by Max Brand
We skidded and slithered around a terrible bend; the coach seemed to leap out into thin air, and I knew we would have been gone had not Charlie, with superhuman skill, managed to turn the wheelers sharply in.
So the front wheels hit the road again, the stage gave a crazy, groaning wrench and heave, and away we went bowling, once more. It was only a question of time, however, before we went to smash. I knew it. In fact, we all knew it. I heard Tracy Dixon call out loudly to Bridges:
“Bridges, I’m too old and brittle to live through it, but you may. If you do, make those directors buy the Cresswell-Hampton line. We’ve got to have it. Tell ’em it’s my dying request!”
About this time, I saw that Steve Cole had climbed onto the driver’s seat. He helped haul upon the reins for a time. Then suddenly he pitched forward in a wild leap. Charlie Butcher cursed again. I looked back, fearing to see Steve lying on the road, smashed by the heavy wheels. But he hadn’t hit the road. No, there he was on the back of the off wheeler. The horse began to buck, but Steve hung on by the back strap, and bending away over inside, he reached, straightened, and he had the lost rein in his hand again!
I let out a yell of joy, then closed my eyes as we shuddered at full speed around a hairpin turn, the leaders out of sight. However, we didn’t quite go over the cliff, and now I could see the mouths of the leaders being pulled wide open by the strength that was leaning back on the reins. Pretty soon their traces were hanging limp. Then the swingers and the wheelers came under control. The stage no longer rolled on freely, like an avalanche, but the brakes were taking hold. And now the stage was in the hands of Charlie, where it should have been.
I sat down, very sick, with a chill of sweat running on my face, and I heard Tracy Dixon saying:
“We owe our lives to that young man, I believe!”
It was true. At one stroke, Steve Cole had showed more real heroism, more natural courage, than I ever would show in my life.
CHAPTER XXXVI. A BOMBSHELL
WE PULLED UP, now, and took stock of things. Nothing was damaged. The tough running gear of the stage was as good as ever, and yet we needed that pause to take breath.
When we started on again, the ice seemed to be broken. The committee had thanked Steve one by one, and he had blushed and waved their gratitude aside. He was so embarrassed by it that he climbed back onto the driver’s seat and remained there all the rest of the way into Piegan.
But now the colonel had an entrance wedge, and he drove it in with talk about other close staging escapes, and proved how many lives a year the railroad would save — to Makerville!
It had been Makerville, of course, all the way from the railroad to Piegan. Makerville was the town of which the colonel talked, and Maker was the name he gave himself. How he was going to make the switch to Piegan I could not tell. That was something for him to shudder over. However, we were in a much better atmosphere all around when we pulled into the town. And young Bridges stood up, just before we came in, and heartened us by exclaiming:
“A glorious valley, Dixon. Simply glorious!”
I was amazed. I looked in my turn. A veil fell from before my eyes. In spite of all the smoke of words that the colonel had sent up, in spite of all of his lies and camouflage, suddenly I saw that Bridges was right. It was a glorious valley. Those broad acres one day might be green with crops; those mountains might send down their hidden treasures; and perhaps the colonel was more prophet than scoundrel!
That was a most amazing idea for me, and I suddenly half expected that everything would go all right. We reached the hotel, which was done up in bunting like the Fourth of July, and our three distinguished guests were taken to their rooms. Then the colonel embraced and practically wept over me and Steve. He said we between us had saved Piegan. He didn’t care, he said, about his own life, but he knew that the fate of Piegan still depended upon his schemes and the courage, et cetera, of the gallant young men who, et cetera. It was a lot of bunk, but it hit Steve hard, and he was in the clouds.
Then a bombshell dropped. Just as we were celebrating, and as I was beginning to get ready for a dive into bed, with the intention of staying there for about a week, down came the three railroaders, Tracy Dixon walking first and stepping high. He sailed straight up to the colonel and said:
“Your name is not Sidney Maker. Your name is Riggs. And you’re a rascal. This town is Piegan. You’ve committed a crime, besides wasting invaluable time for me, and I’ll have you behind bars, you second-rate fraud!”
You can judge a blow by the sound it makes, and the way the other fellow drops. The colonel slumped against a wall, otherwise I’m sure that he would have fallen to the ground.
Where had the visitors picked up their information?
To this very day it remains a mystery. Some rascal of a servant in the hotel may have planted the news in the wrong spot. We never were able to tell.
Tracy Dixon turned on me:
“I’ve heard of your record, too, young man,” said he, “and it appears that this excellent town of Piegan is filled with thieves and blackguards and gunmen.”
He gave me the cold shoulder and whirled toward Steve Cole, grasping his hand.
“My boy,” said he, “I thanked you before for your glorious conduct to-day. I thank you again, and forever. I want you to come away with me. I’ll show you doors of life that may be opened; I’ll show you a future, my friend. But to begin with, I’ve never heard your name, I believe.”
“My name is Steven Cole,” said Steve, dazed and uncertain.
“What’s that? What’s that?” snapped Tracy Dixon. “Parker Cole has a son named Steven!”
“He’s my father,” said Steve.
“Ha?” cried Dixon. “You’re the son of Parker Cole! Oh, blood will tell, blood will tell! Give me your hand again. Parker Cole’s son? You are, too. You’re the image of him when he went to college with me. Did he ever tell you about the day I gave him fifteen pounds and a licking? I’ll wager he never did. He was always a proud young devil; a proud old one, too. Steven, what are you doing in this nest of brigands?”
Steve was pretty badly stunned by this reception, but suddenly I saw that blood did tell. He reached out his hand and touched my arm.
“I’m here with my best friend, sir,” says he. “This is Jeremiah Ash, Mr. Dixon.”
It was a very neat stroke. Old Dixon blinked a couple of times and turned red, but he swallowed the insults he had just fired at my head and held out his hand.
“Mr. Ash,” said he, “I don’t know your father, but I take Steven’s word that I’ve made a mistake. Forgive me. I’m a hothead. And that’s a great handicap to a railroad man. Forget what I said before, like a good fellow. Steven, do you mean to tell me that your father is actually interested in this part of the world? Are we going to have the Cole money slipping in here? Well, he always had a long arm in boxing, and a long arm in business, too. If he’s found something in Piegan that’s worth while, I’m going to stay here long enough to see what it is!”
You can see how he rushed along, making his own conclusions, and most of them wrong. Here he had stumbled onto the belief that Parker Cole was ready to do financing in Piegan, and instantly that unheard of little town was on the Tracy Dixon map with a vengeance.
He got young Steve by the arm and said: “You come up to my room and talk to me. Tell me about things. I want to talk about a great many things. Bridges — Davison — we’re going to stop over here, after all. That is, if Colonel Riggs is willing to let us. Eh, colonel? Words are air. They don’t scalp a man, Riggs. We’ll have a new look at everything.”
A new look?
Yes, everything was newly made, in that instant. Away went Tracy Dixon, and his two men with him, and young Steve Cole still beside him, up the stairs.
I got the colonel into his office and poured a shot of brandy down his throat. He lay back in his chair with his eyes fixed on the ceiling for a long time, and his face was a bad, splotchy purple.
The day w
as dying. The sunset rose flushed across the ceiling, and a cool evening wind came through the window and revived the old boy a little.
“Parker Cole!” he murmured. “Parker Cole! Oh, that was a narrow shave, a narrow shave! Jerry, you rascal, why didn’t you tell me that Parker Cole is interested in this town?”
“He isn’t,” said I. “He hardly knows that it exists.”
“Hey?” said the colonel, sitting up. “Then what will young Cole be saying to Tracy Dixon by this time? We’ll be sunk again!”
“I don’t think so,” said I. “Steve doesn’t yet know how to play with the cards very close to his chest, but I gave him a sign as he went off with Dixon, and I think that he understood. He won’t let Piegan down if he can help it.”
The colonel leaned back with a groan of relief. He closed his eyes, and said in a tone of fervent prayer:
“I’ll build a statue in bronze to him. And to you. Clasping hands. Jerry Ash and Steve Cole, the saviors of Piegan! And now, my boy,” said he, sitting suddenly upright and rubbing his hands together, “I’ll give you a more solid testimonial of my gratitude. You have several square blocks of ground here in Piegan. Worthless, naked ground. But I have hopes in the future of the community. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll write you out a check for fifty thousand dollars. D’you hear me? I’ll pay you fifty thousand for that patch of land, my son! I’ll give you your start in life.”
I looked calmly on the colonel. I was so tired that nothing mattered a great deal, and his foxlike meanness of nature did not revolt me. I merely said:
“Colonel, I may be wrong, but I have a queer idea that in spite of the trick we’ve played on Tracy Dixon, he’s going to build his line into Piegan. And then my land will be worth — well, fifty thousand a block, I take it. At least that much. You’re working on the same idea. Why try to cut my throat?”
He had showed me the shady side of his nature so many times before that now he was not ashamed. He merely laughed.
“Did you think that I meant it, Jerry, my son?” said he. “Not for an instant! I simply wanted to see if you have the makings of a business man in you. That’s all. And you have. I see that you’re not a fool, by any means. You’re going to go far. Very far! And I’ll be beside you every step of the way, helping you, advising you, giving you all the strength that I have on the upward”
I smiled at him a little and got out of the office. He meant well enough, but he was simply — well, a shyster.
Up in my room, I lay flat on my back and stared at the darkening ceiling, and felt a pulse thudding in my temple, with a steady pounding.
I was tired, very tired. It seemed to me that I could still feel the electric shock go through my heart when Tracy Dixon came down the hall and raged at us. Yes, I was tired, but the dreadful sense of falling, floating, sinking through space toward death was not in me. Instead, it was the sort of fatigue that any man might have felt, after the last few days of rough riding that I had been through.
So I counted the throb of the pulse in my temple, and suddenly an idea came to me that almost lifted the roof off my brain. It made me leap into the center of my room.
There came a knock at my door, and the voice of Steve.
“Come in!” I managed to gasp.
He came in.
“What’s the matter? Are you sick?” he exclaimed. “The old heart staggering again?”
He ran to me, with an exclamation.
“Listen to my heart!” I ordered him huskily.
He bent his head and pressed it against my breast.
“It’s going mighty fast, but steady and regular as a clock,” said he.
I lifted up my head. I knew that the miracle had happened. Or was it a miracle, after all? Through a shock the disease had come upon me; through a shock might it not have been brushed away? So I stood there with my face turned up. I wanted to give thanks. But my throat was bound with a band of iron. I dared not try to speak! But I knew that once more I was a real man, not a frail shadow, a mere pretense!
CHAPTER XXXVII. THE BOOM
THE DAYS THAT followed were about the happiest in my life, in many ways. I could not tell that the great blow was coming, and I only knew that my body was sound again, and that things were booming in Piegan.
And how they were booming!
Of course it was nine tenths dependent upon the coming of the great Tracy Dixon and his long stay. Because he remained for more than a week in the place, and every minute of the time he was busy. He rode ten hours a day through the valley and into the mountains. He estimated timber, mineral wealth, all the possibilities of the district, and then he sat up half the night doing figures, making plans with his two engineers. That man was a tiger for work. Piegan was a busy place, just then, but compared with Dixon, every one was standing still.
You can lay your money that we didn’t allow the news to die on our hands. We sent fast riders relaying over to the two railroads, north and south, and they carried batches of written matter for Eastern newspapers, and Western, too. Piegan had been barely a scratch on the map. Now it was to be a complete picture.
After two days, Dixon told the colonel that he had made up his mind; the line would run straight through to Piegan. And the colonel almost died with joy. I found him looking bowed and white, his face all tense, and I asked him what was the matter.
“I’m carrying a terrible burden, Jerry,” said he.
“A burden of what?” I asked him.
“Money,” said he, with a sudden grin. “Tracy Dixon has just dumped a million dollars into my pockets! Boy, the line is coming through our town!”
He said it faintly, staring at a dream, and then he added hastily: “Not that I’ll forget you, Jerry. No, no, I understand exactly what you’ve done for me. You’ll have your fair share, all right. Not of money, only, but of glory, too. The statue”
I got away from him as soon as I could, because he was disgusting to me in that humor. I knew that he hated to part with money to men, though he would water his schemes with all the gold he could beg or borrow after he had spent his own.
The lots which I possessed — two whole blocks in the middle of things! — were a constant weight upon the mind of the colonel. He tried every day or so to get them away from me. He offered me seventy-five thousand in spot cash for them, the day after the railroad was definitely given to Piegan. But I refused. For people were beginning to pour into Piegan from all sides. The mountaineers came down, the prospectors, the outlying cattlemen, the miners, the lumbermen. We were crowded. The stage line quadrupled its service and battered the road to pieces, and still could not fetch in the passengers from the growing pool of them at the railroad.
This was only the beginning of the rush. The word had gone far and wide. I think that there was something in the very name “Piegan” that hung in the imaginations of men, and the colonel’s lying reports, plus the knowledge that the railroad was coming, did the rest. Lots that had been worth twenty dollars sold for a hundred, a thousand! And the prices were still going up. It was crazy, and I knew that it was crazy, but I hung on until the regular Thursday auction, which commenced just before the first stage of the day came in from the railroad. Then I offered not a scattering of my lots, but a whole block, and the auctioneer could turn and point to the ground.
The speculators got excited, at that. They began to fight one another in their bidding, and in half an hour that block was sold for sixty-two thousand, five hundred dollars!
I felt I was rich. I stood transfixed in my place, and could not realize what had happened, but the crowd understood, and it yelled and cheered in a wild way. It knew that with prices going up like that, fortunes were hanging in the air, so to speak, and any man might grab them off. Then I remembered that I had another block just like this one — and my head swam!
In the midst of this, a young man crushed his way to me, a big fellow, and slapped my shoulder. It was my friend Harry, and he hooked a thumb over his shoulder.
“She said t
hat she wanted to see you,” he said.
Looking over his shoulder, I saw Betty Cole, her face brown and rose, her eyes flashing at me. I got hold of her hand and asked her how she managed to get there.
“I dropped out of the sky to see you get rich, Jerry,” she said. “I’m glad for you. Not so much the money, but the way the crowd cheered you. That was sweet to my ears!”
“I’ll get you out of this jam,” said I.
“Before I move,” said she, “tell me where they’ve locked up poor, foolish, crazy Steve!”
“Locked him up?” said I, not remembering for a moment what must be in her mind. “If anybody tried to lock Steve up, this town would split the earth in two to get him out again!”
She stared at me.
“Then he’s not in jail?” said she.
I laughed a little, the whole thing coming back over me, but it seemed as though seven years had passed since Steve arrived in Piegan and started out to make a fool of himself. His first day in town was forgotten, now. I was still laughing a bit when the auctioneer helped me out with an odd coincidence, for just then he announced a lot which was being offered for sale by Steve himself.
The auctioneer was pretty flowery about it. He pointed out that the lot was on the corner of C and Fifth Streets, and he said: “It is offered by one of our youngest but most distinguished townsmen, a man whom Piegan will never forget, a man who helped to make Piegan possible — Steven Cole! Let me have a cheer for him first, boys, and then we’ll hear the bidding on his lot!”