XXXI
A Race to the Swift
Since Sheriff Harding had left his office in the county jail and hadgone home to his ranch on the north side of the river some hoursearlier, not a little precious time was consumed in hunting him up.Beyond this, there was another delay in securing the deputy. WhenStarbuck's car came to a stand for a second time before themesa-fronting entrance of the court-house, Smith came quickly across thewalk from the portal.
"Mr. Harding," he began abruptly, "Judge Warner has gone home and he hasmade me his messenger. There is a bit of sharp work to be done, andyou'll need a strong posse. Can you deputize fifteen or twenty good menwho can be depended upon in a fight and rendezvous them on thenorth-side river road in two hours from now?"
The sheriff, a big, bearded man who might have sat for the model of oneof Frederic Remington's frontiersmen, took time to consider. "Is it ascrap?" he asked.
"It is likely to be. There are warrants to be served, and there willmost probably be resistance. Your posse should be well armed."
"We'll try for it," was the decision. "On the north-side river road, yousay? You'll want us mounted?"
"It will be better to take horses. We could get autos, but Judge Warneragrees with me that the thing had better be done quietly and withoutmaking too much of a stir in town."
"All right," said the man of the law. "Is that all?"
"No, not quite all. The first of the warrants is to be served here inBrewster--upon Mr. Crawford Stanton. Your deputy will probably find himat the Hophra House. Here is the paper: it is a bench warrant ofcommitment on a charge of conspiracy, and Stanton is to be locked up.Also you are to see to it that your jail telephone is out of order; sothat Stanton won't be able to make any attempt to get a hearing and bailbefore to-morrow."
"That part of it is mighty risky," said Harding. "Does the judge knowabout that, too?"
"He does; and for the ends of pure justice, he concurs with me--though,of course, he couldn't give a mandatory order."
The sheriff turned to his jail deputy, who had descended from the rumbleseat in the rear.
"You've heard the dope, Jimmie," he said shortly. "Go and get His Nobsand lock him up. And if he wants to be yelling 'Help!' and sending forhis lawyer or somebody, why, the telephone's takin' a lay-off. _Savvy?_"
The deputy nodded and turned upon his heel, stuffing the warrant forStanton's arrest into his pocket as he went. Smith swung up besideStarbuck, saying: "In a couple of hours, then, Mr. Harding; somewherenear the bridge approach on the other side of the river."
Starbuck had started the motor and was bending forward to adjust the oilfeed when the sheriff left them.
"You seem to have made a ten-strike with Judge Warner," theex-cow-puncher remarked, replacing the flash-lamp in its seat pocket.
"Judge Warner is a man in every inch of him; but there is somethingbehind this night's work that I don't quite understand," was the quickreply. "I had hardly begun to state the case when the judge interruptedme. 'I know,' he said. 'I have been waiting for you people to come andask for relief.' What do you make of that, Billy?"
"I don't know; unless somebody in Stanton's outfit has welshed. Shawmight have done it. He has been to Bob Stillings, and Stillings says heis sore at Stanton for some reason. Shaw was trying to get Stillings toagree to drop the railroad case against him, and Bob says he made somevague promise of help in the High Line business if the railroad peoplewould agree not to prosecute."
"There is a screw loose somewhere; I know by the way Judge Warner tookhold. When I proposed to swear out the warrant for Stanton's arrest, hesaid, 'I can't understand, Mr. Smith, why you haven't done this before,'and he sat down and filled out the blank. But we can let that go for thepresent. How are you going to get me across the river without taking methrough the heart of the town and giving the Brewster police a shy atme?"
Starbuck's answer was wordless. With a quick twist of the pilot wheel hesent the car skidding around the corner, using undue haste, as itseemed, since they had two hours before them. A few minutes fartheralong the lights of the town had been left behind and the car wasspeeding swiftly westward on a country road paralleling the railwaytrack; the road over which Smith had twice driven with the kidnappedJibbey.
"I'm still guessing," the passenger ventured, when the last of therailroad distance signals had flashed to the rear. And then: "What's thefrantic hurry, Billy?"
Starbuck was running with the muffler cut out, but now he cut it in andthe roar of the motor sank to a humming murmur.
"I thought so," he remarked, turning his head to listen. "You didn'tnotice that police whistle just as we were leaving the court-house, didyou?--nor the answers to it while we were dodging through the suburbs?Somebody has marked us down and passed the word, and now they're chasingus with a buzz-wagon. Don't you hear it?"
By this time Smith could hear the sputtering roar of the following caronly too plainly.
"It's a big one," he commented. "You can't outrun it, Billy; and,besides, there is nowhere to run to in this direction."
Again Starbuck's reply translated itself into action. With a skilfultouch of the controls he sent the car ahead at top speed, and for amatter of ten miles or more held a diminishing lead in the race throughsheer good driving and an accurate knowledge of the road and itstwistings and turnings. Smith knew little of the westward half of thePark which they were approaching, and the little was not encouraging.Beyond Little Butte and the old Wire Silver mine the road they weretraversing would become a cart track in the mountains; and there was nooutlet to the north save by means of the railroad bridge at Little Buttestation.
Throughout the race the pursuers had been gradually gaining, and by thetime the forested bulk of Little Butte was outlining itself against theclouded sky on the left, the headlights of the oncoming police car werein plain view to the rear. Worse still, there were three grade crossingsof the railroad track just ahead in the stretch of road which roundedthe toe of the mountain; and from somewhere up the valley and beyond therailroad bridge came the distance-softened whistle of a train.
Starbuck set a high mark for himself as a courageous driver ofmotor-cars when he came to the last of the three road crossings. Jerkingthe car around sharply at the instant of track-crossing, he headedstraight out over the ties for the railroad bridge. It was a courting ofdeath. To drive the bridge at racing speed was hazardous enough, but todrive it thus in the face of a down-coming train seemed nothing lessthan madness.
It was after the car had shot into the first of the three bridge spansthat the pursuers pulled up and opened fire. Starbuck bent lower overhis wheel, and Smith clutched for handholds. Far up the track on thenorth side of the river a headlight flashed in the darkness, and thehoarse blast of a locomotive, whistling for the bridge, echoed andre-echoed among the hills.
Starbuck, tortured because he could not remember what sort of anapproach the railway track made to the bridge on the farther side, drovefor his life. With the bridge fairly crossed he found himself on a highembankment; and the oncoming train was now less than half a mile away.To turn out on the embankment was to hurl the car to certaindestruction. To hold on was to take a hazardous chance of colliding withthe train. Somewhere beyond the bridge approach there was a road; somuch Starbuck could recall. If they could reach its crossing before thecollision should come----
They did reach it, by what seemed to Smith a margin of no more than thelength of the heavy freight train which went jangling past them a scantsecond or so after the car had been wrenched aside into the obscure mesaroad. They had gone a mile or more on the reverse leg of the longdown-river detour before Starbuck cut the speed and turned the wheelover to his seat-mate.
"Take her a minute while I get the makings," he said, dry-lipped,feeling in his pockets for tobacco and the rice-paper. Then he added:"Holy Solomon! I never wanted a smoke so bad in all my life!"
Smith's laugh was a chuckle.
"Gets next to you--after the fact--doesn't it? That's where we split. Ihad
my scare before we hit the bridge, and it tasted like a mouthful ofbitter aloes. Does this road take us back up the river?"
"It takes us twenty miles around through the Park and comes in at thehead of Little Creek. But we have plenty of time. You told Harding twohours, didn't you?"
"Yes; but I must have a few minutes at Hillcrest before we get action,Billy."
Starbuck took the wheel again and said nothing until the roundabout racehad been fully run and he was easing the car down the last of the hillsinto the Little Creek road. There had been three-quarters of an hour ofskilful driving over a bad road to come between Smith's remark and itsreply, but Starbuck apparently made no account of the length of theinterval.
"You're aiming to go and see Corry?" he asked, while the car wascoasting to the hill bottom.
"Yes."
With a sudden flick of the controls and a quick jamming of the brakes,Starbuck brought the car to a stand just as it came into the level road.
"We're man to man here under the canopy, John; and Corry Baldwin hasn'tgot any brother," he offered gravely. "I'm backing you in this businessfight for all I'm worth--for Dick Maxwell's sake and the colonel's, andmaybe a little bit for the sake of my own ante of twenty thousand. AndI'm ready to back you in this old-home scrap with all the money you'llneed to make your fight. But when it comes to the little girl it'sdifferent. Have you any good and fair right to hunt up Corry Baldwinwhile things are shaping themselves up as they are?"
Since Smith had made the acquaintance of the absolute ego he hadacquired many things new and strange, among them a great ruthlessness inthe pursuit of the desired object, and an equally large carelessness forconsequences past the instant of attainment. None the less, he met theshrewd inquisition fairly.
"Give it a name," he said shortly.
"I will: I'll give it the one you gave it a while back. You said youwere an outlaw, on two charges: embezzlement and assault. We'll let theassault part of it go. Even a pretty humane sort of fellow may have tokill somebody now and then and call it all in the day's work. But theother thing doesn't taste good."
"I didn't embezzle anything, Billy. I thought I made that plain."
"So you did. But you also made it plain that the home court would belikely to send you up for it, guilty or not guilty. And with a thinglike that hanging over you ... you see, I know Corry Baldwin, John. Ifyou put it up to her to-night, and she happens to fall in with your sideof it--which is what you're aiming to make her do--all hell won't keepher from going back home with you and seeing you through!"
"Good God, Billy! If I thought she loved me well enough to do that! Butthink a minute. It may easily happen that this is my last chance. I maynever see her again. I said I wouldn't tell her--that I loved her toowell to tell her ... but now the final pinch has come, and I----"
"And that isn't all," Starbuck went on relentlessly. "There's this MissRich-acres. You say there's nothing to it, there, but you've as good asadmitted that she's been lying to Dave Kinzie for you. Your hands ain'tclean, John; not clean enough to let you go to Hillcrest to-night."
Smith groped in his pockets, found a cigar and lighted it. Perhaps hewas recalling his own words spoken to Verda Richlander only a few hoursearlier: "_Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with theshadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?_" And yet that was just whathe was about to do--or had been about to do.
"Pull out to the side of the road and we'll kill what time there is tokill right here," he directed soberly. And then: "What you say is rightas right, Billy. Once more, I guess, I was locoed for the minute. Forgetit; and while you're about it, forget Miss Richlander, too. Luckily forher, she is out of it--as far out of it as I am."
The Real Man Page 31