V
The Specialist
Though the matter of calling in an expert doctor of finance to diagnosethe alarming symptoms in Timanyoni Ditch had been left indeterminate inthe talk between Colonel Baldwin and himself, Williams did not let it goentirely by default. On the day following the Brewster office conferencethe engineer sent for Smith, who was checking the output of the crushersat the quarry, and a little later the "betterment" man presented himselfat the door of the corrugated-iron shack which served as a field officefor the chief.
Williams looked the cost-cutter over as he stood in the doorway. Smithwas thriving and expanding handsomely in the new environment. He had lethis beard grow and it was now long enough to be trimmed to a point. Thetravel-broken clothes had been exchanged for working khaki, with laceboots and leggings, and the workman's cap had given place to thecampaign felt of the engineers. Though he had been less than a month onthe job, he was already beginning to tan and toughen under the healthyoutdoor work--to roughen, as well, his late fellow members of theLawrenceville Cotillon Club might have said, since he had fought threepitched battles with as many of the camp bullies, and had in each ofthem approved himself a man of his hands who could not only takepunishment, but could hammer an opponent swiftly and neatly into anydesired state of subjection.
"Come in here and sit down; I want to talk to you," was the way Williamsbegan it; and after Smith had found a chair and had lighted a gift cigarfrom the headquarters desk-box, the chief went on: "Say, Smith, you'retoo good a man for anything I've got for you here. Haven't you realizedthat?"
Smith pulled a memorandum-book from his hip pocket and ran his eye overthe private record he had been keeping.
"I've shown you how to effect a few little savings which total upsomething like fifteen per cent of your cost of production andoperation," he said. "Don't you think I'm earning my wages?"
"That's all right; I've been keeping tab, too, and I know what you'redoing. But you are not beginning to earn what you ought to, either foryourself or the company," put in the chief shrewdly. And then: "Loosenup, Smith, and tell me something about yourself. Who are you, and wheredo you come from, and what sort of a job have you been holding down?"
Smith's reply was as surprising as it was seemingly irrelevant.
"If you're not too busy, Mr. Williams, I guess you'd better make out mytime-check," he said quietly.
Williams took a reflective half-minute for consideration, turning thesudden request over deliberately in his mind, as his habit was.
"I suppose, by that you mean that you'll quit before you will consent toopen up on your record?" he assumed.
"You've guessed it," said the man who had sealed the book of his past.
Again Williams took a little time. It was discouraging to have his ownand the colonel's prefigurings as to Smith's probable state and standingso promptly verified.
"I suppose you know the plain inference you're leaving, when you say athing like that?"
Smith made the sign of assent. "It leaves you entirely at liberty tofinish out the story to suit yourself," he admitted, adding: "The backnumbers--my back numbers--are my own, Mr. Williams. I've kept a file ofthem, as everybody does, but I don't have to produce it on request."
"Of course, there's nothing compulsory about your producing it. Butunless you are what they call in this country a 'crooked' crook, you arestanding in your own light. You have such a staving good head forfigures and finances that it seems a pity for you to be wasting it hereon an undergraduate's job in cost-cutting. Any young fellow just out ofa technical school could do what you're doing in the way of paring downexpenses."
The cost-cutter's smile was mildly incredulous.
"Nobody seemed to be doing it before I came," he offered.
"No," Williams allowed, "that's the fact. To tell the plain truth, we'vehad bigger things to wrestle with; and we have them yet, for thatmatter--enough of them to go all around the job twice and tie in abow-knot."
"Finances?" queried Smith, feeling some of the back-number instinctsstirring within him.
The chief engineer nodded; then he looked up with a twinkle in hisclosely set gray eyes. "If you'll tell me why you tried to kill Burdellthe other day, maybe I'll open up the record--our record--for you."
This time the cost-cutter's smile was good-naturedly derisive, and itignored the reference to Burdell.
"You don't have to open up your record--for me; it's the talk of thecamp. You people are undercapitalized--to boil it down into one word.Isn't that about the way it sizes up?"
"That is the way it has turned out; though we had capital enough tobegin with. We've been bled to death by damage suits."
Smith shook his head. "Why haven't you hired a first-class attorney, Mr.Williams?"
"We've had the best we could find, but the other fellows have beaten usto it, every time. But the legal end of it hasn't been the whole thingor the biggest part of it. What we are needing most is a man who knows alittle something about corporation fights and high finance." And at thisthe engineer forgot the Smith disabilities, real or inferential, andwent on to explain in detail the peculiar helplessness of the TimanyoniCompany as the antagonist of the as yet unnamed land and irrigationtrust.
Smith heard him through, nodding understandingly when the tale wastold.
"It's the old story of the big fish swallowing the little one; so oldthat there is no longer any saving touch of novelty in it," hecommented. "I've been wondering if there wasn't something of that kindin your background. And you say you haven't any Belmonts or Morgans orRockefellers in your company?"
"We have a bunch of rather badly scared-up ranch owners and localpeople, with Colonel Baldwin in command, and that's all. The colonel isa fighting man, all right, and he can shoot as straight as anybody, whenyou have shown him what to shoot at. But he is outclassed, like all therest of us, when it comes to a game of financial freeze-out. And that iswhat we are up against, I'm afraid."
"There isn't the slightest doubt in the world about that," said the onewho had been called in as an expert. "What I can't understand is whysome of you didn't size the situation up long ago--before it got intoits present desperate shape. You are at the beginning of the end, now.They've caught you with an empty treasury, and these stock sales youspeak of prove that they have already begun to swallow you by littles.Timanyoni Common--I suppose you haven't any Preferred--at thirty-nine isan excellent gamble for any group of men who can see their way clear tobuying the control. With an eager market for the water--and they cansell the water to you people, even if they don't put their own Escalanteproject through--the stock can be pushed to par and beyond, as it willbe after you folks are all safely frozen out. More than that, they cancharge you enough, for the water you've got to have, to finance theEscalante scheme and pay all the bills; and their investment, at thepresent market, will be only thirty-nine cents in the dollar. It's aneat little play."
Williams was by this time far past remembering that his adviser was aman with a possible _alias_ and presumably a fugitive from justice.
"Can't something be done, Smith? You've had experience in these things;your talk shows it. Have we got to stand still and be shot to pieces?"
"The necessity remains to be demonstrated. But you will be shot topieces, to a dead moral certainty, if you don't put somebody on deckwith the necessary brains, and do it quickly," said Smith with frankbluntness.
"Hold on," protested the engineer. "Every man to his trade. When I saidthat we had nobody but the neighbors and our friends in the company, Ididn't mean to give the impression that they were either dolts orchuckleheads. As a matter of fact, we have a pretty level-headed bunchof men in Timanyoni Ditch--though I'll admit that some of them arenervous enough, just now, to want to get out on almost any terms. What Imeant to say was that they don't happen to be up in all the crooks andturnings of the high-finance buccaneers."
"I didn't mean to reflect upon Colonel Baldwin and his friends,"rejoined the ex-cashier good-naturedly. "It is nothin
g especiallydiscrediting to them that they are not up in all the tricks of a tradewhich is not theirs. The financing of a scheme like this has come to bea business by itself, Mr. Williams, and it is hardly to be expected thata group of inexperienced men could do it successfully."
"I know that, blessed well. That is what I said from the beginning, andI think Colonel Baldwin leaned that way, too. But it seemed like a verysimple undertaking. A number of stockmen and crop growers wanted a damand a ditch, and they had the money to pay for them. That seemed to beall there was to it in the beginning."
Smith was leaning back in his chair and smoking reflectively.
"Did you call me in here to get an expert opinion?" he asked, halfhumorously.
"Something of that kind--yes; just on the bare chance that you could,and would, give us one," Williams admitted.
"Well, I'm hardly an expert," was the modest reply; "but if I were inyour place I should hire the best financial scrapper that money couldpay for. I can't attempt to tell you what such a man would do, but hewould at least rattle around in the box and try to give you a fightingchance, which is more than you seem to have now."
The construction chief turned abruptly upon his cost-cutter.
"Keeping in mind what you said a few minutes ago about 'back numbers,'would it be climbing over the fence too far for me to ask if yourexperience has been such as would warrant you in tackling a job of thiskind?"
"That is a fair question, and I can answer it straight," said the manunder fire. "I've had the experience."
"I thought so; and that brings on more talk. I'm not authorized to makeyou any proposal. But Colonel Baldwin and I were talking the matter overyesterday and your name was mentioned. I told the colonel that it wasvery evident that you were accustomed to handling bigger financialmatters than these labor-and-material cost-cuttings you've been figuringon out here. If the colonel should ask you to, would you consider as apossibility the taking of the doctor's job on this sick project ofours?"
"No," was the brief rejoinder.
"Why not?"
Smith looked away out of the one square window in the shack at the busyscene on the dam stagings.
"Let us say that I don't care to mix and mingle with my kind, Mr.Williams, and let it go at that," he said.
"You are not interested in that side of it?"
"Interested, but not to the point of enlisting."
"You don't think of anything that might make you change your mind?"
"There is nothing that you could offer which would be a sufficientinducement."
"Why isn't there?"
"Because I'm not exactly a born simpleton, Mr. Williams. There are anumber of reasons which are purely personal to me, and at least onewhich cuts ice on your side of the pond. Your financial 'doctor,' as youcall him, would have to be trusted absolutely in the handling of thecompany's money and its negotiable securities. You would have a perfectright to demand any and every assurance of his fitness andtrustworthiness. You could, and should, put him under a fairly heavybond. I'll not go into it any deeper than to say that I can't give abond."
Williams took his defeat, if it could be called a defeat, withoutfurther protest.
"I thought it might not be amiss to talk it over with you," he said. "Idon't know that the colonel will make any move, but if he does, he willdeal with you direct. You say it is impossible, and perhaps it is. Butit won't do any harm for you to think it over, and if I were you, Ishouldn't burn all the bridges behind me. There ought to be considerablemoney in it for the right man, if he succeeds, and nothing much to loseif he should fail."
Smith went back to his work in the quarry with a troubled mind. Thelittle heart-to-heart talk with Williams had been sharply depressive. Ithad shown him, as nothing else could, how limited for all the remainderof his life his chances must be. That he would be pursued, thatdescriptions and photographs of the ex-cashier of the Lawrenceville Bankand Trust Company were already circulating from hand to hand among thepaid man-catchers, he did not doubt for a moment. While he could remainas a workman unit in an isolated construction camp, there was somelittle hope that he might be overlooked. But to become the publiccharacter of Williams's suggestion in a peopled city was to run to meethis fate.
In a way the tentative offer was a keen temptation. One of the lustiestgrowths pushing its way up through the new soil of the metamorphosis wasa strong and mounting conviction that J. Montague Smith, of theLawrenceville avatar, had been only half a man; was, at his best, only apale shadow of the plain John Smith to whom accident and a momentaryimpulse of passion had given birth. With a clear field he would haveasked for nothing better than a chance to take the leadership in thefight which Williams had outlined, and the new and elemental stirringswere telling him that he could win the fight. But with a price on hishead it was not to be thought of.
That night, when he rolled himself in his blankets in the bunk tent, hehad renewed his prudent determination and it was crystallizing itself inwords.
"No, not for money or gratitude or any other argument they can bring tobear," he said to himself, and thereupon fell asleep with the mistakennotion that he had definitely pushed the temptation aside for good andall.
The Real Man Page 5