Part 10

Smith breathed freer. Nobody but a most consummate actress could have simulated her frank sincerity. He had jumped too quickly to the small sum-in-addition conclusion. She did _not_ know the story of the absconding bank cashier.

"I don't know why you should feel that way," he said, eager, now, to run where he had before been afraid to walk.

"_I_ do. And I believe you wanted to shame me. I believe you gave up your place at the dam and took hold with daddy more to show me what an inconsequent little idiot I was than for any other reason. Didn't you, really?"

He laughed in quiet ecstasy at this newest and most adorable of the moods.

"Honest confession is good for the soul: I did," he boasted. "Now beat that for frankness, if you can."

"I can't," she admitted, laughing back at him. "But now you've accomplished your purpose, I hope you are not going to give up. That would be a little hard on Colonel-daddy."

"Oh, no; I'm not going to give up--until I have to."

"Does that mean more than it says?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it does."

She was silent for the length of time that it took the flaming crimson in the western sky to fade to salmon.

"I know I haven't earned the right to ask you any of the whys," she said at the end of the little pause.

"Women like you--only there are not any more of them, I think--don't have to earn things. The last time you were in the office you said enough to let me know that you and your father and Williams--all of you, in fact--suspect that I am out here under a cloud of some sort. It is true."

"And that is why you say you won't give up until you have to?"

"That is the reason; yes."

There was another little interval of silence and then she said: "I suppose you couldn't tell me--or anybody--could you?"

"I can tell you enough so that you will understand why I may not be permitted to go on and finish what I have begun in Timanyoni High Line. When I left home I thought I was a murderer."

He would not look at her to see how she was taking it, but he could not help hearing her little gasp.

"_Oh!_" she breathed; and then: "You say you 'thought.' Wasn't it so?"

"It happened not to be. The man didn't die. I suppose I might say that I didn't try to kill him; but that would hardly be true. At the moment, I didn't care. Have you ever felt that way?--you know what I mean, just utterly blind and reckless as to consequences?"

"I have a horrible temper, if that covers it."

"It's something like that," he conceded; "only, up to the moment when it happened I hadn't known that I had any temper. Perhaps I might say that the provocation was big enough, though the law won't say so."

The pink flush had faded out of the high western horizon and the stars were coming out one at a time. The colonel had come up from the ranch bunk-house where the men slept, and was smoking his long-stemmed corn-cob pipe on the lawn under the spreading cottonwoods. Peace was the key-note of the perfect summer night, and even for the man under the shadow of the law there was a quiet breathing space.

"I don't believe you could ever kill a man in cold blood," said the young woman in the hammock. "I'm sure you know that, yourself, and it ought to be a comfort to you."

"It might have been once, but it isn't any more."

"Why not?"

"I suppose it is because I left a good many things behind me when I ran away--besides the man I thought was dead. In that other life I never knew what it meant to fight for the things I wanted; perhaps it was because I never wanted anything very badly, or possibly it was because the things I did want came too easily."

"They are not coming so easily now?"

"No; but I'm going to have them at any cost. You will know what I mean when I say that nothing, not even human life, seems so sacred to me as it used to."

"Have you ever talked with daddy about all these things?"

"No. You don't know men very well; they don't talk about such things to one another. The average man tells some woman, if he can be lucky enough to find one who will listen."

"You haven't told me all of it," she said, after another hesitant pause. "You have carefully left the woman out of it. Was she pretty?"

Smith buried his laugh so deep that not a flicker of it came to the surface.

"Is that the open inference always?--that a man tries to kill another because there is a woman in it?"

"I merely asked you if she was pretty."

"There was a woman," he answered doggedly; "though she had nothing to do with the trouble. I was going to call on her the night I--the night the thing happened. I hope she isn't still waiting for me to ring the door-bell."

"You haven't told her where you are?"

"No; but she's not losing any sleep about that. She isn't that kind. Indeed, I'm not sure that she wouldn't turn the letter over to the sheriff, if I should write her. Let's clear this up before we go any further. It was generally understood, in the home town, you know, that we were to be married some time, though nothing definite had ever been said by either of us. There wasn't any sentiment, you understand; I was idiotic enough at the time to believe that there wasn't any such thing as sentiment. It has cost me about as much to give her up as it has cost her to give me up--and that is a little less than nothing."

Again the silence came between. The colonel was knocking his pipe bowl against a tree trunk and an interruption was threatening. When the low voice came again from the hammock it was troubled.

"You are disappointing me, now. You are taking it very lightly, and apparently you neither know nor care very much how the woman may be taking it. Perhaps there wasn't any sentiment on your part."

Smith was laughing quietly. "If you could only know Verda Richlander," he said. "Imagine the most beautiful thing you can think of, and then take the heart out of it, and--but, hold on, I can do better than that," and he drew out his watch and handed it to her with the back case opened.

She took the watch and stopped the hammock swing to let the light from the nearest window fall upon the photograph.

"She is very beautiful; magnificently beautiful," she said, returning the watch. And an instant later: "I don't see how you could say what you did about the sentiment. If I were a man----"

The colonel had mounted the steps and was coming toward them. The young woman slipped from the hammock and stood up.

"Don't go," said Smith, feeling as if he were losing an opportunity and leaving much unsaid that ought to be said. But the answer was a quiet "good night" and she was gone.

Smith went back to town with the colonel the next morning physically rested, to be sure, but in a frame of mind bordering again upon the sardonic. In the cold light of the following day, after-dinner confidences, even with the best-beloved, have a way of showing up all their puerilities and inadequacies. Two things, and two alone, stood out clearly: one was that he was most unmistakably in love with Corona Baldwin, and the other was that he had shown her the weakest side of himself by appealing like a callow boy to her sympathies.

Hence there was another high resolve not to go to Hillcrest again until he could go as a free man; a resolve which, it is perhaps needless to say, was broken thereafter as often as the colonel asked him to go. Why, in the last resort, Smith should have finally chosen another confidant in the person of William Starbuck, the reformed cow-puncher, he scarcely knew. But it was to Starbuck that he appealed for advice when the sentimental situation had grown fairly desperate.

"I've told you enough so that you can understand the vise-nip of it, Billy," he said to Starbuck one night when he had dragged the mine owner up to the bath-room suite in the Hophra House, and had told him just a little, enough to merely hint at his condition. "You see how it stacks up. I'm in a fair way to come out of this the biggest scoundrel alive--the piker who takes advantage of the innocence of a good girl. I'm not the man she thinks I am. I am standing over a volcano pit every minute of the day. If it blows up, I'm gone, obliterated, wiped out."

"Is it aiming to blow up?" asked Starbuck sagely.

"I don't know any more about that than you do. It is the kind that usually does blow up sooner or later. I've prepared for it as well as I can. What Colonel Baldwin and the rest of you needed was a financial manager, and Timanyoni High Line has its fighting chance--which was more than Timanyoni Ditch had when I took hold. If I should drop out now, you and Maxwell and the colonel and Kinzie could go on and make the fight; but that doesn't help out in this other matter."

Starbuck smoked in silence for a long minute or two before he said: "Is there another woman in it, John?"

"Yes; but not in the way you mean. It never came to anything more than a decently frank friendship, though the whole town had it put up that it was all settled and we were going to be married."

"Huh! I wonder if that's what _she'd_ say? You say it never came to anything more than a friendship: maybe that's all right from your side of the fence. But how about the girl?"

The harassed one's smile was grimly reminiscent.

"If you knew her you wouldn't ask, Billy. She is the modern, up-to-date young woman in all that the term implies. When she marries she will give little and ask little, outside of the ordinary amenities and conventionalities."

"That's what you say; and maybe it's what you think. But when you have to figure a woman into it, you never can tell, John. Are you keeping in touch with this other girl?"

Smith shook his head.

"No; I shall probably never see her or hear from her again. Not that it matters a penny's worth to either of us. And your guess was wrong if you thought that things past are having any effect on things present. Corona Baldwin stands in a class by herself."

"She's a mighty fine little girl, John," said Starbuck slowly. "Any one of a dozen fellows I could name would give all their old shoes to swap chances with you."

"That isn't exactly the kind of advice I'm needing," was the sober rejoinder.

"No; but it was the kind you were wanting, when you tolled me off up here," laughed the ex-cow-puncher. "I know the symptoms. Had 'em myself for about two years so bad that I could wake up in the middle of the night and taste 'em. Go in and win. Maybe the great big stumbling-block you're worrying about wouldn't mean anything at all to an open-minded young woman like Corona; most likely it wouldn't."

"If she could know the whole truth--and believe it," said Smith musingly.

"You tell her the truth, and she'll take care of the believing part of it, all right. You needn't lose any sleep about that."

Smith drew a long breath and removed his pipe to say: "I haven't the nerve, Billy, and that's the plain fact. I have already told her a little of it. She knows that I----"

Starbuck broke in with a laugh. "Yes; it's a shouting pity about your nerve! You've been putting up such a blooming scary fight in this irrigation business that we all know you haven't any nerve. If I had your job in that, I'd be going around here toting two guns and wondering if I couldn't make room in the holster for another."

Smith shook his head.

"I was safe enough so long as Stanton thought I was the resident manager and promoter for a new bunch of big money in the background. But he has had me shadowed and tracked until now I guess he is pretty well convinced that I actually had the audacity to play a lone hand; and a bluffing hand, at that. That makes a difference, of course. Two days after I had climbed into the saddle here, he sent a couple of his strikers after me. I don't know just what their orders were, but they seemed to want a fight--and they got it. It was in Blue Pete's doggery, up at the camp."

"Guns?" queried Starbuck.

"Theirs; not mine, because I didn't have any. I managed to get the shooting-irons away from them before we had mixed very far."

"You're just about the biggest, long-eared, stiff-backed, stubborn wild ass of the wallows that was ever let loose in a half-reformed gun-country!" grumbled the ex-cow-man. "You're fixing to get yourself all killed up, Smith. Haven't you sense enough to see that these rustlers will rub you out in two twitches of a dead lamb's tail if they've made up their minds that you are the High Line main guy and the only one?"

"Of course," said the wild ass easily. "If they could lay me up for a month or two----"

"Lay up, nothing!" retorted Starbuck. "Lay you down, about six feet underground, is what I mean!"

"Pshaw!" exclaimed the one whose fears ran in a far different channel from any that could be dug by mere corporation violence. "This is America, in the twentieth century. We don't kill our business competitors nowadays."

"Don't we?" snorted Starbuck. "That will be all right, too. We'll suppose, just for the sake of argument, that my respected and respectable daddy-in-law, or whatever other silk-hatted old money-bags happens to be paying Crawford Stanton's salary _and_ commission, wouldn't send out an order to have you killed off. Maybe Stanton, himself, wouldn't stand for it if you'd put it that barefaced. But daddy-in-law, and Stanton, and all the others, hire blacklegs and sharpers and gunmen and thugs. And every once in a while somebody takes a wink for a nod--and _bang!_ goes a gun."

"Well, what's the answer?" said Smith.

"Tote an arsenal, yourself, and be ready to shoot first and ask questions afterward. That's the only way you can live peaceably with such men as Jake Boogerfield and Lanterby and Pete Simms."

Smith got out of his chair and took a turn up and down the length of the room. When he came back to stand before Starbuck, he said: "I did that, Billy. I've been carrying a gun for a week and more; not for these ditch pirates, but for somebody else. The other night, when I was out at Hillcrest, Corona happened to see it. I'm not going to tell you what she said, but when I came back to town the next morning, I chucked the gun into a desk drawer. And I hope I'm going to be man enough not to wear it again."

Starbuck dropped the subject abruptly and looked at his watch.

"You liked to have done it, pulling me off up here," he remarked. "I'm due to be at the train to meet Mrs. Billy, and I've got just about three minutes. So long."

Smith changed his street clothes leisurely after Starbuck had gone, and made ready to go down to the cafe dinner, turning over in his mind, meanwhile, the problem whose solution he had tried to extract from his late visitor. The workable answer was still as far off and as unattainable as ever when he went down-stairs and stopped at the desk to toss his room-key to the clerk.

The hotel register was lying open on the counter, and from force of habit he ran his eye down the list of late arrivals. At the end of the list, in sprawling characters upon which the ink was yet fresh, he read his sentence, and for the first time in his life knew the meaning of panic fear. The newest entry was:

"Josiah Richlander and daughter, Chicago."

Smith was not misled by the place-name. There was only one "Josiah Richlander" in the world for him, and he knew that the Lawrenceville magnate, in registering from Chicago, was only following the example of those who, for good reasons or no reason, use the name of their latest stopping-place for a registry address.

XIV

A Reprieve

For the length of time it took him to read Josiah Richlander's signature on the Hophra House register and to grasp the full meaning of the Lawrenceville magnate's presence in Brewster, Smith's blood ran cold and there was a momentary attack of shocked consternation, comparable to nothing that any past experience had to offer. It had been a foregone conclusion from the very outset that, sooner or later, some one who knew him would drift in from the world beyond the mountains; but in all his imaginings he had never dreamed of the Richlander possibility. Verda, as he knew, had been twice to Europe--and, like many of her kind, had never been west of the Mississippi in her native land. Why, then, had she----

But there was no time to waste in curious speculations as to the whys and wherefores. Present safety was the prime consideration. With Josiah Richlander and his daughter in Brewster, and guests under the same roof with him, discovery, identification, disgrace were knocking at the door. Smith had a return of the panicky chill when he realized how utterly impossible it would be for a man with his business activities to hide, even temporarily, not in the hotel, to be sure, but anywhere in a town of the Brewster dimensions. And the peril held no saving element of uncertainty. He could harbor no doubt as to what Josiah Richlander would do if discovery came. For so long a time as should be consumed in telegraphing between Brewster and Lawrenceville, Smith thought he might venture to call himself a free man. But that was the limit.

It was the dregs of the J. Montague subconsciousness yet remaining in him that counselled flight, basing the prompting upon a bit of panic-engendered reasoning. Miss Verda and her father could hardly be anything more than transient visitors in Brewster. Possibly he might be able to keep out of their way for the needful day or so. To resolve in such an urgency was to act. One minute later he had hailed a passing auto-cab at the hotel entrance, and the four miles between the city and Colonel Baldwin's ranch had been tossed to the rear before he remembered that he had expressly declined a dinner invitation for that same evening at Hillcrest, the declination basing itself upon business and having been made by word of mouth to Mrs. Baldwin in person when she had called at the office with her daughter just before the luncheon hour.

Happily, the small social offense went unremarked, or at least unrebuked. Smith found his welcome at the ranch that of a man who has the privilege of dropping in unannounced. The colonel was jocosely hospitable, as he always was; Mrs. Baldwin was graciously lenient--was good enough, indeed, to thank the eleventh-hour guest for reconsidering at the last moment; and Corona----

Notwithstanding all that had come to pass; notwithstanding, also, that his footing in the Baldwin household had come to be that of a family friend, Smith could never be quite sure of the bewitchingly winsome young woman who called her father "Colonel-daddy." Her pose, if it were a pose, was the attitude of the entirely unspoiled child of nature and the wide horizons. When he was with her she made him think of all the words expressive of transparency and absolute and utter unconcealment. Yet there were moments when he fancied he could get passing glimpses of a subtler personality at the back of the wide-open, frankly questioning eyes; a wise little soul lying in wait behind its defenses; prudent, all-knowing, deceived neither by its own prepossessions or prejudices, nor by any of the masqueradings of other souls.

Smith, especially in this later incarnation which had so radically changed him, believed as little in the psychic as any hardheaded young business iconoclast of an agnostic century could. But on this particular evening when he was smoking his after-dinner pipe on the flagstoned porch with Corona for his companion, there were phenomena apparently unexplainable on any purely material hypothesis.

"I am sure I have much less than half of the curiosity that women are said to have, but, really, I _do_ want to know what dreadful thing has happened to you since we met you in the High Line offices this morning--mamma and I," was the way in which one of the phenomena was made to occur; and Smith started so nervously that he dropped his pipe.

"You can be the most unexpected person, when you try," he laughed, but the laugh scarcely rang true. "What makes you think that anything has happened?"

"I don't think--I _know_," the small seeress went on with calm assurance. "You've been telling us in all sorts of dumb ways that you've had an upsetting shock of some kind; and I don't believe it's another lawsuit. Am I right, so far?"

"I believe you are a witch, and it's a mighty good thing you didn't live in the Salem period," he rejoined. "They would have hanged you to a dead moral certainty."

"Then there was something?" she queried; adding, jubilantly: "I knew it!"

"Go on," said the one to whom it had happened; "go on and tell me the rest of it."

"Oh, that isn't fair; even a professional clairvoyant has to be told the color of her eyes and hair."

"Wha-what!" the ejaculation was fairly jarred out of him and for the moment he fancied he could feel a cool breeze blowing up the back of his neck.

The clairvoyant who did not claim to be a professional was laughing softly.

"You told me once that a woman was adorable in the exact degree in which she could afford to be visibly transparent; yes, you said 'afford,' and I've been holding it against you. Now I'm going to pay you back. You are the transparent one, this time. You have as good as admitted that the 'happening' thing isn't a man; 'wha-what' always means that, you know; so it must be a woman. Is it the Miss Richlander you were telling me about?"

There are times when any mere man may be shocked into telling the simple truth, and Smith had come face to face with one of them. "It is," he said.

"She is in Brewster?"

"Yes."

"When did she come?"

"This evening."

"And you ran away? That was horribly unkind, don't you think--after she had come so far?"

"Hold on," he broke in. "Don't let's go so fast. I didn't ask her to come. And, besides, she didn't come to see me."

"Did she tell you that?"

"I have taken precious good care that she shouldn't have the chance. I saw her name--and her father's--on the hotel register; and just about that time I remembered that I could probably get a bite to eat out here."

"You are queer! All men are a little queer, I think--always excepting Colonel-daddy. Don't you want to see her?"

"Indeed, I don't!"

"Not even for old times' sake?"

"No; not even for old times' sake. I've given you the wrong impression completely, if you think there is any obligation on my part. It never got beyond the watch-case picture stage, as I have told you. It might have drifted on to the other things in the course of time, simply because neither of us might have known any better than to let it drift. But that's all a back number, now."

"Just the same, her coming shocked you."

"It certainly did," he confessed soberly; and then: "Have you forgotten what I told you about the circumstances under which I left home?"

"_Oh!_" she murmured, and as once before there was a little gasp to go with the word. Then: "She wouldn't--she wouldn't----"

"No," he answered; "she wouldn't; but her father would."

"So her father wanted her to marry the other man, did he? What was he like--the other man? I don't believe you've ever told me anything about him."

Smith's laugh was an easing of strains.

"Now your 'control' is playing tricks on you. There were a dozen other men, more or less."

"And her picture was in the watch-case of each?"

"You've pumped me dry," he returned, the sardonic humor reasserting itself. "I haven't her watch-case list; I never had it. But I guess it's within bounds to suppose that she got the little pictures from the photographer by the half-dozen, at least. Young women in my part of the world don't think much of the watch-case habit; I mean they don't regard it seriously."

A motor-car was coming up the driveway and Smith was not altogether sorry when he saw Stillings, the lawyer, climb out of it to mount the steps. It was high time that an interruption of some sort was breaking in, and when the colonel appeared and brought Stillings with him to the lounging end of the porch, a business conference began which gave Miss Corona an excuse to disappear, and which accounted easily for the remainder of the evening.