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!"
"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.