VIII
Timanyoni Ditch
Smith had his vote of thanks from Colonel Dexter Baldwin in person late in the afternoon of the day following the summary eviction of the sham mine locators in the upper reservoir; presidential thanks for his prompt defense of the company's interests, and a warm outhanding of fatherly gratitude for the rescue at the unloading side-track. The vote was passed in Williams's sheet-iron office at the dam, the colonel having driven out to the camp for the express purpose; and the chief of construction himself was not present.
"You've loaded us up with a tolerably heavy obligation, Smith – Corry's mother and me," was the way the colonel summed up in the personal field. "If you hadn't been on deck and strictly on the job at that railroad crossing yesterday morning – "
"Don't mention it, Colonel," Smith broke in, protesting honestly as plain "John" where a "J. Montague" might have made self-gratulatory capital. "There is only one thing in this world more onerous than owing an obligation, and that is the feeling that you've got to live up to one. I did nothing more than any man would have done for any woman. You know it, and I know it. Let's leave it that way and forget it."
The tall Missourian's laugh was entirely approbative.
"I like that," he said. "It's a good, man-fashion way of looking at it. Corry wanted me to tell her what I was going to say to you, and I said I'd be hanged if I knew. I owe you one for making it easy. You know how I feel about it – how any father would feel; and that's enough."
"Plenty," was the brief rejoinder.
"But there's another chapter to it that neither of us can cross out; you'll have to come out to the ranch and let Corry's mother have a hack at you," Baldwin went on. "I couldn't figure you out of that if I should try. And now about those claim-jumpers: I suppose you didn't know any of them by name?"
"No."
"Corry says you gave them the time of their lives. By George, I wish I'd been there to see!" and the colonel slapped his leg and laughed. "Did they look like the real thing – sure-enough prospectors?"
"They looked like a bunch of hired assassins," said Smith, with a grin. "It's some more of the interference, isn't it?"
The colonel's square jaw settled into the fighting angle.
"How much do you know about this business mix-up of ours, Smith?" he asked.
"All that Williams could tell me in a little heart-to-heart talk we had the other day."
"You agreed with him that there was a tolerably big nigger in the wood-pile, didn't you?"
"I had already gathered that much from the camp gossip."
"Well, it's so. We're just about as helpless as a bunch of cattle in a sink-hole," was the ranchman president's confirmation of the camp guesses. "As long as it was a straightaway stunt of buying land and building a dam and digging a few ditches, we were in the fight. We knew what we wanted, and we had the money to go out and buy it. But now it looks as if we were aiming to get it where the chicken got the cleaver. If our hunch about the Escalante irrigation trust is right, we are not only going to lose our money and our work; we've run slap up against a proposition that will shut us out of the water altogether and force us to buy it of these Eastern sharks – at their own price. When it comes to that, we may as well make 'em a present of the entire Little Creek district. They can take it whenever they have a mind to."
Smith was thinking of the young woman with the resolute slaty-gray eyes when he said: "That is, of course, if you lie down and let them put the steam-roller over you. But you're not going to do that, are you?"
Baldwin shook his head as one who will not permit himself to minimize a hazard.
"Keep that notion of the cattle in a sink-hole in front of you, Smith, and you'll get a pretty fair idea of the chances. What in the name of the great horn spoon can we do – more than we have done?"
"There are a number of things that might be done," said Smith, falling back reflectively upon the presumably dead and buried bank-cashier part of him. "In the first place, these trust people can't take your dam and your ditch right of way until after they have bought up a voting control of your stock. It is very pointedly up to you and your fellow stockholders to say whether or not you are going to let them scare or force you into selling, isn't it?"
"I reckon maybe it is. But two of our men have already sold out, and more will follow. These Eastern sharks 've got the bulge on us; they have the money, and we're just about as good as dead broke."
"Of course," said the younger man. "That was part of the game; to swamp you with costly lawsuits, use up your capital, and break your credit. It's done every day in business, and in a thousand different ways, some of them pure robberies, but most of them legally defensible. You folks have made the mistake of letting it go too far on too small a capitalization. You're left without a fighting fund. Still, while there is life there is always hope. And if you can manage to stay in the game and play it out, there is big money in it for all of you; enough to make it well worth while for you to put up the fight of your lives."
"Big money? – you mean in saving our investment?"
"Oh, no; not at all; in cinching the other fellows," Smith put in genially. "As Williams explained it to me, there is the biggest kind of a killing in it for you people, if you can hold on and win out."
Colonel Dexter Baldwin lifted his soft hat and ran his fingers through his grizzled hair.
"Say, Smith; you mustn't forget that I'm from Missouri," he said half quizzically.
"But I shouldn't think you'd need to be 'shown' in this particular instance," was the smiling rejoinder. "Why are these Eastern capitalists spending their good money on a scheme to freeze out your little handful of ranch owners, Colonel? Surely you've asked yourself that question long before this, haven't you?"
"Why, yes; it's because they want to get something for nothing, isn't it?"
"In a general sense, of course, that is the basis of all crooked business schemes. But the chance to sell you people water from your own dam isn't the only thing or the main thing in this case; that part of it is merely incidental. Didn't Williams tell me that they are obliged to have this dam site, or, at least, one as high up the river as this, in order to get the water over to their newly alienated grant in the western half of the park?"
"I don't know what Bartley told you, but that is the fact."
"No way of dodging that, is there? They couldn't possibly build a dam of their own, lower down, and make it work, could they? I'm asking because what I don't know about irrigation engineering would fill a Carnegie library in a good-sized little city."
"You've got it straight," said the colonel. "A good part of the Escalante Grant lies higher than our Little Creek ranches. From any point farther down the river than this, they'd have to pump the water to get it up to the Escalante mesas."
"Very good. Then they're simply obliged to have your dam, or – Don't you see the alternative now, Colonel?"
"Heavens to Betsy!" exclaimed the breeder of fine horses, bringing his fist down upon Williams's desk with a crash that made the ink-bottles dance. And then: "The Lord have mercy! What a lot of fence-posts we are – the whole kit and b'ilin' of us! If they get the dam, they sell water to us; if they don't get it, we sell it to them!"
"That's it, exactly," Smith put in quietly. "And I should say that your stake in the game is worth the stiffest fight you can make to save it. Don't you agree with me?"
"Great Jehu! I should say so!" ejaculated the amateur trust fighter. Then he broke down the barriers masterfully. "That settles it, Smith. You can't wiggle out of it now, no way or shape. You've got to come over into Macedonia and help us. Williams tells me you refused him, but you can't refuse me."
If Smith hesitated, it was only partly on his own account. He was thinking again of the young woman with the honest eyes when he said: "Do you know why I turned Williams down when he spoke to me the other day?"
Colonel Dexter Baldwin had his faults, like other men, but they were not those of indirection.
"I reckon I do know, son," he said, with large tolerance. "You're a 'lame duck' of some sort; you've made that pretty plain in your talks with Williams, haven't you? But that's our lookout. Bartley is ready to swear that you are not a crooked crook, whatever else it is that you're dodging for, and if we want to shut our eyes to the way you won't loosen up about yourself… Besides, there's yesterday; and what you did down at the railroad crossing and out yonder in the hills – "
"We agreed to forget the yesterday incidents," the lame duck reminded him quickly. And then: "I ought to say 'No,' Colonel Baldwin; say it straight out, and stick to it. If I don't say it – if I ask for a little time – it is because I want to weigh up a few things – the things I can't talk about to you or to Williams. If, in the end, I should be fool enough to say 'Yes,' it will be merely because, the way things have turned out with me, I'd a little rather fight than eat. But even in that case it is only fair to you to say that, right in the middle of the scrap, I may fall to pieces on you."
Baldwin was too shrewd to try to push his advantage when there was, or seemed to be, a chance that the desired end was as good as half attained. And it was a purely manful prompting that made him get up and thrust out his hand to the young fellow who was trying to be as frank as he dared to be.
"Put it there, John," he said heartily. "Nobody in the Timanyoni is going to pry into you an inch farther than you care to let 'em; and if you get into trouble by helping us, you can count on at least one backer who will stand by you until the cows come home. Now then, hunt up your coat, and we'll drive over to Hillcrest for a bite to eat. I know you won't be easy in your mind until you've had it out with Corry's mother – about that little railroad trick – and you may as well do it now and have it over with. No; excuses don't go, this time. I had my orders from the Missus before I left town, and I know better than to go home without you. Never mind the commissary khaki. It won't be the first time that the working-clothes have figured at the Hillcrest table – not by a long shot."
And because he did not know how to frame a refusal that would refuse, Smith got his coat and went.
IX
Relapsings
Given his choice between the two, Smith would cheerfully have faced another hand-to-hand battle with the claim-jumpers in preference to even so mild a dip into the former things as the dinner at Hillcrest foreshadowed. The reluctance was not forced; it was real. The primitive man in him did not wish to be entertained. On the fast auto drive down to Brewster, across the bridge, and out to the Baldwin ranch Smith's humor was frankly sardonic. Dinners, social or grateful, were such childish things; so little worth the time and attention of a real man with work to do!
It mattered nothing that he had lived twenty-five years and more without suspecting this childishness of things social. That door was closed and another had been opened; beyond the new opening the prospect was as yet rather chaotic and rugged, to be sure, but the color scheme, if somewhat raw, was red-blood vivid, and the horizons were illimitable. Smith sat up in the mechanician's seat and straightened the loose tie under the soft collar of his working-shirt, smiling grimly as his thought leaped back to the dress clothes he had left lying on the bed in his Lawrenceville quarters. He cherished a small hope that Mrs. Baldwin might be shocked at the soft shirt and the khaki. It would serve her right for taking a man from his job.
The colonel did not try to make him talk, and the fifteen-mile flight down the river and across into the hills was shortly accomplished. At the stone-pillared portal he got out to open the gates. Down the road a little distance a horseman was coming at a smart gallop – at least, the rider figured as a man for the gate-opener until he saw that it was Corona Baldwin, booted and spurred and riding a man's saddle.
Smith let the gray car go on its way up the drive without him and held the gates open for the horse and its rider.
"So you weakened, did you? I'm disappointed in you," was Miss Baldwin's greeting. "You've made me lose my bet with Colonel-daddy. I said you wouldn't come."
"I had no business to come," he answered morosely. "But your father wouldn't let me off."
"Of course, he wouldn't; daddy never lets anybody off, unless they owe him money. Where are your evening clothes?"
Smith let the lever of moroseness slip back to the grinning notch. "They are about two thousand miles away, and probably in some second-hand shop by this time. What makes you think I ever wore a dress suit?" He had closed the gates and was walking beside her horse up the driveway.
"Oh, I just guessed it," she returned lightly, "and if you'll hold your breath, I'll guess again."
"Don't," he laughed. "You are going to say that at some time in my life I knew better than to accept anybody's dinner invitation undecorated. Maybe there was such a time, but if so, I am trying to forget it."
Her laugh was good-naturedly derisive.
"You'll forget it just so long as you are able to content yourself in a construction camp. I know the symptoms. There are times when I feel as if I'd simply blow up if I couldn't put on the oldest things I've got and go and gallop for miles on Shy, and other times when I want to put on all the pretty things I have and look soulful and talk nonsense."
"But you've been doing that – the galloping, I mean – all your life, haven't you?"
"Not quite. There were three wasted years in a finishing school back East. It is when I get to thinking too pointedly about them that I have to go out to the stable and saddle Shy."
They had reached the steps of the pillared portico, and a negro stable-boy, one of the colonel's importations from Missouri, was waiting to take Miss Baldwin's horse. Smith knew how to help a woman down from a side-saddle; but the two-stirruped rig stumped him. The young woman saw his momentary embarrassment and laughed again as she swung out of her saddle to stand beside him on the step.
"The women don't ride that way in your part of the country?" she queried.
"Not yet."
"I'm sorry for them," she scoffed. And then: "Come on in and meet mamma; you look as if you were dreading it, and, as Colonel-daddy says, it's always best to have the dreaded things over with."
Smith did not find his meeting with the daughter's mother much of a trial. She was neither shocked at his clothes nor disposed to be hysterically grateful over the railroad-crossing incident. A large, calm-eyed, sensible matron, some ten or a dozen years younger than the colonel, Smith put her, and with an air of refinement which was reflected in every interior detail of her house.
Smith had not expected to find the modern conveniences in a Timanyoni ranch-house, but they were there. The room to which the Indian house-boy led him had a brass bedstead and a private bath, and the rugs, if not true Tabriz, were a handsome imitation. Below stairs it was much the same. The dining-room was a beamed baronial hall, with a rough-stone fireplace big enough to take a cord-wood length, and on the hearth andirons which might have come down from the Elizabethan period. It was mid-June and the fireplace was empty, but its winter promise was so hospitable that Smith caught himself hoping that he might stay out of jail long enough to be able to see it in action.
The dinner was strictly a family meal, with the great mahogany table shortened to make it convenient for four. There were cut glass and silver and snowy napery, and Smith was glad that the colonel did most of the talking. Out of the past a thousand tentacles were reaching up to drag him back into the net of the conventional. With the encompassments to help, it was so desperately easy to imagine himself once more the "débutantes' darling," as Westfall had often called him in friendly derision. When the table-talk became general, he found himself joining in, and always upon the lighter side.
By the time the dessert came on, the transformation was complete. It was J. Montague, the cotillon leader, who sat back in his chair and told amiable little after-dinner stones, ignoring the colonel's heartinesses, and approving himself in the eyes of his hostess as a dinner guest of the true urban quality. Now and then he surprised a look in the younger woman's eyes which was not wholly sympathetic, he thought; but the temptation to show her that he was not at all the kind of man she had been taking him for was too strong to be resisted. Since she had seen fit to charge him with a dress-clothes past he would show her that he could live up to it.
Contrary to Smith's expectations, the colonel did not usurp him immediately after dinner. A gorgeous sunset was flaming over the western Timanyonis and there was time for a quiet stroll and a smoke under the silver-leafed cottonwoods with his hostess for a companion. In the little talk and walk, Smith found himself drawn more and more to the calm-eyed, well-bred matron who had given a piquant Corona to an otherwise commonplace world. He found her exceedingly well-informed; she had read the books that he had read, she had heard the operas that he had always wanted to hear, and if any other bond were needed, he found it in the fact that she was a native of his own State.
Under such leadings the relapse became an obsession. He abandoned himself shamelessly to the J. Montague attitude, and the events crowding so thickly between the tramp-like flight from Lawrenceville and the present were as if they had not been. Mrs. Baldwin saw nothing of the rude fighter of battles her daughter had drawn for her, and wondered a little. She knew Corona's leanings, and was not without an amused impression that Corona would not find this later Smithsonian phase altogether to her liking.
A little later the daughter, who had been to the horse corral with her father, came to join them, and the mother, smiling inwardly, saw her impression confirmed. Smith was talking frivolously of thés dansants and dinner-parties and club meets; whereat the mother smiled and Miss Corona's lip curled scornfully.
Smith got what he had earned, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, a few minutes after Mrs. Baldwin had gone in, leaving him to finish his cigar under the pillared portico with Corona to keep him company. He never knew just what started it, unless it was his careful placing of a chair for the young woman and his deferential – and perfectly natural – pause, standing, until she was seated.
"Do, for pity's sake, sit down!" she broke out, half petulantly. And when he had obeyed: "Well, you've spoiled it all, good and hard. Yesterday I thought you were a real man, but now you are doing your best to tell me that you were only shamming."
Smith was still so far besotted as to be unable to imagine wherein he had offended.
"Really?" he said. "I'm sorry to have disappointed you. All I need now to make me perfectly happy is to be told what I have done."
"It isn't what you've done; it's what you are," she retorted.
"Well, what am I?" he asked patiently.
Her laugh was mocking. "You are politely good-natured, for one thing; but that wasn't what I meant. You have committed the unpardonable sin by turning out to be just one of the ninety-nine, after all. If you knew women the least little bit in the world, you would know that we are always looking for the hundredth man."
Under his smile, Smith was searching the Lawrenceville experience records minutely in the effort to find something that would even remotely match this. The effort was a complete failure. But he was beginning to understand what this astonishingly frank young woman meant. She had seen the depth of his relapse, and was calmly deriding him for it. A saving sense of humor came to remind him of his own sardonic musings on the silent drive from the camp with the colonel; how he had railed inwardly at the social trivialities.
"You may pile it on as thickly as you please," he said, the good-natured smile twisting itself into the construction-camp grin. Then he added: "I may not be the hundredth man, but you, at least, are the hundredth woman."
"Why? Because I say the first thing that asks to be said?"
"That, and some other things," he rejoined guardedly. Then, with malice aforethought: "Is it one of the requirements that your centennial man should behave himself like a boor at a dinner-table, and talk shop and eat with his knife?"
"You know that isn't what I meant. Manners don't make the man. It's what you talked about – the trumpery little social things that you found your keenest pleasure in talking about. I don't know what has ever taken you out to a construction camp and persuaded you to wear khaki. Perhaps it was only what Colonel-daddy calls a 'throw-back.' I don't believe you ever did a day's hard work in your life before you came to the Timanyoni."
Smith looked at his hands. They were large and shapely, but the only callouses they could show were accusingly recent.
"If you mean manual labor, you are right," he admitted thoughtfully. "Just the same, I think you are a little hard on me."
It was growing dark by this time, and the stars were coming out. Some one had turned the lights on in the room the windows of which opened upon the portico, and the young woman's chair was so placed that he could still see her face. She was smiling rather more amicably when she said:
"You mustn't take it too hard. It isn't you, personally, you know; it's the type. I've met it before. I didn't meet any other kind during my three years in the boarding-school; nice, pleasant young gentlemen, as immaculately dressed as their pocketbooks would allow, up in all the latest little courtesies and tea-table shop-talk. They were all men, I suppose, but I'm afraid a good many of them had never found it out – will never find it out. I've been calling it environment; I don't like to admit that the race is going down-hill."
By this time the sardonic humor was once more in full possession and he was enjoying her keenly.
"Go on," he said. "This is my night off."
"I've said enough; too much, perhaps. But a little while ago at the dinner-table, and again out there in the grove where you were walking with mamma, you reminded me so forcibly of a man whom I met just for a part of one evening about a year ago."
"Tell me about him," he urged.
"I was coming back from school and I stopped over in a small town in the Middle West to visit some old friends of mamma's. There were young people in the family, and one evening they gave a lawn-party for me. I met dozens of the pleasant young gentlemen, more than I had ever seen together at any one time before; clerks and book-keepers, and rich farmers' sons who had been to college."
"But the man of whom I am reminding you?"
"He was one of them. He drove over from some neighboring town in his natty little automobile and gave me fully an hour of his valuable time. He made me perfectly furious!"
"Poor you!" laughed Smith; but he was thankful that the camp sunburn and his four weeks' beard were safeguarding his identity. "I hope you didn't tell him so. He was probably doing his level best to give you a good time in the only definition of the term that the girls of his own set had ever given him. But why the fury in his case in particular?"
"Just because, I suppose. He was rather good-looking, you know; and down underneath all the airy little things he persisted in talking about it seemed as if I could now and then get tiny glimpses of something that might be a real man, a strong man. I remember he told me he was a bank cashier and that he danced. He was quite hopeless, of course. Without being what you would call conceited, you could see that the crust was so thick that nothing short of an earthquake would ever break it."
"But the earthquakes do come, once in a blue moon," he said, still smiling at her. "Let's get it straight. You are not trying to tell me that you object to decent clothes and good manners per se, are you?"
"Not at all; I like them both. But the hundredth man won't let either his clothes or his manners wear him; he'll wear them."
"Still, you think the type of man you have been describing is entirely hopeless; that was the word you used, I believe."
The colonel was coming out, and he had stopped in the doorway to light a long-stemmed pipe. The young woman got up and fluffed her hair with the ends of her fingers – a little gesture which Smith remembered, recalling it from the night of the far-away lawn-party.
"Daddy wants you, and I'll have to vanish," she said; "but I'll answer your question before I go. Types are always hopeless; it's only the hundredth man who isn't. It's a great pity you couldn't go on whipping claim-jumpers all the rest of your life, Mr. Smith. Don't you think so? Good night. We'll meet again at breakfast. Daddy isn't going to let you get away short of a night's lodging, I know."
Two cigars for Smith and four pipes for the colonel further along, the tall Missourian rose out of the split-bottomed chair which he had drawn up to face the guest's and rapped the ashes from the bowl of the corn-cob into the palm of his hand.
"I think you've got it all now, Smith, every last crook and turn of it, and I reckon you're tired enough to run away to bed. You see just where we stand, and how little we've got to go on. If I've about talked an arm off of you, it's for your own good. I don't know how you've made up your mind, or if you've made it up at all; but it was only fair to show you how little chance we've got on anything short of a miracle. I wouldn't want to see you butt your head against a stone wall, and that's about what it looks like to me."
Smith took a turn up and down the stone-flagged floor of the portico with his hands behind him. Truly, the case of Timanyoni Ditch was desperate; even more desperate than he had supposed. Figuring as the level-headed bank cashier of the former days, he told himself soberly that no man in his senses would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Then the laughing gibes of the hundredth woman – gibes which had cut far deeper than she had imagined – came back to send the blood surging through his veins. It would be worth something to be able to work the miracle the colonel had spoken of; and afterward…
Colonel Dexter Baldwin was still tapping his palm absently with the pipe when Smith came back and said abruptly:
"I have decided, Colonel. I'll start in with you to-morrow morning, and we'll pull this mired scheme of yours out of the mud, or break a leg trying to. But you mustn't forget what I told you out at the camp. Right in the middle of things I may go rotten on you and drop out."