Kitabı oku: «The Real Man», sayfa 5
VII
A Notice to Quit
Once started and given its push, the gray roadster drifted backward from the railroad crossing and kept on until it came to rest in the sag at the turn in the road. Running to overtake it, Smith found that the young woman was still trying, ineffectually, to free herself. In releasing the clutch her dress had been caught and Smith was glad enough to let the extricating of the caught skirt and the cranking of the engine serve for a breath-catching recovery.
When he stepped back to "tune" the spark the young woman had subsided into the mechanician's seat and was retying her veil with fingers that were not any too steady. She was small but well-knit; her hair was a golden brown and there was a good deal of it; her eyes were set well apart, and in the bright morning sunlight they were a slaty gray – of the exact shade of the motor veil she was rearranging. Smith had a sudden conviction that he had seen the wide-set eyes before; also the straight little nose and the half boyish mouth and chin, though where he had seen them the conviction could give no present hint.
"I sup-pup-pose I ought to say something appropriate," she was beginning, half breathlessly, while Smith stood at the fender and grinned in character-not with the ex-leader of the Lawrenceville younger set, but with the newer and more elemental man of all work on a desert dam-building job. "Wha-what is the proper thing to say when you have just been sus-snatched out of the way of a railroad train?"
As J. Montague, the rescuer would have had a neatly turned rejoinder at his tongue's end; but the well-mannered phrases were altogether too conventional to suggest themselves to a strapping young barbarian in ill-fitting khaki and leggings and a slouch felt. Being unable to recall them, he laughed and pushed the J. Montague past still farther into the background.
"You don't have to say anything. It's been a long time since I've had a chance to make such a bully grand-stand play as this." And then: "You're Colonel Baldwin's daughter, aren't you?"
She nodded, saying:
"How did you know?"
"I know the car. And you have your father's eyes."
She did not seem to take it amiss that he was making her eyes a basis for comparisons. One William Starbuck, a former cattleman and her father's time-tried friend, paid Miss Corona the compliment of saying that she never allowed herself to get "bogged down in the haughtinesses." She was her father's only son, as well as his only daughter, and she divided her time pretty evenly in trying to live up to both sets of requirements.
"You have introduced me; wo-won't you introduce yourself?" she said, when a second crash of the shifting freight-train spent itself and gave her an opening.
"I'm Smith," he told her; adding: "It's my real name."
Her laugh was an instant easing of tensions.
"Oh, yes; you're Mr. Williams's assistant. I've heard Colonel-da – my father, speak of you."
"No," he denied in blunt honesty, "I'm not Williams's assistant; at least, the pay-roll doesn't say so. Up at the camp they call me 'The Hobo,' and that's what I was a week or so ago when your father picked me up and gave me a lift to the dam in this car."
The young woman had apparently regained whatever small fraction of self-possession the narrow escape had shocked aside.
"Are they never going to take that miserable train out of the way?" she exclaimed. "I've got to see Mr. Williams, and there isn't a minute to spare. That is why I was breaking all the speed limits."
"They are about ready to pull out now," he returned, with a glance over his shoulder at the train. "I'm a sort of general utility man up at the camp: can you use me in any way?"
"I'm afraid you won't do," she replied, with a little laughing grimace that made him wonder where and when in the past he had seen some young woman do the same thing under exactly similar conditions. "It's a matter of business – awfully urgent business. Colonel-da – I mean my father, has gone up to Red Butte, and a little while ago they telephoned over to the ranch from the Brewster office to say that there was going to be some more trouble at the dam."
"They?" he queried.
"Mr. Martin, the head bookkeeper. He said he'd been trying to get Mr. Williams, but the wires to the camp were out of order."
"They're not," said Smith shortly, remembering that Perkins had been talking from the camp to the Brewster railroad agent within the half-hour. "But never mind that: go on."
Again she let him see the piquant little grimace.
"You say that just as if you were Mr. Williams's assistant," she threw back at him. "But I haven't time to quarrel with you this morning, Mr. Real-name Smith. If you'll take your foot off the fender I'll go on up to the dam and find Mr. Williams."
"You couldn't quarrel with me if you should try," was the good-natured rejoinder, and Smith tried in vain to imagine himself taking his present attitude with any of the young women he had known in his cotillon days – with Verda Richlander, for example. Then he added: "You won't find Williams at the camp. He started out early this morning to ride the lower ditch lines beyond Little Creek, and he said he wouldn't be back until some time to-morrow. Now will you tell me what you're needing – and give me a possible chance to get my pay raised?"
"Oh!" she exclaimed, with a little gasp of disappointment, presumably for the Williams absence. "I've simply got to find Mr. Williams – or somebody! Do you happen to know anything about the lawsuit troubles?"
"I know all about them; Williams has told me."
"Then I'll tell you what Mr. Martin telephoned. He said that three men were going to pretend to relocate a mining claim in the hills back of the dam, somewhere near the upper end of the reservoir lake-that-is-to-be. They're doing it so that they can get out an injunction, or whatever you call it, and then we'll have to buy them off, as the others have been bought off."
Smith was by this time entirely familiar with the maps and profiles and other records of the ditch company's lands and holdings.
"All the land within the limits of the flood level has been bought and paid for – some of it more than once, hasn't it?" he asked.
"Oh, yes; but that doesn't make any difference. These men will claim that their location was made long ago, and that they are just now getting ready to work it. It's often done in the case of mining claims."
"When is all this going to happen?" he inquired.
"It is already happening," she broke out impatiently. "Mr. Martin said the three men left town a little after daybreak and crossed on the Brewster bridge to go up on the other side of the Timanyoni. They had a two-horse team and a camping outfit. They are probably at work long before this time."
The young woman had taken her place again behind the big tiller-wheel, and Smith calmly motioned her out of it.
"Take the other seat and let me get in here," he said; and when she had changed over, he swung in behind the wheel and put a foot on the clutch pedal.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to take you on up to the camp, and then, if you'll lend me this car, I'll go and do what you hoped to persuade Williams to do – run these mining-claim jokers into the tall timber."
"But you can't!" she protested; "you can't do it alone! And, besides, they are on the other side of the river, and you can't get anywhere with the car. You'll have to go all the way back to Brewster to get across the river!"
It was just here that he stole another glance at the very-much-alive little face behind the motor veil; at the firm, round chin and the resolute, slaty-gray eyes.
"I suppose I ought to take you to the camp," he said. "But you may go along with me, if you want to – and are not afraid."
She laughed in his face.
"I was born here in the Timanyoni, and you haven't been here three weeks: do you think I'd be afraid to go anywhere that you'll go?"
"We'll see about that," he chuckled, matching the laugh; and with that he let the clutch take hold and sent the car rolling gently up to the level of the railroad embankment and across the rails of the main track.
On the right of way of the paralleling side-track he steered off the crossing and pulled the roadster around until it was headed fairly for the upper switch. Then he climbed down and recovered his coat which had been flung aside in the race with the train. Resuming his place behind the tiller-wheel, he put the motor in the reverse and began to back the car on the siding, steering so that the wheels on one side hugged the inside of one rail.
"What in the world are you trying to do?" questioned the young woman who had said she was not afraid.
"Wait," he temporized; "just wait a minute and get ready to hang on like grim death. We're going across on that trestle."
He fully expected her to shriek and grab for the steering-wheel. That, he told himself, was what the normal young woman would do. But Miss Corona disappointed him.
"You'll put us both into the river, and smash Colonel-daddy's car, but I guess the Baldwin family can stand it if you can," she remarked quite calmly.
Smith kept on backing until the car had passed the switch from which the spur branched off to cross to the material yard on the opposite side of the river. A skilful bit of juggling put the roadster over on the ties of the spur-track. Then he turned to his fellow risk.
"Sit low, and hang on with both hands," he directed. "Now!" and he opened the throttle.
The trestle was not much above two hundred feet long, and, happily, the cross-ties were closely spaced. Steered to a hair, the big car went bumping across, and in his innermost recesses Smith was saying to his immediate ancestor, the well-behaved bank clerk: "You swab! you never saw the day when you could do a thing like this … you thought you had me tied up in a bunch of ribbon, didn't you?"
If Miss Baldwin were frightened, she did not show it; and when the crossing was safely made, Smith caught a little side glance that told him he was making good. He jerked the roadster out of the entanglement of the railroad track and said: "You may sit up now and tell me which way to go. I don't know anything about the roads over here."
She pointed out the way across the hills, and a four-mile dash followed that set the blood dancing in Smith's veins. He had never before driven a car as fast as he wanted to; partly because he had never owned one powerful enough, and partly because the home-land speed laws – and his own past métier– would not sanction it. Up hill and down the big roadster raced, devouring the interspaces, and at the topping of the last of the ridges the young woman opened the small tool-box in the dividing arm between the seats and showed her reckless driver a large and serviceable army automatic snugly holstered under the lid.
"Daddy always keeps it there for his night drives on the horse ranges," she explained. But Smith was shaking his head.
"We're not going to need anything of that sort," he assured her, and the racing search for three men and a two-horse team was continued.
Beyond the final hill, in a small, low-lying swale which was well hidden from any point of view in the vicinity of the distant dam, they came upon the interlopers. There were three men and two horses and a covered wagon, as Martin's telephone message had catalogued them. The horses were still in the traces, and just beyond the wagon a long, narrow parallelogram, of the length and breadth of a legal mining claim, had been marked out by freshly driven stakes. In one end of the parallelogram two of the men were digging perfunctorily, while the third was tacking the legal notice on a bit of board nailed to one of the stakes.
Smith sent the gray car rocketing down into the swale, brought it to a stand with a thrust of the brakes, and jumped out. Once more the primitive Stone Age man in him, which had slept so long and so quietly under the Lawrenceville conventionalities, was joyously pitching the barriers aside.
"It's moving day for you fellows," he announced cheerfully, picking the biggest of the three as the proper subject for the order giving. "You're on the Timanyoni Ditch Company's land, and you know it. Pile into that wagon and fade away!"
The big man's answer was a laugh, pointed, doubtless, by the fact that the order giver was palpably unarmed. But on second thought he began to supplement the laugh with an oath. Smith's right arm shot out, and when the blow landed there were only two left to close in on him. In such sudden hostilities the advantages are all with the beginner. Having superior reach and a good bit more skill than either of the two tacklers, Smith held his own until he could get in a few more of the smashing right-handers, but in planting them he took punishment enough to make him Berserk-mad and so practically invincible. There was a fierce mingling of arms, legs, and bodies, sufficiently terrifying, one would suppose, to a young woman sitting calmly in an automobile a hundred yards away; but she neither cried out nor attempted to go to the rescue with the weapon which it seemed as if Smith might be needing.
The struggle was short in just proportion to its vigor, and at the end of it two of the trespassers were knocked out, and Smith was dragging the third over to the wagon, into which he presently heaved the man as if he had been a sack of meal. Miss Baldwin, sitting in the car, saw her ally dive into the covered wagon and come out with a pair of Winchesters. Pausing only long enough to smash the guns, one after the other, over the wagon-wheel, he started back after the two other men. They were not waiting to be carried to the wagon; they were up and running in a wide semicircle to reach their hope of retreat unslain, if that might be. It was all very brutal and barbarous, no doubt, but the colonel's daughter was Western born and bred, and she clapped her hands and laughed in sheer enthusiasm when she saw Smith make a show of chasing the circling runners.
He did not return to her until after he had pulled up the freshly driven stakes and thrown them away, and by that time the wagon, with the horses lashed to a keen gallop, was disappearing over the crest of the northern ridge.
"That's one way to get rid of them, isn't it?" said the emancipated bank man, jocosely, upon taking his place in the car to cramp it for the turn. "Was that something like the notion you had in mind?"
"Mercy, no!" she rejoined. And then: "Are you sure you are not hurt?"
"Not worth mentioning," he evaded. "Those duffers couldn't hurt anybody, so long as they couldn't get to their guns."
"But you have saved the company at your own expense. They will be sure to have you arrested."
"We won't cross that bridge until we come to it," he returned. "And, besides, there were no witnesses. You didn't see anything."
"Of course, I didn't; not the least little thing in the world!" she agreed, laughing with him.
"I thought not. There were too many of us for any single eye-witness to get more than the general effect." Then, in easy assertion of his victor rights: "If we were back in the country from which I have lately escaped it would be proper for me to ask your permission to drive you safely home. Since we are not, I shall assume the permission and do it anyway."
"Oh, is that necessary?" she asked, meaning, as he took it, nothing more than comradely deprecation at putting him to the trouble of it.
"Not absolutely necessary, perhaps, but decently prudent. You might drop me opposite the dam, but you'd have to pass those fellows somewhere on the way and they might try to make it unpleasant for you."
She made no further comment, and he sent the car spinning along over the hills to the westward. A mile short of the trestle river crossing they overtook and passed the wagon. Because he had the colonel's daughter with him, Smith put on a burst of speed and so gave the claim-jumpers no chance to provoke another battle. With the possible unpleasantnesses thus left in the rear, Smith knew well enough that there was really no reason for his going any farther than the spur-track trestle. None the less, he held to his announced determination, driving briskly down the north-side river road and on toward the grass-land ranches.
In the maze of cross-roads opposite the little city on the south bank of the river, Smith was out of his reckoning, and was obliged to ask his companion to direct him.
"I thought you weren't ever going to say anything any more," she sighed, in mock despair. "Take this road to the right."
"I can't talk and drive a speed-wagon at the same time," he told her, twisting the gray car into the road she had indicated, and he made the assertion good by covering the four remaining miles in the same preoccupied fashion.
There was a reason, of a sort, for his silence; two of them, to be exact. For one, he was troubled by that haunting sense of familiarity which was still trying to tell him that this was not his first meeting with Colonel Baldwin's daughter; and the other was much bigger, and more depressing. Though he was continually assuring himself that he had buried the former bank clerk and all of his belongings in a deep grave, some of the bank-clerk convictions still refused to remain decently in the coffin. One of these – and it had been daggering him sharply for the past half-hour – was the realization that in breaking with his past, he had broken also with the world of women – good women – at least to the extent of ever asking one of them to marry him.
Truly, though shadows are insubstantial things for the greater part, there is one exception. The shadow of a crime may involve both the innocent and the guilty quite as effectually as the thing itself, and Smith saw himself shut out automatically from the married beatitudes… He pushed the thought aside, coming back to the other one – the puzzle of familiarity – when Miss Baldwin pointed to a transplanted Missouri farm mansion, with a columned portico, standing in a grove of cottonwoods on the left-hand side of the road, telling him it was Hillcrest.
There was a massive stone portal fronting the road, and when he got down to open the gates the young woman took the wheel and drove through; whereupon, he decided that it was time for him to break away, and said so.
"But how will you get back to the camp?" she asked.
"I have my two legs yet, and the walking isn't bad."
"No; but you might meet those men again."
"That is the least of my troubles."
Miss Corona Baldwin, like the Missouri colonel, her father, came upon moments now and then when she had the ultimate courage of her impulses.
"I should have said you hadn't a trouble in the world," she asserted, meeting his gaze level-eyed.
The polite paraphrases of the coffined period were slipping to the end of his tongue, but he set his teeth upon them and said, instead: "That's all you know about it. What if I should tell you that you've been driving this morning with an escaped convict?"
"I shouldn't believe it," she said calmly.
"Well, you haven't – not quite," he returned, adding the qualifying phrase in sheer honesty.
She had untied her veil and was asking him hospitably if he wouldn't come in and meet her mother. Something in the way she said it, some little twist of the lips or look of the eyes, touched the spring of complete recognition and the familiarity puzzle vanished instantly.
"You forget that I am a workingman," he smiled. "My gang in the quarry will think I've found a bottle somewhere." And then: "Did you ever lose a glove, Miss Baldwin – a white kid with a little hole in one finger?"
"Dozens of them," she admitted; "and most of them had holes, I'm afraid. But what has that got to do with your coming in and meeting mamma and letting her thank you for saving my life?"
"Nothing at all, of course," he hastened to say; and with that he bade her good-by rather abruptly and turned his back upon the transplanted Missouri mansion, muttering to himself as he closed the portal gates behind him: "'Baldwin,' of course! What an ass I was not to remember the name! And now I've got the other half of it, too; it's 'Corona.'"
