XI
When Greek Meets Greek
Smith allowed himself ten brief seconds for a swift eye-measuring of the square-shouldered, stockily built man with a gray face and stubbly mustache sitting in the chair of authority at the Brewster City National before he chose his line of attack.
"We are not going to cut very deeply into your time this morning, Mr. Kinzie," he began when the eye-appraisal had given him his cue. "You know the history of Timanyoni Ditch up to the present, and you have no doubt had your own misgivings about the wisdom of its financing on such a small scale, and as a purely local enterprise. Others have had the same misgivings, and – well, to cut out the details, there is to be a complete reorganization of the company on a new basis, and we are here to offer to take your personal allotment of the stock off your hands at par for cash. Colonel Baldwin has stipulated that his friends in the original deal must be protected, and – "
"Here, here – hold on," interrupted the bank president; "you're hitting it up a little bit too fast for me, Mr. Smith. Before we get down to any talk of buying and selling, suppose you tell me something about yourself and your new company. Who are you? and whereabouts do you hold forth when you are at home?"
Smith laughed easily. "If we were trying to borrow money of you, we might have to go into preliminaries and particulars, Mr. Kinzie. As it is, I'm sure you are not going to press for the answers to these very natural questions of yours. Further than that, we shall have to ask you to hold anything that may be said here in strict confidence – as between a banker and his customer. We are not alone in the fight for the water-rights on the other side of the river, as you know, and until we are safely fortified we shall have to be prudently cautious. But that is another matter. What we want to know now is this: will you let us protect you by taking your Timanyoni Ditch stock at par? That's the principal question at issue just now."
Kinzie met the issue fairly. "I don't know you yet, Mr. Smith; but I do know Colonel Baldwin, here, and I guess I'll take a chance on things as they stand. I'll keep my stock."
The new secretary's smile was rather patronizing than grateful.
"As you please, Mr. Kinzie, of course," he said smoothly. "But I'm going to tell you frankly that you'll keep it at your own risk. I am not sure what plan will be adopted, but I assume it will be amortization and a retirement of the stock of the original company. All that we need to enable us to bring this about is the voting control of the old stock, and we already have that, as you know."
The banker pursed his lips until the stubbly gray mustache stood out stiffly. Then he cut straight to the heart of the matter.
"You mean that there will be a majority pool of the old stock, and that the pool will ignore those stockholders who don't come in?"
"Something like that," said Smith pleasantly. And then: "We're going to be generously liberal, Mr. Kinzie; we are giving Colonel Baldwin's friends a fair chance to come in out of the wet. Of course, if they refuse to come in – if they prefer to stay out – "
Kinzie was smiling sourly.
"You'll have to take care of your own banker, won't you, Mr. Smith?" he asked. "Why don't you loosen up and tell me a little more? What have you fellows got up your sleeve, anyway?"
At this, the new financial manager slacked off on the hawser of secrecy a little – just a little.
"Mr. Kinzie, we've got the biggest thing, and the surest, that ever came to Timanyoni Park; not in futures, mind you, but in facts already as good as accomplished. If it were necessary – as it isn't – I could go to New York to-day and put a million dollars behind our reorganization plan in twenty-four hours. You'd say so, yourself, if I were at liberty to explain. But again we're dodging and wasting your time and ours. Think the matter over – about your stock – and let me know before noon. It's rather cruel to hurry you so, but time is precious with us and – "
"You sit right down there, young man, and put a little of this precious time of yours against mine," said Kinzie, pointing authoritatively at the chair which Smith had just vacated. "You mustn't go off at half-cock, that way. You'll need a bank here to do business with, won't you?"
Smith did not sit down. Instead, he smiled genially and fired his final shot.
"No, Mr. Kinzie; we shan't need a local bank – not as a matter of absolute necessity. In fact, on some accounts, I don't know but that it would be better for us not to have one."
"Sit down," insisted the bank president; and this time he would take no denial. Then he turned abruptly upon Baldwin, who had been playing his part of the silent listener letter-perfect.
"Baldwin, we are old friends, and I'd trust you to the limit – on any proposition that doesn't ask for more than straight-from-the-shoulder honesty. How much is this young friend of ours talking through his hat?"
"Not any, whatever, Dave. He's got the goods." Baldwin was wise enough to limit himself carefully as to quantity in his reply.
"It's straight, is it? No gold-brick business?"
"So straight that if we can't pay twenty per cent on what money we put in, I'll throw up my three thousand acres over yonder on Little Creek and go back to cow-punching."
Again the banker made a comical bristle brush of his cropped mustache.
"I want your business, Dexter; I've got to have it. But I'm going to be plain with you. You two are asking me to believe that you've gone outside and dug up a new bunch of backers. That may be all right, but Timanyoni Ditch has struck a pretty big bone that maybe your new backers know about – and maybe they don't. You've had a lot of bad luck, so far; getting your land titles cleared, and all that; and you're going to have more. I've – "
It was Smith's turn again and he cut in smartly.
"That is precisely what I was driving at. Our banker can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. You'll excuse me if I say that you haven't been altogether fair with Timanyoni Ditch, or with Colonel Baldwin, Mr. Kinzie. A friendly banker doesn't help sell out his customer. You know that, as well as I do. Still, you did it."
Kinzie threw up his hands and tried to defend himself. "It was a straight business transaction, Mr. Smith. As long as we're in the banking business, we buy and sell for anybody who comes along."
"No, we don't, Mr. Kinzie; we protect our customers first. In the present instance you thought your customer was a dead one, anyway, so it wouldn't make much difference if you should throw another shovelful of dirt or so onto the coffin. Wasn't that the way of it?"
The president was fairly pushed to the ropes and he showed it.
"Answer me one question, both of you," he snapped. "Are you big enough to fight for your own hand against Stanton's crowd?"
"You'll see; and the sight is going to cost you something," said Smith, and the blandest oil could have been no smoother than his tone.
"Is that right, Dexter?"
"That's the way it looks to me, Dave," said the ranchman capitalist, who, whatever might be his limitations in the field of high finance, was not lacking the nerve to fight unquestioning in any partner's quarrel.
The president of the Brewster City National turned back to Smith.
"What do you want, Mr. Smith?" he asked, not too cordially.
"Nothing that you'd give us, I guess; a little business loyalty, for one thing – "
"And a checking balance for immediate necessities for another?" suggested the banker.
With all his trained astuteness – trained in Kinzie's own school, at that – Smith could not be sure that the gray-faced old Westerner was not setting a final trap for him, after all. But he took the risk, saying, with a decent show of indifference: "Of course, it would be more convenient here than in Denver or Chicago. But there is no hurry about that part of it."
The president took a slip of paper from a pigeonhole and wrote rapidly upon it. Once more his optimism was locking horns with prudent caution. It was the optimism, however, that was driving the pen. Baldwin's word was worth something, and it might be disastrous to let these two get away without anchoring them solidly to the Brewster City National.
"Sign this, you two," he said. "I don't know even the name of your new outfit yet, but I'll take a chance on one piece of two-name paper, anyhow."
Smith took up the slip and glanced at it. It was an accommodation note for twenty thousand dollars. With the money fairly in his hands, he paused to drive the nail of independence squarely home before he would sign.
"We don't want this at all, Mr. Kinzie, unless the bank's good-will comes with it," he said with becoming gravity.
"I'll stand with you," was the brusque rejoinder. "But it's only fair to you both to say that you've got the biggest kind of a combination to buck you – a national utilities corporation with the strongest sort of political backing."
"I doubt if you can tell us anything that we don't already know," said Smith coolly, as he put his name on the note; and when Baldwin had signed: "Let this go to the credit of Timanyoni Ditch, if you please, Mr. Kinzie, and we'll transfer it later. It's quite possible that we shan't need it, but we are willing to help out a little on your discount profits, anyway. Further along, when things shape themselves up a bit more definitely, you shall know all there is to know, and we'll give you just as good a chance to make money as you'll give us."
When they were safely out of the bank and half a square away from it, Dexter Baldwin pushed his hat back and mopped his forehead. "They say a man can't sweat at this altitude," he remarked. "I'm here to tell you, Smith, that I've lost ten pounds in the last ten minutes. Where in the name of the jumping Jehoshaphat did you get your nerve, boy? You stand to lose an even hundred-and-fifty-dollar bill on this deal; don't you know that?"
"How so?" asked the plunger.
"I'd have bet you that much against the old campaign hat you're wearing that you couldn't 'touch' Dave Kinzie for twenty dollars – let alone twenty thousand – in a month of Sundays! You made him believe we'd got outside backing from somewhere."
"I didn't say anything like that, did I?"
"No; but you opened the door and he walked in."
"That's all right: I'm not responsible for Mr. Kinzie's imagination. We were obliged to have a little advertising capital; we couldn't turn a wheel without it. Now that we have it, we'll get busy. We've got to furnish a new suite of offices, install a bigger office force, incorporate Timanyoni High Line, and open its stock subscription books, all practically while the band plays. Time is the one thing we can't waste. Put me in touch with a good business lawyer and I'll start the legal machinery. Then you can get into your car and go around and interview your crowd, man by man. I want to know exactly where we stand with the old stockholders before we make any move in public. Can you do that?"
Baldwin lifted his hat and shoved his fingers through his hair.
"I reckon I can; there are only sixty or seventy of 'em. And Bob Stillings is your lawyer. Come around the corner and I'll introduce you."
XII
The Rocket and the Stick
For a full fortnight after the preliminary visit to the Brewster City National Bank, Smith was easily the busiest man in Timanyoni County. Establishing himself in the Hophra House, and discarding the working khaki only because he was shrewd enough to dress the new part becomingly, he flung himself into what Colonel Baldwin called the "miracle-working" campaign with a zest that knew no flagging moment.
Within the fourteen-day period new town offices were occupied on the second floor of the Brewster City National Building; Stillings, most efficient of corporation counsels, had secured the new charter; and the stock-books of Timanyoni High Line had been opened, with the Brewster City National named as the company's depository and official fiduciary agent.
At the dam the building activities had been generously doubled. An electric-light plant had been installed, and Williams was working day and night shifts both in the quarries and on the forms. Past this, the new financial manager, himself broadening rapidly as his field broadened, was branching out in other directions. After a brief conference with a few of his principal stockholders he had instructed Stillings to include the words "Power and Light" in the cataloguing of the new company's possible and probable charter activities, and by the end of the fortnight the foundations of a power-house were going in below the dam, and negotiations were already on foot with the Brewster city council looking toward the sale of electric current to the city for lighting and other purposes.
Notwithstanding all the demands made upon him as the chief energizer in the working field, Smith had made the planting of his financial anchor securely to windward his first care. Furnished with a selected list by Colonel Baldwin, he had made a thorough canvas of possible investors, and by the time the new stock was printed and ready for delivery through Kinzie's bank, an iron-clad pool of the majority of the original Timanyoni Ditch stock had been organized, and Smith had sold to Maxwell, Starbuck, and other local capitalists a sufficient amount of the new treasury stock to give him a fighting chance; this, with a promise of more if it should be needed.
The stock-selling campaign was a triumph, and though he did not recognize it as such, it marked the longest step yet taken in the march of the metamorphosis. As the cashier in Dunham's bank Smith had been merely a high-grade clerk. There had been no occasion for the development of the precious quality of initiative, and he had hardly known the meaning of the word. But now there seemed to be no limit to the new powers of accomplishment. Men met him upon his own ground, and a lilting sense of triumph gave him renewed daring when he found that he could actually inspire them with some portion of his own confidence and enthusiasm.
But in all this there had been no miracle, one would say; nothing but enterprise and shrewd business acumen and lightning-like speed in bringing things to pass. If there were a miracle, it lay in this: that not to Maxwell or to any of the new investors had Smith revealed the full dimensions of the prize for which Timanyoni High Line was entering the race. Colonel Baldwin and one William Starbuck, Maxwell's brother-in-law, by courtesy, and his partner in the Little Alice mine, alone knew the wheel within the wheel; how the great Eastern utility corporation represented by Stanton had spent a million or more in the acquisition of the Escalante Grant, which would be practically worthless as agricultural land without the water which could be obtained only by means of the Timanyoni dam and canal system.
With all these strenuous stirrings in the business field, it may say itself that Smith found little time for social indulgences during the crowded fortnight. Day after day the colonel begged him to take a night off at the ranch, and it was even more difficult to refuse the proffered hospitality at the week-end. But Smith did refuse it.
With the new life and the larger ambition had come a sturdy resolve to hold himself aloof from entanglements of every sort. That Corona Baldwin was going to prove an entanglement he was wise enough to foresee from the moment in which he had identified her with the vitalizing young woman whose glove he had carried off. In fact, she was already associated in his thoughts with every step in the business battle. Was he not taking a very temerarious risk of discovery and arrest merely for the sake of proving to her that her "hopeless case" of the lawn-party could confute her mocking little theories about men and types without half trying?
It was not until after Miss Corona – driving to town with her father, as she frequently did – had thrice visited the new offices that Smith began to congratulate himself, rather bitterly, to be sure, upon his wisdom in staying away from Hillcrest. For one thing, he was learning that Corona Baldwin was an exceedingly charming young woman of many moods and tenses, and that in some of the moods, and in practically all of the tenses, she was able to make him see rose-colored. When she was not with him, he had no difficulty in assuring himself that the rose-colored point of view was entirely out of the question for a man in daily peril of meeting the sheriff. But when she was present, calm sanity had a way of losing its grip, and the rose-colored possibilities reasserted themselves with intoxicating accompaniments.
Miss Corona's fourth visit to the handsome suite of offices over the Brewster City National chanced to fall upon a Saturday. Her father, president of the new company, as he had been of the old, had a private office of his own, but Miss Corona soon drifted out to the railed-off end of the larger room, where the financial secretary had his desk.
"Colonel-daddy tells me that you are coming out to Hillcrest for the week-end," was the way in which she interrupted the financial secretary's brow-knittings over a new material contract. "I have just wagered him a nice fat little round iron dollar of my allowance that you won't. How about it?"
Smith looked up with his best-natured grin.
"You win," he said shortly.
"Thank you," she laughed. "In a minute or so I'll go back to the president's office and collect." Then: "One dinner, lodging, and breakfast of us was about all you could stand, wasn't it? I thought maybe it would be that way."
"What made you think so?"
"You should never ask a woman why; it's a frightfully unsafe thing to do."
"I know," he mocked. "There have been whole books written about the lack of logic on your side of the sex fence."
She had seated herself in the chair reserved for inquiring investors. There was a little interval of glove-smoothing silence, and then, like a flash out of a clear sky, she smiled across the desk-end at him and said:
"Will you forgive me if I ask you a perfectly ridiculous question?"
"Certainly. Other people ask them every day."
"Is – is your name really and truly John Smith?"
"Why should you doubt it?"
It was just here that Smith was given to see another one of Miss Corona's many moods – or tenses – and it was a new one to him. She was visibly embarrassed.
"I – I don't want to tell you," she stammered.
"All right; you needn't."
"If you're going to take it that easy, I will tell you," she retorted. "Mr. Williams thought your name was an alias; and I'm not sure that he doesn't still think so."
"The Smiths never have to have aliases. It's like John Doe or Richard Roe, you know."
"Haven't you any middle name?"
"I have a middle initial. It is 'M.'" He was looking her fairly in the eyes as he said it, and the light in the new offices was excellent. Thanks to her horseback riding, Miss Corona's small oval face had a touch of healthy outdoor tan; but under the tan there came, for just a flitting instant, a flush of deeper color, and at the back of the gray eyes there was something that Smith had never seen there before.
"It's – it's just an initial?" she queried.
"Yes; it's just an initial, and I don't use it ordinarily. I'm not ashamed of the plain 'John.'"
"I don't know why you should be," she commented, half absently, he thought. And then: "How many 'John M. Smiths' do you suppose there are in the United States?"
"Oh, I don't know; a million or so, I guess."
"I should think you would be rather glad of that," she told him. But when he tried to make her say why he should be glad, she talked pointedly of other things and presently went back to her father's office.
It was not until after she had gone out with her father, and he had made her wager good by steadfastly refusing to spend the week-end at the ranch, that Smith began to put two and two together, erroneously, as it happened, though he could not know this. Mrs. Baldwin's home town in his native State was the little place that her daughter had visited and where the daughter had had a lawn-party given in her honor. Was it not more than probable that the colonel's wife was still keeping up some sort of a correspondence with her home people and that through this, or some mention in a local paper, Corona had got hold of the devastating story of one J. Montague Smith?
There were fine little headings of perspiration standing on the fugitive's forehead when the small sum in addition had progressed thus far. But if he had only known it, there was no need, as yet, for the sweat of apprehension. Like some other young women, Miss Baldwin suffered from spasmodic attacks of the diary-keeping malady; she had been keeping one at the time of her return from school, and the lawn-party in the little town in the Middle West had its due entry.
In a moment of idle curiosity on the Saturday forenoon, she had looked into the year-old diary to find the forgotten name of the man of whom Smith was still persistently reminding her. It was there in all its glory: "J. Montague Smith." Could it be possible? – but, no; John Smith, her father's John Smith, had come to the construction camp as a hobo, and that was not possible, not even thinkable, of the man she had met. None the less, it was a second attack of the idle curiosity that had moved her to go to town with her father on the Saturday afternoon of questionings.
After the other members of the office force had taken their departure, Smith still sat at his desk striving to bring himself back with some degree of clear-headedness to the pressing demands of his job. Just as he was about to give it up and go across to the Hophra House for his dinner, William Starbuck drifted in to open the railing gate and to come and plant himself in the chair of privilege at Smith's desk-end.
"Well, son; you've got the animals stirred up good and plenty, at last," he said, when he had found the "makings" and was deftly rolling a cigarette – his one overlapping habit reaching back to his range-riding youth. "Dick Maxwell got a wire to-day from his kiddie's grandpaw – and my own respected daddy-in-law – Mr. Hiram Fairbairn; you know him – the lumber king."
"I'm listening," said Smith.
"Dick's wire was an order; instructions from headquarters to keep hands off of your new company and to work strictly in cahoots – 'harmony' was the word he used – with Crawford Stanton. How does that fit you?"
The financial secretary's smile was the self-congratulatory face-wrinkling of the quarry foreman who has seen his tackle hitch hold to land the big stone safely at the top of the pit.
"What is Maxwell going to do about it?" he asked.
"Dick is all wool and a yard wide; and what he signs his name to is what he is going to stand by. You won't lose him, but the wire shows us just about where we're aiming to put our leg into the gopher-hole and break it, doesn't it?"
"I'm not borrowing any trouble. Mr. Fairbairn and his colleagues are just a few minutes too late, Starbuck. We've got our footing – inside of the corral."
The ex-cow-puncher, who was now well up on the middle rounds of fortune's ladder, shook his head doubtfully.
"Don't you make any brash breaks, John. Mr. Hiram Fairbairn and his crowd can swing twenty millions to your one little old dollar and a half, and they're not going to leave any of the pebbles unturned when it comes to saving their investment in the Escalante. I don't care specially for my own ante – Stella and I will manage to get a bite to eat, anyway. But for your own sake and Colonel Dexter's, you don't want to let the grass grow under your feet; not any whatsoever. You go ahead and get that dam finished, pronto, if you have to put a thousand men on it and work 'em Sundays as well as nights. That's all; I just thought I'd drop in and tell you."
Smith went to his rooms in the hotel a few minutes later to change for dinner. Having been restocking his wardrobe to better fit his new state and standing as the financial head of Timanyoni High Line, he found the linen drawer in his dressing-case overflowing. Opening another, he began to arrange the overflow methodically. The empty drawer was lined with a newspaper, and he took the paper out to fold it afresh. In the act he saw that it was a copy of the Chicago Tribune some weeks old. As he was replacing it in the drawer bottom, a single head-line on the upturned page sprang at him like a thing living and venomous. He bent lower and read the underrunning paragraph with a dull rage mounting to his eyes and serving for the moment to make the gray of the printed lines turn red.
Lawrenceville, May 19. – The grand jury has found a true bill against Montague Smith, the absconding cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust, charged with embezzling the bank's funds. The crime would have been merely a breach of trust and not actionable but for the fact that Smith, by owning stock in the bankrupt Westfall industries lately taken over by the Richlander Company, had so made himself amenable to the law. Smith disappeared on the night of the 14th and is still at large. He is also wanted on another criminal count. It will be remembered that he brutally assaulted President Dunham on the night of his disappearance. The reward of $1,000 for his apprehension and arrest has been increased to $2,000 by the bank directors.