XXI
At Any Cost
Brewster, drawing its business profit chiefly from the mines in theTopaz and upper Gloria districts, had been only moderately enthusiasticover the original irrigation project organized by Colonel Dexter Baldwinand the group of ranchmen who were to be directly benefited. But whenthe scope of the plan was enlarged to include a new source of power andlight for the city, the scheme had become, in a broader sense, a publicutility, and Brewster had promptly awakened to the importance of itssuccess as a local enterprise.
The inclusion of the hydro-electric privilege in the new charter hadbeen a bit of far-sighted business craft on the part of the young manwhose name was now in everybody's mouth. As he had pointed out to hisnew board of directors, there was an abundant excess of water, and amodest profit on the electric plant would pay the operating expenses ofthe entire system, including the irrigating up-keep and extension work.In addition to this, a reasonable contract price for electric current tobe furnished to the city would give the project a _quasi_-publiccharacter, at least to the extent of enlisting public sympathy on theside of the company in the fight with the land trust.
This piece of business foresight found itself amply justified asthe race against time was narrowed down to days and hours. Thoughthere was spiteful opposition offered by one of the two dailynewspapers--currently charged with being subsidized by the landtrust--public sentiment as a whole, led by the other newspaper, wasstrongly on the side of the local corporation. Baldwin, Maxwell,Starbuck, and a few more of the leading spirits in Timanyoni High Linehad many friends, and Crawford Stanton found his task growingincreasingly difficult as the climax drew near.
But to a man with an iron jaw difficulties become merely incentives togreater effort. Being between the devil, in the person of an employerwho knew no mercy, on the one hand, and the deep blue sea of failure onthe other, the promoter left no expedient untried, and the one which wasyielding the best results, thus far, was the steady undercurrent ofdetraction and calamitous rumor which he had contrived to set in motion.As we have seen, it was first whispered, and then openly asserted, thatthe dam was being built too hurriedly; that its foundations wereinsecure; that, sooner or later, it would be carried away in high water,and the city and the intervening country would be flood-swept anddevastated.
Beyond this, the detractive gossip attacked the _personnel_ of the newcompany. Baldwin was all right as a man, and he knew how to raise finehorses; but what did he, or any of his associates, know about buildingdams and installing hydro-electric plants? Williams, the chief engineer,was an ex-government man, and--government projects being anathema in theTimanyoni by reason of the restrictive rules and regulations of theHophra Forest Reserve--everybody knew what that meant: out-of-datemethods, red-tape detail, general inefficiency. And Smith, the youngplunger who had dropped in from nobody knew where: what could be said ofhim more than that he had succeeded in temporarily hypnotizing an entirecity? Who was he? and where had the colonel found him? Was his namereally Smith, or was that only a convenient _alias_?
Having set these queries afoot in Brewster, Stanton was unwearied inkeeping them alive and pressing them home. And since such askings growby what they feed upon, the questions soon began to lose theinterrogatory form and to become assertions of fact. Banker Kinzie wasquoted as saying, or at least as intimating, that he had lost faith, notonly in the High Line scheme, but particularly in its secretary andtreasurer; and to this bit of gossip was added another to the effectthat Smith had grossly deceived the bank by claiming to be therepresentative of Eastern capital when he was nothing more than anadventurer trading upon the credulity and good nature of an entirecommunity.
To these calumniating charges it was admitted on all sides that Smith,himself, was giving some color of truth. To those who had opposed him hehad shown no mercy, and there were plenty of defeated litigants, andsome few dropped stockholders, among the obstructors to claim that thenew High Line promoter was a bully and a browbeater; that a poor manstood no chance in a fight with the Timanyoni Company.
On the sentimental side the charges were still graver--in the Westernpoint of view. In its social aspect Brewster was still in thecountry-village stage, and Smith's goings and comings at Hillcrest hadbeen quickly marked. From that to assuming the sentimental status, withthe colonel's daughter in the title role, was a step that had alreadybeen taken by the society editress of the _Brewster Banner_ in a veiledhint of a forthcoming "announcement" in which "the charming daughter ofone of our oldest and most respected families" and "a brilliant youngbusiness man from the East" were to figure as the parties in interest.Conceive, therefore, the shock that had been given to these kindliergossips when Smith's visits to the Baldwin ranch ceased abruptly betweentwo days, and the "brilliant young business man" was seen everywhere andalways in the company of the beautiful stranger who was stopping at theHophra House. In its palmier day the Timanyoni had hanged a man forless.
On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smithgave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the businessfield. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a mansuddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial,not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the shortspace of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities whichhe had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing andrefinancing of the irrigation project.
"We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, atlast," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for thebejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra cafe. "Kinzie is aboutto throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam isgetting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that youcan't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up tohis office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smithabused him first and then threw him out bodily--hurt him prettysavagely, they say."
The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise.
"Bad temper?" she queried.
"Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take yourchoice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with MissRichlander overnight?--or has he?"
The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were atluncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutesago."
Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But aninvisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might havedrawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrencevillemagnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were notprecisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times.
"I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day,Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the littleranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from usand went back to you at the autos?"
"No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say."
"But it, or something else, has changed you--very much for the worse.Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch thisafternoon?"
"And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition?--never in thisworld!"
"More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame ofmind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever doyou suppose has become of Tucker?"
"How should I know?"
"If he had come in last night, and you had met him--as I asked youto--in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might thinkyou had murdered him."
It was doubtless by sheer accident that Smith, reaching at the momentfor the salad-oil, overturned his water-glass. But the small accident byno means accounted for the sudden graying of his face under theTimanyoni wind tan--for that or for the shaking hands with which heseconded the waiter's anxious efforts to repair the damage. When theywere alone again, the momentary trepidation had given place to a renewedhardness that lent a biting rasp to his voice.
"In the hope that father will tell what he knows about you?"
"Just that."
"Does this Mr. Kinzie know where father is to be found?"
"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."
Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.
"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making,if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell youthat Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in tryingto make me tell him where father has gone."
"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assureyou, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach yourfather--alive."
"_Ooh!_" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the roundedshoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a muchsimpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie insome way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you dothat?"
"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"
"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said theyoung woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, youknow. Father left it with me--in case I should want to communicate withhim."
Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.
"_You_ wouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of theultimate right and wrong, would you? _You_ wouldn't say that the onlygreat man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"
Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.
"Are you quoting the little ranch person?" she inquired. Then sheanswered his query: "The only great men worth speaking of are the menwho win. For the lack of something better to do, I'm willing to help youwin, Montague. Contrive in some way to have that clerk sent to me. Itcan come about quite casually if it is properly suggested. Mostnaturally, I am the one who would know where my father is to be found.And I have changed my mind about wanting to drive to the Baldwins'.We'll compromise on the play--if there _is_ a play."
Two things came of this talk over the luncheon table. Smith went back tohis office and shut himself up, without going near the Brewster CityNational. None the less, the expedient suggested by Verda Richlandermust have found its means of communication in some way, since at twoo'clock David Kinzie summoned the confidential clerk who had beendirected to provide himself with a livery mount and gave him hisinstructions.
"I'm turning this over to you, Hoback, because you know enough to keep astill tongue in your head. Mr. Stanton doesn't know where Mr. Richlanderis, but Mr. Richlander's daughter does know. Go over to the hotel andintroduce yourself as coming from me. Say to the daughter that it isnecessary for us to communicate with her father on a matter of importantbusiness, and ask her if she can direct you. That's all; only don'tmention Stanton in the matter. Come back and report after you've seenher."
This was one of the results of the luncheon-table talk; and the othercame a short half-hour further along, when the confidential clerkreturned to make his report.
"I don't know why Miss Richlander wouldn't tell Mr. Stanton," he said."She was mighty nice to me; made me a pencil sketch of the Topaz countryand marked the mines that her father is examining."
"Good!" said David Kinzie, with his stubbly mustache at its mostaggressive angle. "It's pretty late in the day, but you'd better make astart and get as far as you can before dark. When you find Mr.Richlander, handle him gently. Tell him who you are, and then ask him ifhe knows anything about a man named 'Montague,' or 'Montague Smith';ask him who he is, and where he comes from. If you get that far withhim, he'll probably tell you the rest of it."
Smith saw no more of Miss Richlander until eight o'clock in the evening,at which time he sent his card to her room and waited for her in themezzanine parlors. When she came down to him, radiant in fine raiment,he seemed not to see the bedeckings or the beauty which they adorned.
"There is a play, and I have the seats," he announced briefly.
"_Merci!_" she flung back. "Small favors thankfully received, and largerones in proportion; though it's hardly a favor, this time, because Ihave paid for it in advance. Mr. Kinzie's young man came to see me thisafternoon."
"What did you do?"
"I gave him a tracing of my map, and he was so grateful that it made mewant to tell him that it was all wrong; that he wouldn't find father ina month if he followed the directions."
"But you didn't!"
"No; I can play the game, when it seems worth while."
Smith was frowning thoughtfully when he led her to the elevator alcove.
"My way would have been the surer," he muttered, half to himself.
"Barbarian!" she laughed; and then: "To think that you were once a'debutantes' darling'! Oh, yes; I know it was Carter Westfall who saidit first, but it was true enough to name you instantly for allLawrenceville."
Smith made no comment, and Miss Richlander did not speak again untilthey were waiting in the women's lobby for the house porter to call acab. Then, as if she had just remembered it:
"Oh! I forgot to ask you: is the Eastern train in?"
He nodded. "It was on time this evening--for a wonder."
"And no Tucker yet! What in the world do you suppose could have happenedto him, Montague?"
The porter was announcing the theatre cab and Smith reserved his answeruntil the motor hackney was rolling jerkily away toward the opera-house.
"Jibbey has probably got what was coming to him," he said grittingly. "Idon't know whether you have ever remarked it or not, but the insect ofthe Jibbey breed usually finds somebody to come along and step on it,sooner or later."
The Real Man Page 21