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The Sick Project

Brewster, owing its beginnings to the completion of the Nevada Short Line, and the fact that the railroad builders designated it as a division headquarters, had grown into city-charter size and importance with the opening of the gold-mines in the Gloria district, and the transformation of the surrounding park grass-lands into cultivated ranches. To the growth and prosperity of the intermountain city a summer hotel on the shore of Lake Topaz – reached only by stage from Brewster – had added its influence; and since the hotel brought people with well-lined pocketbooks, there was a field for the enthusiastic real-estate promoters whose offices filled all the odd corners in the Hophra House block.

In one of these offices, on the morning following Smith's first dinner at Hillcrest, a rather caustic colloquy was in progress between the man whose name appeared in gilt lettering on the front windows and one of his unofficial assistants. Crawford Stanton, he of the window name, was a man of many personalities. To summer visitors with money to invest, he was the genial promoter, and if there were suggestions of iron hardness in the sharp jaw and in the smoothly shaven face and flinty eyes, there was also a pleasant reminder of Eastern business methods and alertness in the promoter's manner. But Lanterby, tilting uneasily in the "confidential" chair at the desk-end, knew another and more biting side of Mr. Stanton, as a hired man will.

"Good Gad! do you sit there and tell me that the three of them let that hobo of Williams's push them off the map?" Stanton was demanding raucously. "I thought you had at least sense enough to last you overnight. I told you to pick out a bunch with sand – fellows that could hang on and put up a fight if they had to. And you say all this happened the day before yesterday: how does it come that you are just now reporting it?"

The hard-faced henchman in the tilting chair made such explanations as he could.

"Boogerfield and his two partners 've been hidin' out somewhere; I allow they was plumb ashamed to come in and tell how they'd let one man run 'em off. You'd think that curly-whiskered helper o' Williams's was a holy terror, to hear Boogerfield talk. They'd left their artillery in the chuck-wagon, and they say he come at 'em barehanded – with the colonel's girl settin' in the ortamobile a-lookin' on. Boogerfield wants to know who's goin' to pay him for them two Winchesters that His Whiskers bu'sted over the wagon-wheel."

Mr. Crawford Stanton was carelessly unconcerned about the claim-jumpers' loss, either in gear or skin.

"Damn the Winchesters!" he said morosely. "What do you know about this fellow Smith? Who is he, and where did he come from?"

Lanterby told all that was known of Smith, and had no difficulty in compressing it into a single sentence. Stanton leaned back in his chair and the lids of the flinty eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

"There's a lot more to it than that," he said incisively at the end of the reflective pause. Then he added a curt order: "Make it your job to find out."

Lanterby moved uneasily in his insecure seat, but before he could speak, his employer went on again, changing the topic abruptly, but still keeping within the faultfinding boundaries.

"What sort of a screw has gone loose in your deal with the railroad men? I thought you told me you had it fixed with the yard crews so that Williams's material would have a chance to season a while in the Brewster yards before it was delivered. They got two cars of cement and one of steel the day before yesterday, and the delivery was made within three hours after the stuff came in from the East."

Again Lanterby tried to explain.

"Dougherty, the yardmaster, took the bank roll I slipped him, all right enough, and promised to help out. But he's scared of Maxwell. He told me this mornin' that Colonel Baldwin has been kickin' like blazes to Maxwell about the delays."

"Maxwell is a thick-headed ass!" exploded the faultfinder. "I've done everything on earth except to tell him outright in so many words that his entire railroad outfit, from President Brewster down, is lined up on the other side of the fight. But go on with your dickering. Jerk Dougherty into line and tell him that nothing is going to happen to him if he doesn't welsh on us. Hint to him that we can pull a longer string than Dick Maxwell can, if it comes to a show-down. Now go out and find Shaw. I want him, and I want him right now."

The hard-faced man who looked as if he might be a broken-down gambler unjointed his leg-hold upon the tilted chair and went out; and a few minutes later another of Stanton's pay-roll men drifted in. He was a young fellow with sleepy eyes and cigarette stains on his fingers, and he would have passed readily for a railroad clerk out of a job, which was what he really was.

"Well?" snapped Stanton when the incomer had taken the chair lately vacated by Lanterby.

"I shadowed the colonel, as you told me to," said the young man. "He went up to Red Butte to see if he couldn't rope in some of the old-timers on his ditch project. He was trying to sell some treasury stock. His one-horse company is about out of money. Mickle, a clerk in Kinzie's bank, tells me that the ditch company's balance is drawn down to a few thousand dollars, with no more coming in."

"Did the colonel succeed in making a raise in Red Butte?"

"Nary," said the spy nonchalantly. "Drake, the banker up there, was his one best bet; but I got a man I know to give Drake a pointer, and he curled up like a hedgehog when you poke it with a sharp stick."

"That's better. The colonel came back yesterday, didn't he?"

"Yesterday afternoon. His wife and daughter met him at the railroad-station with the automobile, and told him something or other that made him hire old man Shuey to drive the women out home while he took the roadster and went up to the dam."

"You went along?" queried Stanton.

"As soon as I could find somebody to drive me; yes. That wasn't right away, though; and when I got there I had to leave my buzz-wagon back in the hills a piece and walk into camp. When I inquired around I found that the colonel was shut up in Williams's office with a fellow named Smith. They were finishing up whatever they'd been talking about when I got a place to listen in; but I heard enough to make me suspect that something new had broken loose. Just as they were getting ready to quit, the colonel was saying: 'That settles it, Smith; you've got to come over into' – I didn't catch the name of the place – 'and help us. Williams tells me you refused him, but you can't refuse me.' There was more of it, but they had opened the door and I had to skin out. A little later they drove off together in the colonel's car, coming on through town to go out to the ranch, I suppose, because Smith didn't show up any more at the camp."

Again the gentleman with the sharp jaw took time for narrow-eyed reflection.

"You'll have to switch over from the colonel to this fellow Smith for the present, Shaw," he decided, at length. "Lanterby is supposed to be on that part of the job, but he's altogether too coarse-handed. I want to know who Smith is, and where he hails from, and how he comes to be butting in. Lanterby said at first, and says yet, that he is just a common hobo tumbling in from the outside. It's pretty evident that Lanterby has another guess coming. You look him up and do it quick."

The young man glanced up with a faint warming of avarice in his sleepy eyes. "It'll most likely run into money – for expenses," he suggested.

"For graft, you mean," snapped Stanton. Then he had it out with this second subordinate in crisp English. "I'm onto you with both feet, Shaw; every crook and turn of you. More than that, I know why you were fired out of Maxwell's office; you've got sticky fingers. That's all right with me up to a certain point, but beyond that point you get off. Understand?"

Shaw made no answer in direct terms, but if his employer had been watching the heavy-lidded eyes he might have seen in them the shadow of a thing much more dangerous than plain dishonesty: a passing shadow of the fear that makes for treachery when the sharp need for self-protection arises.

"I'll try to find out about the hobo," he said, with fair enough lip-loyalty, and after he had rolled a fresh cigarette he went away to begin the mining operations which might promise to unearth Smith's record.

It was ten o'clock when Shaw left the real-estate office in the Hophra House block. Half an hour earlier Smith had come to town with the colonel in the roadster, and the two had shut themselves up in the colonel's private room in the Timanyoni Ditch Company's town office in the Barker Building, which was two squares down the street from the Hophra House. Summoned promptly, Martin, the bookkeeper, had brought in his statements and balance-sheets, and the new officer, who was as yet without a title, had struck out his plan of campaign.

"'Amortization' is the word, Colonel," was Smith's prompt verdict after he had gone over Martin's summaries. "The best way to get at it now is to wipe the slate clean and begin over again."

The ranchman president was chuckling soberly.

"Once more you'll have to show me, John," he said. "We folks out here in the hills are not up in all the Wall Street crinkles."

"You don't know the word? It means to scrap the old machinery to make room for the new," Smith explained. "In modern business it is the process of extinguishing a corporation: closing it up and burying it in another and bigger one, usually. That is what we must do with Timanyoni Ditch."

"I'm getting you, a little at a time," said the colonel, taking his first lesson in high finance as a duck takes to the water. Then he added: "It won't take much of a lick to kill off the old company, in the shape it's got into now. How will you work it?"

Smith had the plan at his fingers' ends. With the daring of all the perils had come a fresh access of fighting fitness that made him feel as if he could cope with anything.

"We must close up the company's affairs and then reorganize promptly and, with just as little noise as may be, form another company – which we will call Timanyoni High Line – and let it take over the old outfit, stock, liabilities, and assets entire. You say your present capital stock is one hundred thousand dollars; is it all paid in?"

"Every dollar of it except a little for a few shares of treasury stock that we've been holding for emergencies. As I told you last night, I went up to Red Butte and tried to sell that treasury stock to Drake, the banker; but he wouldn't bite."

"Which was mighty lucky for us," Smith put in. "It would have queered us beautifully if he had, and the story had got out that the president of Timanyoni Ditch had sold a block of treasury stock at thirty-nine."

"Well, he didn't take it," said the colonel. "He was so blame' chilly that I like to froze to death before I could get out of the bank."

"All right; then we'll go on. This new company that I am speaking of will be capitalized at, say, an even half million. To the present holders of Timanyoni Ditch we'll give the new stock for the old, share for share, with a bonus of twenty-five shares of the new stock for every twenty-five shares of the old surrendered and exchanged. This will be practically giving the present shareholders two for one. Will that satisfy them?"

This time Colonel Dexter Baldwin's smile was grim.

"You're just juggling now, John, and you know it. Out here on the woolly edge of things a dollar is just a plain iron dollar, and you can't make it two merely by calling it so."

"Never you mind about that," cut in the new financier. "The first rule of investment is that a dollar is worth just what it will earn in dividends; no more, and equally no less. You know, and I know, that if we can pull this thing through there is a barrel of money in it for all concerned. But we'll skip that part of it and stick to the details. At two to one for the amortization of the old company we shall still have something like three hundred thousand dollars treasury stock upon which to realize for the new capital needed, and that will be amply sufficient to complete the dam and the ditches and to provide a fighting fund. Now then, tell me this: how near can we come to placing that treasury stock right here in Timanyoni Park? In other words, can the money be had here at any price?"

"You mean that you don't want to go East to raise it?"

"I mean that we haven't time. More than that, it's up to us to keep this thing in the family, so to speak; and the moment we go into other markets, we are getting over into the enemy's country. I'm not saying that the money couldn't be raised in New York; but if we should go there, the trust would have an underhold on us, right from the start."

"I see," said the colonel, who was indeed seeing many things that his simple-hearted philosophy had never dreamed of; and then he answered the direct question. "There is plenty of money right here in the Timanyonis; not all of it in Brewster, perhaps, but in the country among the Gloria and Little Butte mine owners, smelter men, and the better class of ranchmen. Take Dick Maxwell, the railroad superintendent – he's a miner on the side, you know – he could put ten or twenty thousand more into it without turning a hair; and so could some of the others."

Smith nodded. He was getting his second wind now, and the race promised to be a keen joy.

"But they would have to be 'shown,' you think?" he suggested. "All right; we'll proceed to show them. Now we can come down to present necessities. We've got to keep the work going – and speed it up to the limit: we ought to double Williams's force at once – put on a night shift to work by electric light. I took the liberty of telephoning Williams from Hillcrest this morning while you were reading your newspaper. I told him to wire advertisements for more labor to the newspapers in Denver, offering wages high enough to make the thing look attractive."

The colonel blinked twice and swallowed hard.

"Say, John," he said, leaning across the table-desk; "you've sure got your nerve with you. Do you know what our present bank balance happens to be?"

"No; I was just coming to that," said the reorganizer, smiling easily. "How much is it?"

"It is under five thousand dollars, and a good part of that is owing to the cement people!"

"Never mind; don't get nervous," was the reassuring rejoinder. "We are going to make it bigger in a few minutes, I hope. Who is your banker here?"

"Dave Kinzie, of the Brewster City National."

"Tell me a little something about Mr. Kinzie before we go down to see him; just brief him for me as a man, I mean."

The colonel was shaking his head slowly.

"He's what you might call a twenty-ton optimist, Dave is; solid, a little slow and sure, but the biggest boomer in the West, if you can get him started – believes in the resources of the country and all that. But you can't borrow money from him without security, if that's what you're aiming to do."

"Can't we?" smiled the young man who knew banks and bankers. "Let's go and see. You never know until you try, Colonel; and even then you're not always dead certain. Take me around and introduce me to this Mr. David Kinzie – and, hold on; it may be as well to give me a handle of some sort before we begin to talk money with other people. What are you going to call me in this new scheme of things?"

The big Missourian's laugh was a hearty guffaw.

"Gosh all Friday! the way it's starting out you're the whole works, Smith! Just name your own name, and we'll cinch it for you."

"I suppose you've already got a secretary and treasurer?"

"We had up to a few days ago, before Buck Gardner sold out his stock to Crawford Stanton."

"Haven't you had a board meeting since?"

"Yes; but only to accept Gardner's resignation. We didn't elect anybody else – nobody wanted the place; every last man of 'em shied."

"Naturally; not seeing any immediate prospects of having anything to treasure," laughed Smith. "But that will do. You may introduce me to Kinzie as your acting financial secretary, if you like. Now one more question: what is Kinzie's attitude toward Timanyoni Ditch?"

"At first it was all kinds of friendly; he is a stockholder in a small way, and he's heart and soul for anything that promises to build up the country, as I told you. But after a while he began to cool down a little, and now – well, I don't know; I hate to think it of Dave, but I'm afraid he's leaning the other way, toward these Eastern fellows. Little things he has let fall, and this last deal in which he tried to cover Stanton's tracks in the stock-buying from Gardner and Bolling; they all point that way."

"That is natural, too," said Smith, whose point of view was always unobscured in any battle of business. "The big company would be a better customer for the bank than your little one could ever hope to be. I guess that's all for the present. If you're ready, we'll go down and face the music. Take me to the Brewster City National and introduce me to Mr. Kinzie; then you can stand by and watch the wheels go round."

"By Janders!" said the colonel with an open smile; "I believe you'd just as soon tackle a banker as to eat your dinner; and I'd about as soon take a horsewhipping. Come on; I'll steer you up against Dave, but I'm telling you right now that the steering is about all you can count on from me."

It was while they were crossing the street together and turning down toward the Alameda Avenue corner where the Brewster City National Bank windows looked over into the windows of the Hophra House block opposite, that Mr. Crawford Stanton had his third morning caller, a thick-set barrel-bodied man with little pig-like eyes, closely cropped hair, a bristling mustache, and a wooden leg of the home-made sort – a peg with a hollowed bowl for the bent knee and a slat-like extension to go up the outside of the leg to be stapled to a leathern belt. Across one of the swarthy cheeks there was a broad scar that looked, at first sight, like a dash of blue paint. It was a knife slash got in the battle with Mexican Ruiz in which the thick-set man had lost his leg. After the Mexican had brought him down with a bullet, he had added his mark as he had said he would; laying the big man's cheek open and rubbing the powder from a chewed cartridge into the wound. Afterward, the men of the camps called the cripple "Pegleg" or "Blue Pete" indifferently, though not to his face. For though the fat face was always relaxed in a good-natured smile, the crippled saloon-keeper was of those who kill with the knife; and since he could not pursue, he was fain to cajole the prey within reach.

Stanton looked up from his desk when the pad-and-click of the cripple's step came in from the street.

"Hello, Simms," he said, in curt greeting. "Want to see me?"

"Uh-huh; for a minute or so. Busy?"

"Never too busy to talk business. Sit down."

Simms threw the brim of his soft hat up with a backhanded stroke and shook his head. "It ain't worth while; and I gotta get back to camp. I blew in to tell y'u there's a fella out there that needs th' sand-bag."

"Who is it?"

"Fella name' Smith. He's showin' 'em how to cut too many corners – pace-settin', he calls it. First thing they know, they'll get the concrete up to where the high water won't bu'st it out."

Stanton's laugh was impatient.

"Don't make any mistake of that sort, Simms," he said. "We don't want the dam destroyed; we'd work just as hard as they would to prevent that. All we want is to have other people think it's likely to go out – think it hard enough to keep them from putting up any more money. Let that go. Is there any more fresh talk – among the men?" Stanton prided himself a little upon the underground wire-pulling which had resulted in putting Simms on the ground as the keeper of the construction-camp canteen. It was a fairly original way of keeping a listening ear open for the camp gossip.

"Little," said the cripple briefly. "This here blink-blank fella Smith's been tellin' Williams that I ort to be run off th' reservation; says th' booze puts the brake on for speed."

"So it does," agreed Stanton musingly. "But I guess you can stay a while longer. What do the men say about Smith?"

"Whole heap o' things. The best guess is that he's a jail-break' from somewheres back in the States. He ain't no common 'bo; that's a dead cinch. Gatrow, the quarry foreman, puts it up that he done something he had to run for."

"Get him drunk and find out," suggested Stanton shortly.

"Not him," said the round-faced villain, with the ingratiating smile wrinkling at the corners of the fat-embedded eyes. "He's the take-a-drink-or-let-it-alone kind."

"Well, keep your eye on him and your ears open. I have a notion that he's been sent here – by some outfit that means to buck us. If he hasn't any backing – "

The interruption was the hurried incoming of the young man with sleepy eyes and the cigarette stains on his fingers, and for once in a way he was stirred out of his customary attitude of cynical indifference.

"Smith and Colonel Baldwin are over yonder in Kinzie's private office," he reported hastily. "Before they shut the door I heard Baldwin introducing Smith as the new acting financial secretary of the Timanyoni Ditch Company!"