Chapter 18

There was something terrifying in the sight of the racing machinery, something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of a great power gone mad. The wind from the round blur that represented the fly-wheel was a gale and in the semi-dusk,--Smaltz had closed the double-doors--the leaping flames and the screech of the red-hot bearings made the place an Inferno.

For a moment the amazing, unexpected sight deprived Bruce of the power to move. Then he jumped for the lever and shut down. It was not until the machinery responded that Smaltz turned. His yellow-brown eyes widened until they looked round. He had not counted on anyone's being able to cross the river for fully half an hour.

If Smaltz had been the villain of fiction, he would have been a coward as well. But Smaltz was not a coward. It is true he was startled--so startled that his skin turned a curious yellow-green like a half-ripe pear--but he was not afraid. He knew that he was "in for it." He knew that something was going to happen, and quick. That Bruce was sitting on the wooden casing quietly pulling off his heavy boots did not deceive him in the least.

It was as still as the tomb in the power-house when Bruce stood up and walked toward Smaltz. Grimy streaks of perspiration showed on his colorless face, from which every drop of blood seemed to have fled, and his black eyes, that shone always with the soft brilliancy of a warm, impulsive nature and an imaginative mind, were glittering and purposeful.

Smaltz stood his ground as Bruce advanced.

"Why didn't you answer that telephone, Smaltz?"

In feigned surprise Smaltz glanced at the box.

"I declare--the receiver's dropped off the hook!"

Bruce ignored the answer; he did not even look, but stepped closer.

"Why didn't you shut down?"

Smaltz summoned his impudent grin, but it wavered and faded under Bruce's burning eyes even while he replied in a tone of injured innocence--

"How should I know? The bell didn't ring--Banule hadn't told me to."

Bruce paid no attention to the foolish excuse. He demanded again:

"Why didn't you shut down, Smaltz?"

"I've told you once," was the sullen answer.

Bruce turned to the telephone and rang the bell hard.

"Hello--hello--hello!" came the frantic reply.

"Can you swim, Banule?"

"Yes."

"Then take it where the cable crosses the river. Come quick." He put the receiver back on its hook and stepped to the lever. Smaltz's eyes opened wide as Bruce shoved it hard. He stared as though he thought Bruce had gone out of his mind. Then the dynamos began to pick up.

"What you goin' to do?" he shouted above the screech of the belting and the hot bearings.

"You're going to tell the truth!" The last vestige of Bruce's self-control vanished. His voice, which had been nearly a whisper, was like the sudden roar of a deep-hurt bear. His dark face was distorted to ugliness with rage. He rushed Smaltz--with his head down--and Smaltz staggered with the shock. Then they grappled and went down. Once more it was pandemonium in the power-house with the screeching of the red hot bearings and the glare of the crackling blue flames that meant the final and complete destruction of the plant. Over and over the grimy, grease-soaked floor of the power-house they rolled and fought. Brutally, in utter savagery, Bruce ground Smaltz's face into the rough planks littered with nails and sharp-copper filings, whenever he could--dragging him, shoving him, working him each second a little closer to the machinery with the frenzy of haste. He had not yet recovered from his run but Smaltz was no match for his great strength.

A glimmer of Bruce's purpose came to Smaltz at last.

"What--you tryin'--to do?" he panted.

Bruce panted back:

"I'm going to kill you! Do you hear?" His eyes were bloodshot, more than ever he looked like some battle-crazed grizzly seeing his victim through a blur or rage and pain. "If I can--throw you--across those commutators--before the fireworks stop--I'm goin' to give you fifteen hundred volts!"

A wild fright came in Smaltz's eyes.

"Let me up!" he begged.

For answer Bruce shoved him closer to the dynamo. He fought with fresh desperation.

"Don't do that, Burt! My God--Don't do that!"

"Then talk--talk! She's going fast. You've got to tell the truth before she stops! _Why_ did you burn out this plant?"

Smaltz would not answer. Bruce lifted him bodily from the floor. In the struggle he threw out a hand to save himself and his finger touched the spring that held the carbons. He screamed with the shock, but the blue flashes were close to his face blinding him before he suddenly relaxed:

"I'm all in. I'll tell."

Bruce let him drop back hard upon the floor and thrust a knee into his chest.

"Goon, then--talk!"

The words came with an effort; he seemed afraid of their effect upon Bruce, then, uncertainly:

"I--was paid."

For the fraction of a second Bruce stared into Smaltz's scared face. "You were paid," he repeated slowly. "Who--" and then the word came rapier-like as had the thought--"Sprudell!"

"He told me to see that you didn't start. He left the rest to me." With sullen satisfaction: "And it's cost him plenty--you bet--"

Inexplicable things suddenly grew clear to Bruce.

"You turned the boat loose in Meadows--"

"Yes."

"You wrecked it on that rock--"

"Yes."

"You fouled the mercury in the boxes?"

"Yes."

"And Toy!" The look of murder came back into Bruce's face, his hand crept toward Smaltz's throat. "Don't lie! What did you do to Toy?"

Smaltz whispered--he could barely speak--"I'm tellin' the truth--it was an accident. He jumped me--I threw him off and he fell in the sluice-box--backward--I tried to save him--I did--that's straight." Smaltz kept rolling his head back and forth in an oil-soaked spot where a grease cup leaked. Bruce's knee was grinding into his ribs and chest and his fingers were tightening on his throat.

Bruce raised himself a little and looked down at Smaltz. As he stared at the smudged, bleeding face and into the yellow-brown eyes with their dilated pupils, the rage in his own gave place to a kind of intense curiosity, the scrutiny one gives to a repulsive and venomous insect or reptile he has captured. He was trying to impress upon his own mind the incredible fact that this human being, lying helpless beneath him, watching him with questioning fear, had ruined him without the least personal malice--had robbed him of all he had strained, and worked, and fought for, for pay! It seemed like a preposterous, illogical dream; yet there he lay, alive, real, his face less than two feet from his own.

Finally, Bruce took his knee from his chest and got up. Smaltz pulled himself to his feet and stood uncertainly.

"Well--I suppose it's jail." There was sullen resignation in his voice.

Bruce stopped the machinery without answering. Then he folded his arms and leaned his broad shoulders against the rough boards of the power-house while, eying Smaltz, he considered. A year ago he would have killed him--he would have killed him begging on his knees, but taking a human life either makes a man callous or sobers him and the remorse which had followed the tragedy in the cabin was a sensation Bruce never wanted to experience again.

Penitentiaries were made for men like Smaltz--but in a country of long and difficult distances, with the lax courts and laws indifferently enforced, to put Smaltz where he belonged was not so simple as it might sound. It required time and money; Bruce had neither to spare.

It was so still in the power-house that the ticking of the dollar watch hanging on a nail sounded like a clock. Smaltz shifted feet nervously. At last Bruce walked to the work-bench and took a carpenter's pencil from a box and sharpened it. He smoothed out some wrapping paper then motioned Smaltz to sit down.

"I want you to write what you told me--exactly--word for word. Write it in duplicate and sign your name."

Consternation overspread Smaltz's face. A verbal confession to save himself from being electrocuted was one thing, to put it in black and white was quite another. He hesitated. Bruce saw the mutiny in his face; also the quick, involuntary glance he gave toward a monkey-wrench which lay on the end of the work-bench within his reach.

Rage burned up in Bruce again.

"Don't you know when you've got enough?" He stepped forward and removed the heavy wrench from Smaltz's reach. "I'll give you just one minute by the watch there to make up your mind. You'd better write, for you won't be able when I'm through!"

They measured each other, eye to eye again. Each could hear the breathing of the other in the silence while the watch ticked off the seconds. An over-sanguine pack-rat tried to scramble up the tar-paper covering on the outside and squeaked as he fell back with a thud, but the face of neither man relaxed. Smaltz took the full limit of the time. He saw Bruce's fingers work, then clinch. Suddenly he grinned--a sheepish, unresentful grin.

"I guess you're the best man," He slouched to the bench and sat down.

He was still writing when Banule came, breathing hard and still dripping from his frigid swim. He stopped short and his jaw dropped at seeing Smaltz. He was obviously disappointed at finding him alive.

Smaltz handed Bruce the paper when he had finished and signed his name. Neither the writing or composition was that of an illiterate man. Bruce read it carefully and handed it to Banule:

"Read this and witness it."

Banule did as he was told, for once, apparently, too dumfounded for comment.

"Now copy it," said Bruce, and Smaltz obeyed.

When this was done, signed and witnessed Smaltz looked up inquiringly--his expression said--"What next?"

Bruce stepped to the double doors and slid the bolt.

"There's your trail--now _hit_ it!" He motioned into the wilderness as he threw the doors wide.

Incredulity, amazement, appeared on Smaltz's face.

In the instant that he stood staring a vein swelled on Bruce's temple and in a spasm of fury he cried:

"_Go_, I tell you! Go while I can keep my hands off you--you--" he finished with an oath.

Smaltz went. He snatched his coat from its nail as he passed but did not stop for his hat. It was not until he reached the slab which served as a bridge over the water from the spillway that he recovered anything of his impudent nonchalance. He was in the centre of it when he heard Banule say:

"If it ud be me I'd a put a lash rope round his neck and drug him up that hill to jail."

Smaltz wheeled and came back a step.

"Oh, you would, would you? Say, you fakir, I'm glad you spoke. I almost forgot you." There was sneering, utter contempt in Smaltz's voice. "_Fakir_," he reiterated, "you get that, do you, for I'm pickin' my words and not callin' names by chance. You're the worst that ever come off the Pacific coast--and that's goin' _some_."

He turned sharply to Bruce.

"You know even a liar sometimes tells the truth and I'm goin' to give it to you straight now. I've nothin' to win or lose. _This machinery never will run._ The plant was a failure before it was put up. And," he nodded contemptuously at Banule, "nobody knew it better than that dub."

"Jennings," he went on "advised this old-fashioned type of machinery because it was the only kind he understood and he wanted the job of putting it up, honestly believin' at the time that he could. When he realized that he couldn't, he sent for Banule to pull him through.

"Jennings failed because of his ignorance but this feller _knows_, and whatever he's done he has done knowin' that his work couldn't by any chance last. All he's thought of was gettin' the plant up somehow so it would run temporarily--any old way to get through--get his money, and get out. He's experimented continually at your expense; he's bungled the job from beginning to end with his carelessness--his 'good enough' work.

"You were queered from the start with them armatures he wound back there on the Coast. He and Jennings took an old fifty horse-power motor and tried to wind it for seventy-five. There wasn't room for the copper so they hammered in the coils. They ruptured the insulation in the armature and that's why it's always short-circuited and sparked. He rated it at seventy-five and it's never registered but fifty at its best. He rated the small motor at fifty and it developed thirty--no more. The blue print calls for 1500 revolutions on the big pump and the speed indicator shows 900. Even if the motors were all right, the vibration from that bum foundation that he told you was 'good enough' would throw them out, in time.

"All through he's lied and bluffed, and faked. He has yet to put up his first successful plant. Look up his record if you think it ain't the truth. What's happened here is only a repetition of what's happened everywhere he's ever been. It would be a fortune if 'twas figured what his carelessness has cost the men for whom he's worked.

"In the eyes of the law I'm guilty of wreckin' this plant but in fact I only put on the finishin' touches. I've shortened your misery, Burt, I've saved you money, for otherwise you'd have gone tryin' to tinker it up. Don't do it. Take it from me it isn't worth it. From start to finish you've been stung."

He turned mockingly to Banule:

"As we know, Alphy, generally there's a kind of honor among crooks that keeps us from squeakin' on each other, but that little speech of yourn about takin' a turn of a las' rope round my neck kind of put me on the prod. That virtuous pose of yours sort of set my teeth on edge, knowin' what I do, and I ain't told half of what I could if I had the time. However, Alphy," he shot a look at Bruce's face, "if you'll take the advice of a gent what feels as though a log had rolled over him, you'll sift along without puttin' up any holler about your pay."

XXVI

FAILURE

Smaltz was a liar, as he said, but Bruce knew that he had told the truth regarding Banule's work. He confirmed the suspicions and fears that had been in Bruce's mind for months. Therefore, when he said quietly to Banule--"You'd better go up the hill!" there was that in his voice and eyes which made that person take his departure with only a little less celerity than Smaltz had taken his.

It remained for Bruce to gather up Banule's scattered tools, drain the pumps, and nail the pump-house door. When he closed the head gate and turned the water back into Big Squaw Creek, removed the belting from the pulleys in the power-house and shut the place up tight, he felt that it was much like making arrangements for his own funeral.

At last everything was done and Porcupine Jim, who had stayed on a day or so to help, was waiting for Bruce to finish his letter to Helen Dunbar so he could take it up the hill. Jim sat by the kitchen stove whistling dismally through his teeth while Bruce groped for words in which to break the news of his complete failure.

If only he could truthfully hold out some hope! But there was not the slightest that he could see. Harrah was out of it. The stockholders had lost both confidence and interest in him and his proposition and would sell out, as they had notified him they would do if the season's work was a failure--and consider themselves lucky to have the chance. It was a foregone conclusion that Sprudell would shortly own the controlling stock.

There was nothing for it but the blunt truth so Bruce wrote:

Sprudell boasted that he would down me and he has. Villainy, incompetency and carelessness have been too strong a combination for my inexperience to beat.

I've failed. I'm broke. I've spent $40,000 and have nothing to show for it but a burned-out plant of an obsolete type.

You can't imagine how it hurts to write these words. The disappointment and humiliation of it passes belief. No one who has not been through an experience like it could ever, even faintly, understand.

I grow hot and cold with shame when I look back now and see my mistakes. They are so plain that it makes me feel a fool--an ignorant, conceited, inexperienced fool. I've learned many lessons, but at what a price!

You'll see from the enclosed paper what I was up against. But it does not excuse me, not in the least. Thinking myself just, I was merely weak. A confiding confidence in one's fellowman is very beautiful in theory but there's nothing makes him more ridiculous when it's taken advantage of. When I recall the suspicious happenings that should have warned me from Jenning's incompetency to Smaltz's villainy I have no words in which to express my mortification. The stockholders cannot condemn me more severely for my failure than I condemn myself.

You are the beginning and end of everything with me. All my hopes, my ambitions, my life itself have come to centre in you. It was the thought that it was for you that kept me going when I have been so tired doing two men's work that I could scarcely drag one foot after the other. It made me take risks I might otherwise never have dared to take. It kept me plodding on when one failure after another smashed me in the face so fast that I could not see for the blackness.

I never dreamed that love was like this--that it was such a spur--such an incentive--or that it could add so to the bitterness of failure. For I do love you, Helen; I see now that I have loved you from the time I saw you with Sprudell--further back than that, from the time I shook your picture out of that old envelope.

I'm telling you this so you'll know why my tongue ran away with my judgment when I talked so much to you of my plans and expectations, hoping that in spite of the great disappointment my failure will be to you, it will make you a little more lenient.

I have failed so completely that I don't even dare ask you if you care the least bit for me. It's presumptuous to suggest it-- it seems like presuming because you have been kind. But even if such a miracle could be, I have nothing to offer you. I don't mean to quit but it may be years before I get again the chance that I had down here.

I love you, Helen, truly, completely: I am sure there will never be any one else for me. If only for this reason won't you write to me sometimes, for your letters will mean so much in the days that are ahead of me.

When he had finished, Bruce gave Jim the letter and paid him off with the check that took the last of his balance in the bank.

From the doorway of the shack he watched the Swede climb the hill, following him with his eyes until he had rounded the last point before the zig-zag trail disappeared into the timber on the ridge. A pall of awful loneliness seemed to settle over the canyon as the figure passed from sight and as Bruce turned inside he wondered which was going to be the worst--the days or nights. His footsteps sounded hollow when he walked across the still room. He stopped in the centre and looked at the ashes overflowing the hearth of the greasy range, at the unwashed frying-pan on the dirty floor, at the remains of Jim's lunch that littered the shabby oilcloth on the table. A black wave of despair swept over him. This was for him instead of cleanliness, comfort, brightness, friendly people--and Helen Dunbar. This squalor, this bare loneliness, was the harsh penalty of failure. He put his hand to his throat and rubbed it for it ached with the sudden contraction of the muscles, but he made no sound.

* * * * *

One of the pictures with which Bruce tortured himself was Helen's disappointment when she should read his letter. He imagined the animation fading from her face, the tears rising slowly to her eyes. Her letters had shown how much she was counting on what he had led her to expect, for she had written him of her plans; so the collapse of her air-castles could not be other than a blow.

And he was right. The blunt news _was_ a blow. In one swift picture Helen saw herself trudging drearily along the dull, narrow road of genteel poverty to the end of her days, sacrificing every taste, and impulse, and instinct to the necessity of living, for more and more as she thought her freedom closer the restrictions of economic slavery chaffed.

But as she read on, her face grew radiant and when she raised the letter impulsively to her lips her eyes were luminous with happiness. He loved her--he had told her so--that fact was paramount. It overshadowed everything else, even her disappointment. The conditions against which she rebelled so fiercely suddenly shrank to small importance. It was extraordinary how half-a-dozen sentences should change the world! She was so incredibly happy that she could have cried.

In her eagerness, she had read the first of Bruce's letter hastily so she had not grasped the full significance of what he had written of the part in his failure that Sprudell had played. It was not until she read it again together with Smaltz's confession, that it came to her clearly. When it did she was dumfounded by the extent of Sprudell's villainy, his audacity, the length to which his mania for revenge would take him. It was like a plot in one of his own preposterous melodramas!

And was he to be allowed to get away with it? Were his plans to work out without a hitch? she asked herself furiously. She realized that Bruce's hands were tied, that the complete exhaustion of his resources left him helpless.

She sat at her desk for a long time, mechanically drawing little designs upon a blotter. Wild impulses, impractical plans, followed each other in quick succession. They crystallized finally into a definite resolve, and her lips set in a line of determination.

"I don't know how much or how little I can do, but, T. Victor Sprudell," Helen clenched a small fist and shook it in the direction in which she imagined Bartlesville lay, "I'm going to fight!"

If much of Helen's work was uncongenial it at least had the merit of developing useful traits. It had given her confidence, resourcefulness, persistency and when she was aroused, as now, these qualities were of the sort most apt to furnish the exultant Sprudell with a disagreeable surprise.

* * * * *

It was not such a difficult matter as Helen had thought to get from the investors a thirty days' option upon their stock. In the first place they were frankly amused and interested by her request; and, in the second, while Sprudell had succeeded in shaking their confidence in Bruce he had not inspired any liking for himself. Besides, he had not been able to conceal his eagerness and they felt that his offer would keep. It was unusual and quite outside their experiences, but in these days of women architects, legislators, financiers, who could tell where the sex would turn up next? So at a meeting of the stockholders it was agreed that it would do no harm to "give the girl a chance" though they made no secret of the fact that they had little expectation that she would be able to take up the option.

When it was secure and she had obtained leave of absence from the office, Helen felt that the hardest part of the task she had assigned herself was done. To acquaint Bruce's father with Sprudell's plot and enlist him on Bruce's side seemed altogether the easiest part of her plan. She had no notion that she was the brilliant lady-journalist to whom the diplomat, the recluse, the stern and rock-bound capitalist, give up the secrets of their souls, but she did have an assured feeling that with the arguments she had to offer she could manage Bruce's "Dad."