IV
The High Hills
Train Number Seventeen, the Nevada through freight, was two hours lateissuing from the western portal of Timanyoni Canyon. Through the earlymountain-climbing hours of the night and the later flight across the RedDesert, the dusty, travel-grimed young fellow in the empty box carmidway of the train had slept soundly, with the hard car floor for a bedand his folded coat for a pillow. But on the emergence of the train fromthe echoing canyon depths the sudden cessation of the crash and roar ofthe shut-in mountain passage awoke him and he got up to open the doorand look out.
It was still no later than a lazy man's breakfast time, and the Maymorning was perfect, with a cobalt sky above and a fine tingling qualityin the air to set the blood dancing in the veins. Over the top of theeastern range the sun was looking, level-rayed, into a parked valleybounded on all sides by high spurs and distant snow peaks. In its nearerreaches the valley was dotted with round hills, some of them bare,others dark green to their summits with forestings of mountain pine andfir. Now that it was out of the canyon, the train was skirting the footof the southern boundary spur, the railroad track holding its level byheading the gulches and rounding the alternating promontories.
From the outer loopings of the curves, the young tramp at the car doorhad momentary glimpses of the Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in itscanyon, and the swiftest of upland rivers even here where it had thevalley in which to expand. A Copah switchman had told him that therailroad division town of Brewster lay at the end of the night's run, ina river valley beyond the eastern Timanyonis, and that the situation ofthe irrigation project which was advertising for laborers in the Denvernewspapers was a few miles up the river from Brewster.
For reasons of his own, he was not anxious to make a daylight entry intothe town itself. Sooner or later, of course, the scrutiny of curiouseyes must be met, but there was no need of running to meet the risk. Notthat the risk was very great. While he was killing time in the Copahyard the day before, waiting for a chance to board the night freight, hehad picked up a bit of broken looking-glass and put it in his pocket.The picture it gave back when he took it out and looked into it was thatof a husky young tramp with a stubble beard a week old, and on face andneck and hands the accumulated grime of two thousand miles offreight-train riding. Also, the week's wear and tear had been, ifanything, harder on the clothes than on the man. His hat had been lostin one of the railroad-yard train-boardings and he had replaced it inDenver with a workman's cap. It was a part of the transformation,wrought and being wrought in him, that he was able to pocket the bit oflooking-glass with a slow grin of satisfaction. When one is about toapply for a job as a laboring man it is well to look the part.
As the train swept along on its way down the grades the valley becamemore open and the prospect broadened. At one of the promontory roundingsthe box-car passenger had a glimpse of a shack-built construction campon the river's margin some distance on ahead. A concrete dam was risingin sections out of the river, and dominating the dam and the shacks twosteel towers, with a carrying cable stretched between them, formed thepiers of the aerial spout conveyer for the placing of the material inthe forms.
A mile or more short of the construction camp the railroad made anotherof the many gulch loopings; and on its next emergence the train hadpassed the site of the dam, leaving it fully a mile in the rear. Herethe young man at the car door saw the ditch company's unloadingside-track with a spur branching away from the main line and crossingthe river on a temporary trestle. There were material yards on bothsides of the stream, and in one of the opposing hills a busy quarry.
The train made no stop at the construction siding, but a half-milefarther along the brakes began to grind and the speed was slackened.Sliding the car door another foot or two, the young tramp with theweek-old stubble beard on his face leaned out to look ahead. Hisopportunity was at hand. A block semaphore was turned against thefreight and the train was slowing in obedience to the signal. Waitinguntil the brakes shrilled again, the tramp put his shoulder to thesliding door, sat for a moment in the wider opening, and then swung off.
After the train had gone on he drew himself up, took a deepchest-filling breath of the crisp morning air, and looked about him. Thesun was an hour high over the eastern mountains, and the new worldspread itself in broad detail. His alighting was upon one of thepromontory embankments. To the westward, where the curving railroadtrack was lost in the farther windings of the river, lay the littleintermountain city of Brewster, a few of its higher buildings showingclear-cut in the distance. Paralleling the railroad, on a lower leveland nearer the river, a dusty wagon road pointed in one direction towardthe town, and in the other toward the construction camp.
The young man who had crossed four States and the better part of a fifthas a fugitive and vagrant turned his back upon the distant town as aplace to be avoided. Scrambling down the railroad embankment, he madehis way to the wagon road, crossed it, and kept on until he came to thefringe of aspens on the river's edge, where he broke all the trampishtraditions by stripping off the travel-worn clothes and plunging in totake a soapless bath. The water, being melted snow from the range, wasicy-cold and it stabbed like knives. Nevertheless, it was wet, and somepart of the travel dust, at least, was soluble in it. He came outglowing, but a thorn from his well-groomed past came up and pricked himwhen he had to put the soiled clothes on again. There was no presenthelp for that, however; and five minutes later he had regained the roadand was on his way to the ditch camp.
When he had gone a little distance he found that the wagon road dodgedthe railroad track as it could, crossing and recrossing the right of waytwice before the construction camp came into view. The last of thecrossings was at the temporary material yard for which the side-trackhad been installed, and from this point on, the wagon road held to theriver bank. The ditch people were doubtless getting all their materialover the railroad so there would be little hauling by wagon. But therewere automobile tracks in the dust, and shortly after he had passed thematerial yard the tramp heard a car coming up behind him. It was asix-cylinder roadster, and its motor was missing badly.
He gave the automobile passing room when it came along, glancing up tonote that its single occupant was a big, bearded man, wearing his graytweeds as one to whom clothes were merely a convenience. He was chewinga black cigar, and the unoccupied side of his mouth was busy at thepassing moment heaping objurgations upon the limping motor. A hundredyards farther along the motor gave a spasmodic gasp and stopped. Whenthe young tramp came up, the big man had climbed out and had the hoodopen. What he was saying to the stalled motor was picturesque enough tomake the young man stop and grin appreciatively.
"Gone bad on you?" he inquired.
Colonel Dexter Baldwin, the Timanyoni's largest landowner, and a breederof fine horses who tolerated motor-cars only because they could bedriven hard and were insensate and fit subjects for abusive language,took his head out of the hood.
"The third time this morning," he snapped. "I'd rather drive a team ofwind-broken mustangs, any day in the year!"
"I used to drive a car a while back," said the tramp. "Let me look herover."
The colonel stood aside, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, while theyoung man sought for the trouble. It was found presently in a loosenedmagneto wire; found and cleverly corrected. The tramp went around infront and spun the motor, and when it had been throttled down, ColonelBaldwin had his hand in his pocket.
"That's something like," he said. "The garage man said it was carbon.You take hold as if you knew how. What's your fee?"
The tramp shook his head and smiled good-naturedly.
"Nothing; for a bit of neighborly help like that."
The colonel put his coat on, and in the act took a better measure of thestalwart young fellow who looked like a hobo and talked and behaved likea gentleman. Colonel Dexter was a fairly shrewd judge of men, and heknew that the tramping brotherhood divides itself pretty evenly on adistinct line of cleavage, with the born vagran
t on one side and the manout of work on the other.
"You are hiking out to the dam?" he asked brusquely.
"I am headed that way, yes," was the equally crisp rejoinder.
"Hunting a job?"
"Just that."
"What sort of a job?"
"Anything that may happen to be in sight."
"That usually means a pick and shovel or a wheelbarrow on a constructionjob. We're needing quarrymen and concrete handlers, and we could use afew more rough carpenters on the forms. But there isn't much officework."
The tramp looked up quickly.
"What makes you think I'm hunting for an office job?" he queried.
"Your hands," said the colonel shortly.
The young man looked at his hands thoughtfully. They were dirty againfrom the tinkering with the motor, but the inspection went deeper thanthe grime.
"I'm not afraid of the pick and shovel, or the wheelbarrow, and on someaccounts I guess they'd be good for me. But on the other hand, perhapsit _is_ a pity to spoil a middling good office man to make anindifferent day-laborer--to say nothing of knocking some honest fellowout of the only job he knows how to do."
Colonel Baldwin swung in behind the steering-wheel of the roadster andheld a fresh match to the black cigar. Though he was from Missouri, hehad lived long enough in the high hills to know better than to judge anyman altogether by outward appearances.
"Climb in," he said, indicating the vacant seat at his side. "I'm thepresident of the ditch company. Perhaps Williams may be able to use you;but your chances for office work would be ten to one in the town."
"I don't care to live in the town," said the man out of work, mountingto the proffered seat; and past that the big roadster leaped away upthe road and the roar of the rejuvenated motor made further speechimpossible.
* * * * *
It was a full fortnight or more after this motor-tinkering incident onthe hill road to the dam, when Williams, chief engineer of the ditchproject, met President Baldwin in the Brewster offices of the ditchcompany and spent a busy hour with the colonel going over thecontractors' estimates for the month in prospect. In an interval of thebusiness talk, Baldwin remembered the good-looking young tramp who hadwanted a job.
"Oh, yes; I knew there was something else that I wanted to ask you," hesaid. "How about the young fellow that I unloaded on you a couple ofweeks ago? Did he make good?"
"Who--Smith?"
"Yes; if that's his name."
The engineer's left eyelid had a quizzical droop when he said dryly:"It's the name he goes by in camp; 'John Smith.' I haven't asked him hisother name."
The ranchman president matched the drooping eyelid of unbelief with asober smile. "I thought he looked as if he might be out here for hishealth--like a good many other fellows who have no particular use for adoctor. How is he making it?"
The engineer, a hard-bitten man with the prognathous lower jawcharacterizing the tribe of those who accomplish things, thrust hishands into his pockets and walked to the window to look down into theBrewster street. When he turned to face Baldwin again, it was to say:"That young fellow is a wonder, Colonel. I put him into the quarry atfirst, as you suggested, and in three days he had revolutionized thingsto the tune of a twenty-per-cent saving in production costs. Then I gavehim a hack at the concrete-mixers, and he's making good again in thecost reduction. That seems to be his specialty."
The president nodded and was sufficiently interested to follow up whathad been merely a casual inquiry.
"What are you calling him now?--a betterment engineer? You know yourfirst guess was that he was somebody's bookkeeper out of a job."
Williams wagged his head.
"He's a three-cornered puzzle to me, yet. He isn't an engineer, but whenyou drag a bunch of cost money up the trail, he goes after it like a dogafter a rabbit. I'm not anxious to lose him, but I really believe youcould make better use of him here in the town office than I can on thejob."
Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
"I'm afraid he'd have to loosen up on his record a little before wecould bring him in here. Badly as we're needing a money man, we canhardly afford to put a 'John Smith' into the saddle--at least notwithout knowing what his other name used to be."
"No; of course not. I guess, after all, he's only a 'lame duck,' like agood many of the rest of them. Day before yesterday, Burdell, the deputysheriff, was out at the camp looking the gangs over for the fellow whobroke into Lannigan's place last Saturday night. When he came into theoffice Smith was busy with an estimate, and Burdell went up and touchedhim on the shoulder, just to let him know that it was time to wake up.Suffering cats! It took three of us to keep him from breaking Burdell intwo and throwing him out of the window!"
"That looks rather bad," was the president's comment. Colonel DexterBaldwin had been the first regularly elected sheriff of Timanyoni Countyin the early days and he knew the symptoms. "Was Burdell wearing hisstar where it could be seen?"
The engineer nodded.
"What explanation did Smith make?"
"Oh, he apologized like a gentleman, and said he was subject to littlenervous attacks like that when anybody touched him unexpectedly. He tookBurdell over to Pete Simm's shack saloon and bought him a drink.Perkins, the timekeeper, says he's going to get a megaphone so he cangive due notice in advance when he wants to call Smith's attention."
The colonel pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of diplomaticcigars and passed it to the engineer, saying: "Light up a sure-enoughgood one, and tell me what you think Smith has been doing back yonder inthe other country."
Williams took the cigar but he shied at the conundrum.
"Ask me something easy," he said. "I've stacked up a few guesses. He'sfrom the Middle West--as the Bible says, his 'speech bewrayeth' him--andhe's had a good job of some kind; the kind that required him to keepabreast of things. If there's anything in looks, you'd say he wasn't athief or an embezzler, and yet it's pretty apparent that he's been usedto handling money in chunks and making it work for its living. I've putit up that there's a woman in it. Perhaps the other fellow got in hisway, or came up behind him and touched him unexpectedly, or something ofthat sort. Anyway, I'm not going to believe he's a crooked crook until Ihave to."
Colonel Baldwin helped himself to one of his own cigars, and the talkwent back to business. In the irrigation project, Williams was astockholder as well as the chief of construction, and Baldwin had morethan once found him a safe adviser. There was need for counsel. TheTimanyoni Ditch Company was in a rather hazardous condition financially,and the president and Williams rarely met without coming sooner or laterto a threshing out of the situation.
The difficulties were those which are apt to confront a small and localenterprise when it is so unfortunate as to get in the way of largerundertakings. Colonel Baldwin, and a group of his neighbors on the northside of the river, were reformed cattlemen and horse breeders. Insteadof drifting farther west in advance of the incoming tide of populationfollowing the coming of the railroad, they had availed themselves oftheir homestead rights and had taken up much of the grass-land in thefavorable valleys, irrigating it at first with water taken out of theriver in private or neighborhood ditches.
Later on came the sheep-feeding period, and after that the utilizationof larger crop-raising areas. The small ditches proving inadequate forthese, Colonel Baldwin had formed a stock company among his neighbors inthe grass-lands and his friends in Brewster for the building of asubstantial dam in the eastern hills. The project had seemed simpleenough in the beginning. The stock was sold for cash and eachstockholder would be a participating user of the water. Williams, whohad been a United States reclamation man before he came to theTimanyoni, had made careful estimates, and the stock subscriptionprovided money enough to cover the cost of the dam and the main ditch.
After some little bargaining, the dam site and the overflow land for thereservoir lake had been secured, and the work was begun. Out of a clear
sky, however, came trouble and harassment. Alien holders of miningclaims in the reservoir area turned up and demanded damages. Some fewhomesteaders who had promised to sign quitclaims changed their minds andsued for relief, and after the work was well under way it appeared thatthere was a cloud on the title of the dam site itself. All of theseclashings were carried into court, and the rancher promoters foundthemselves confronting invisible enemies and obstacle-raisers at everyturn.
The legal fight, as they soon found out, cost much money in every phaseof it; and now, when the dam was scarcely more than half completed, apractically empty treasury was staring them in the face. This was thesituation which called for its regular threshing out in every conferencebetween Colonel Baldwin and his chief of construction. There was nodisguising the fact that a crisis was approaching, a financial crisiswhich no one among the amateur promoters was big enough to cope with.
"We've got to go in deeper, Colonel; there is nothing else to do," wasthe engineer's summing up of the matter at the close of the conference."The snow is melting pretty rapidly on the range now, and when we getthe June rise we'll stand to lose everything we have if we can't keepevery wheel turning to get ready for the high water."
Baldwin was holding his cigar between his fingers and scowling at it asif it had mortally offended him.
"Assessments on the stock, you mean?" he said. "I'm afraid our crowdwon't stand for that. A good part of it is ready to lie down in theharness right now."
"How about a bond issue?" asked the engineer.
"Lord of heavens! What do we, or any of us, know about bond issues? Why,we knew barely enough about the business at the start to chip intogether and buy us a charter and go to work on a plan a little bitbigger than the neighborhood ditch idea. You couldn't float bonds inTimanyoni Park, and we're none of us foxy enough to go East and float'em."
"I guess that's right, too," admitted Williams. "Besides, with the stockgone off the way it has, it would take a mighty fine-haired financialsharp to sell bonds."
"What's that?" demanded the president. "Who's been selling any stock?"
"Buck Gardner, for one; and that man Bolling, up at the head of LittleCreek, for another. Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, told me aboutit, and he says that the price offered, and accepted, was thirty-nine."
"Dad burn a cuss with a yellow streak in him!" rasped the Missouricolonel. "We had a fair and square agreement among ourselves that ifanybody got scared he was to give the rest of us a chance to buy himout. Who bought from these welshers?"
"Maxwell didn't know that. He said it was done through Kinzie's bank.From what I've heard on the outside, I'm inclined to suspect thatCrawford Stanton was the buyer."
"Stanton, the real-estate man?"
"The same."
Again the president stared thoughtfully at the glowing end of his cigar.
"There's another of the confounded mysteries," he growled. "Who isCrawford Stanton, and what is he here for? I know what he advertises,but everybody in Brewster knows that he hasn't made a living dollar inreal estate since he came here last winter. Williams, do you know, I'mbeginning to suspect that there is a mighty big nigger in our littlewood-pile?"
"You mean that all these stubborn hold-ups have been bought and paidfor? You'll remember that is what Billy Starbuck tried to tell us whenthe first of the missing mining-claim owners began to shout at us."
"Starbuck has a long head, and what he doesn't know about mining claimsin this part of the country wouldn't fill a very big book. I remember hesaid there had never been any prospecting done in the upper Timanyonigulches, and now you'd think half the people in the United States hadbeen nosing around up there with a pick and shovel at one time oranother. But it was a thing that Starbuck told me no longer ago thanyesterday that set me to thinking," Baldwin went on. "As you know, theold Escalante Spanish Grant corners over in the western part of thispark. When the old grants were made, they were ruled off on the mapwithout reference to mountain ranges or other natural barriers."
Williams nodded.
"Well, as I say, one corner of the Escalante reaches over the Hophrasand out into the park, covering about eight or ten square miles of theterritory just beyond us on our side of the river. Starbuck told meyesterday that a big Eastern colonization company had got a bill throughCongress alienating that tract."
The chief of construction bounded out of his chair and began to walk thefloor. "By George!" he said; and again: "By George! That's what we're upagainst, Colonel! Where will those fellows get the water for their land?There is no site for a dam lower down than ours, and, anyway, that landlies too high to be watered by anything but a high-line ditch!"
"Nice little brace game, isn't it?" growled Baldwin. "If we hadn't beena lot of hayseed amateurs, we might have found out long ago that someone was running in a cold deck on us. What's your notion? Are we doneup, world without end?"
Williams's laugh was grim.
"What we need, Colonel, is to go out on the street and yell for adoctor," he said. "It's beginning to look as if we had acquired a prettybad case of malignant strangle-itis."
Baldwin ran his fingers through his hair and admitted that he had losthis sense of humor.
"It's hell, Williams," he said soberly. "You know how recklessly I'vewaded into this thing--how recklessly we've all gone into it for thatmatter. I'll come down like a man and admit that it has climbed up theladder to a place where I can't reach it. This Eastern crowd is tryingto freeze us out, to get our dam and reservoir and ditch rights fortheir Escalante scheme. When they do, they'll turn around and sell uswater--at fifty dollars an inch, or something like that!"
"What breaks my heart is that we haven't been able to surround thesure-enough fact while there was still time to do something," lamentedthe ex-reclamation man. "The Lord knows it's been plain enough, withStanton right here on the ground, and probably every one of theinterferences traceable directly to him. He has begun to close in onus; his purchase of the Gardner and Bolling stockholdings is thebeginning of the end. You know as well as I do, Colonel, what acontagious disease 'the yellows' is. Others will get it, and the firstthing we know, Stanton will own a majority of the stock and be voting usall out of a job. You'll have to come around to my suggestion, afterall, and advertise for a doctor." It was said of the chief ofconstruction that he would have joked on his death-bed, and, as afollower for the joke, he added: "Why don't you call Smith in and givehim the job?"
"Smith be damned," growled the colonel, who, as we have seen, had becomecompletely color-blind on the sense-of-humor side.
"I wouldn't put it beyond him to develop into the young Napoleon offinance that we seem to be needing just now," Williams went on, carryingthe jest to its legitimate conclusion.
Baldwin, like other self-made promoters in their day of trouble, was inthe condition of the drowning man who catches at straws.
"You don't really mean that, Williams, do you?" he asked.
"No, I didn't mean it when I said it," was the engineer's admission; "Iwas only trying to get a rise out of you. But really, Colonel, onsecond thought I don't know but it is worth considering. As I say,Smith seems to know the money game from start to finish. What is betterstill, he is a fighter from the word go--what you might call a joyousfighter. Suppose you drive out to-morrow or next day and pry into him alittle."
The rancher president had relapsed once more into the slough ofdiscouragement.
"You are merely grabbing for handholds, Bartley--as I was a minute ago.We are in a bad row of stumps when we can sit here and talk seriouslyabout roping down a young hobo and putting him into the financialharness. Let's go around to Frascati's and eat before you go back tocamp. It's bread-time, anyway."
The chief of construction said no more about his joking suggestion atthe moment, but when they were walking around the square to the BrewsterDelmonico's he went back to the dropped subject in all seriousness,saying: "Just the same, I wish you could know Smith and size him up as Ihave. I can't help believing, some way, that he's
all to the good."
The Real Man Page 4