. Perhaps this may help to account for some other things – for your trouble, for one. You were in his way, you see. But never mind that: there are other matters to be considered now. Though Mr. Kinzie has been put off the track, Mr. Stanton hasn't. I have earned Mr. Stanton's ill-will because I wouldn't tell him about you, and this evening, at table, he took it out on me."

"In what way?"

"He gave me to understand, very plainly, that he had done something; that there was a sensation in prospect for all Brewster. He was so exultantly triumphant that it fairly frightened me. The fact that he wasn't afraid to show some part of his hand to me – knowing that I would be sure to tell you – makes me afraid that the trap has already been set for you."

"In other words, you think he has gone over Kinzie's head and has telegraphed to Lawrenceville?"

"Montague, I'm almost certain of it!"

Smith stood up and put his hands behind him.

"Which means that I have only a few hours, at the longest," he said quietly. And then: "There is a good bit to be done, turning over the business of the office, and all that: I've been putting it off from day to day, saying that there would be time enough to set my house in order after the trap had been sprung. Now I am like the man who has put off the making of his will until it is too late. Will you let me thank you very heartily and vanish?"

"What shall you do?" she asked.

"Set my house in order, as I say – as well as I can in the time that remains. There are others to be considered, you know."

"Oh; the plain-faced little ranch girl among them, I suppose?"

"No; thank God, she is out of it entirely – in the way you mean," he broke out fervently.

"You mean that you haven't spoken to her – yet?"

"Of course I haven't. Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?"

"But you are not really guilty."

"That doesn't make any difference: Watrous Dunham will see to it that I get what he has planned to give me."

She was tapping an impatient tattoo on the carpet with one shapely foot.

"Why don't you turn this new leaf of yours back and go home and fight it out with Watrous Dunham, once for all?" she suggested.

"I shall probably go, fast enough, when Macauley or one of his deputies gets here with the extradition papers," he returned. "But as to fighting Dunham, without money – "

She looked up quickly, and this time there was no mistaking the meaning of the glow in the magnificent brown eyes.

"Your friends have money, Montague – plenty of it. All you have to do is to say that you will defend yourself. I am not sure that Watrous Dunham couldn't be made to take your place in the prisoner's dock, or that you couldn't be put in his place in the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. You have captured Tucker Jibbey, and that means Tucker's father; and my father – well, when it comes to the worst, my father always does what I want him to. It's his one weakness."

For one little instant Smith felt the solid ground slipping from beneath his feet. Here was a way out, and his quick mentality was showing him that it was a perfectly feasible way. As Verda Richlander's husband and Josiah Richlander's son-in-law, he could fight Dunham and win. And the reward: once more he could take his place in the small Lawrenceville world, and settle down to the life of conventional good report and ease which he had once thought the acme of any reasonable man's aspirations. But at the half-yielding moment a word of Corona Baldwin's flashed into his brain and turned the scale: "It did happen in your case … giving you a chance to grow and expand, and to break with all the old traditions … and the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose." It was the reincarnated Smith who met the look in the beautiful eyes and made answer.

"No," was the sober decision; and then he gave his reasons. "If I could do what you propose, I shouldn't be worth the powder it would take to drive a bullet through me, Verda, for now, you see, I know what love means. You say I have changed, and I have changed: I can imagine the past-and-gone J. Montague jumping at the chance you are offering. But the mill will never grind with the water that is past: I'll take what is coming to me, and try to take it like a man. Good-night – and good-by." And he turned his back upon the temptation and went away.

Fifteen minutes later he was in his office in the Kinzie Building, trying in vain to get Colonel Baldwin on the distance wire; trying also – and also in vain – to forget the recent clash and break with Verda Richlander. He had called it a temptation at the moment, but perhaps it was scarcely that. It was more like a final effort of the man who had been to retransform the man who was. For a single instant the doors of all his former ambitions had stood open. He saw how Josiah Richlander's money and influence, directed by Verda's compelling demands, could be used to break Dunham; and that done, all the rest would be easy, all the paths to the success he had once craved would be made smooth.

On the other hand, there was everything to lose, and nothing, as the world measures results, to be gained. In a few hours at the furthest the good name he had earned in Brewster would be hopelessly lost, and, so far as human foresight could prefigure, there was nothing ahead but loss and bitter disgrace. In spite of all this, while the long-distance "central" was still assuring him that the Hillcrest wire was busy, he found time to be fiercely glad that the choice had been only a choice offered and not a choice accepted. For love's sake, if for no higher motive, he would go down like a man, fighting to the end for the right to live and think and love as a man.

He was jiggling the switch of the desk 'phone for the twentieth time in the effort to secure the desired line of communication with Baldwin when a nervous step echoed in the corridor and the door opened to admit William Starbuck. There was red wrath in the mine owner's ordinarily cold eyes when he flung himself into a chair and eased the nausea of his soul in an outburst of picturesque profanity.

"The jig's up – definitely up, John," he was saying, when his speech became lucid enough to be understood. "We know now what Stanton's 'other string' was. A half-hour ago, a deputy United States marshal, with a posse big enough to capture a town, took possession of the dam and stopped the work. He says it's a court order from Judge Lorching at Red Butte, based on the claims of that infernal paper railroad!"

Smith pushed the telephone aside.

"But it's too late!" he protested. "The dam is completed; Williams 'phoned me before I went to dinner. All that remains to be done to save the charter is to shut the spillways and let the water back up so that it will flow into the main ditch!"

"Right there's where they've got us!" was the rasping reply. "They won't let Williams touch the spillway gates, and they're not going to let him touch them until after we have lost out on the time limit! Williams's man says they've put the seal of the court on the machinery and have posted armed guards everywhere. Wouldn't that make you run around in circles and yelp like a scalded dog?"