Part 11

Borrowing a horse from the Hillcrest corral the following morning, Smith returned to Brewster by way of the dam, making the long detour count for as much as possible in the matter of sheer time-killing. It was a little before noon when he reached town by the roundabout route, and after putting the horse up at the livery-stable in which Colonel Baldwin was a half owner, he went to the hotel to reconnoitre. The room-clerk who gave him his key gave him also the information he craved.

"Mr. Richlander? Oh, yes; he left early this morning by the stage. He is interested in some gold properties up in the range beyond Topaz. Fine old gentleman. Do you know him, Mr. Smith?"

"The name seemed familiar when I saw it on the register last evening," was Smith's evasion; "but it is not such a very uncommon name. He didn't say when he was coming back?"

"No."

Smith took a fresh hold upon life and liberty. While the world is perilously narrow in some respects, it is comfortably broad in others, and a danger once safely averted is a danger lessened. Snatching a hasty luncheon in the grill-room, the fighting manager of Timanyoni High Line hurried across to the private suite in the Kinzie Building offices into which he had lately moved and once more plunged into the business battle.

Notwithstanding a new trouble which Stillings had wished to talk over with his president and the financial manager the night before--the claim set up by the dead-and-gone paper railroad to a right of way across the Timanyoni at the dam--the battle was progressing favorably. Williams was accomplishing the incredible in the matter of speed, and the dam was now nearly ready to withstand the high-water stresses when they should come. The power-house was rising rapidly, and the machinery was on the way from the East. Altogether things were looking more hopeful than they had at any period since the hasty reorganization. Smith attacked the multifarious details of his many-sided job with returning energy. If he could make shift to hold on for a few days or weeks longer....

He set his teeth upon a desperate determination to hold on at any cost; at all costs. If Josiah Richlander should come back to Brewster--but Smith would not allow himself to think of this. At the worst, the period of peril could not be long. Smith knew his man, and was well assured that it would take something more alluring than a gold-mine to keep the Lawrenceville millionaire away from his business at home for any considerable length of time. With the comforting conclusion for a stimulus, the afternoon of hard work passed quickly and there was only a single small incident to break the busy monotonies. While Smith was dictating the final batch of letters to the second stenographer a young man with sleepy eyes and yellow creosote stains on his fingers came in to ask for a job. Smith put him off until the correspondence was finished and then gave him a hearing.

"What kind of work are you looking for?" was the brisk query.

"Shorthand work, if I can get it," said the man out of a job.

"How rapid are you?"

"I have been a court reporter."

Smith was needing another stenographer and he looked the applicant over appraisingly. The appraisal was not entirely satisfactory. There was a certain shifty furtiveness in the half-opened eyes, and the rather weak chin hinted at a possible lack of the discreetness which is the prime requisite in a confidential clerk.

"Any business experience?"

"Yes; I've done some railroad work."

"Here in Brewster?"

Shaw lied smoothly. "No; in Omaha."

"Any recommendations?"

The young man produced a handful of "To Whom it May Concern" letters. They were all on business letter-heads, and were apparently genuine, though none of them were local. Smith ran them over hastily and he had no means of knowing that they had been carefully prepared by Crawford Stanton at no little cost in ingenuity and painstaking. How careful the preparation had been was revealed in the applicant's ready suggestion.

"You can write or wire to any of these gentlemen," he said; "only, if there is a job open, I'd be glad to go to work on trial."

The business training of the present makes for quick decisions. Smith snapped a rubber band around the letters and shot them into a pigeonhole of his desk.

"We'll give you a chance to show what you can do," he told the man out of work. "If you measure up to the requirements, the job will be permanent. You may come in to-morrow morning and report to Mr. Miller, the chief clerk."

The young man nodded his thanks and went out, leaving just as the first stenographer was bringing in his allotment of letters for the signatures. Having other things to think of, Smith forgot the sleepy-eyed young fellow instantly. But it is safe to assume that he would not have dismissed the incident so readily if he had known that Shaw had been waiting in the anteroom during the better part of the dictating interval, and that on the departing applicant's cuffs were microscopic short-hand notes of a number of the more important letters.

XV

"Sweet Fortune's Minion"

It was late dinner-time when Smith closed the big roll-top desk in the new private suite in the Kinzie Building offices and went across the street to the hotel. A little farther along, as he was coming down from his rooms to go to dinner, he saw Starbuck in the lobby talking to Williams; but since they did not see him, he passed on without stopping.

The great dining-room of the Hophra House was on the ground floor; a stucco-pillared immensity with scenic mural decorations after Bierstadt and a ceiling over which fat cupids and the classical nude in goddesses rioted in the soft radiance of the shaded electrics. The room was well filled, but the head waiter found Smith a small table in the shelter of one of the pillars and brought him an evening paper.

Smith gave his dinner order and began to glance through the paper. The subdued chatter and clamor of the big room dinned pleasantly in his ears, and the disturbing thought of peril imminent was losing its keenest cutting edge when suddenly the solid earth yawned and the heavens fell. Half absently he realized that the head waiter was seating some one at the place opposite his own; then the faint odor of violets, instantly reminiscent, came to his nostrils. He knew instinctively, and before he could put the newspaper aside, what had happened. Hence the shock, when he found himself face to face with Verda Richlander, was not so completely paralyzing as it might have been. She was looking across at him with a lazy smile in the glorious brown eyes, and the surprise was quite evidently no surprise for her.

"I told the waiter to bring me over here," she explained; and then, quite pleasantly: "It is an exceedingly little world, isn't it, Montague?"

He nodded gloomily.

"Much too little for a man to hide in," he agreed; adding: "But I think I have known that, all along; known, at least, that it would be only a question of time."

The waiter had come to take Miss Richlander's dinner order, and the talk paused. After the man had gone she began again.

"Why did you run away?" she asked.

Smith shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"What else was there for me to do. Besides, I believed, at the time, that I had killed Dunham. I could have sworn he was dead when I left him."

She was toying idly with the salad-fork. "Sometimes I am almost sorry that he wasn't," she offered.

"Which is merely another way of saying that you were unforgiving enough to wish to see me hanged?" he suggested, with a sour smile.

"It wasn't altogether that; no." There was a pause and then she went on: "I suppose you know what has been happening since you ran away--what has been done in Lawrenceville, I mean?"

"I know that I have been indicted by the grand jury and that there is a reward out for me. It's two thousand dollars, isn't it?"

She let the exact figure of the reward go unconfirmed.

"And still you are going about in public as if all the hue and cry meant nothing to you? The beard is an improvement--it makes you look older and more determined--but it doesn't disguise you. I should have known you anywhere, and other people will."

Again his shoulders went up.

"What's the use?" he said. "I couldn't dig deep enough nor fly high enough to dodge everybody. You have found me, and if you hadn't, somebody else would have. It would have been the same any time and anywhere."

"You knew we were here?" she inquired.

He made the sign of assent.

"And yet you didn't think it worth while to take your meals somewhere else?"

He made a virtue of necessity. "I should certainly have taken the small precaution you suggest if the clerk hadn't told me that your father had gone up to the Gloria district. I took it for granted that you had gone with him."

The lazy smile came again in the brown eyes, and it irritated him.

"I am going to believe that you wouldn't have tried to hide from me," she said slowly. "You'll give my conceit that much to live on, won't you?"

"You mean that I ought to have been willing to trust you? Perhaps I was. But I could hardly think of you as apart from your father. I knew very well what he would do."

"I was intending to go on up to the mines with him," she said evenly. "But last evening, while I was waiting for him to finish his talk with some mining men, I was standing in the mezzanine, looking down into the lobby. I saw you go to the desk and leave your key; I was sure I couldn't be mistaken; so I told father that I had changed my mind about going out to the mines and he seemed greatly relieved. He had been trying to persuade me that I would be much more comfortable if I should wait for him here."

It was no stirring of belated sentiment that made Smith say: "You--you cared enough to wish to see me?"

"Naturally," she replied. "Some people forget easily: others don't. I suppose I am one of the others."

Smith remembered the proverb about a woman scorned and saw a menace more to be feared than all the terrors of the law lurking in the even-toned rejoinder. It was with some foolish idea of thrusting the menace aside at any cost that he said: "You have only to send a ten-word telegram to Sheriff Macauley, you know. I'm not sure that it isn't your duty to do so."

"Why should I telegraph Barton Macauley?" she asked placidly. "I'm not one of his deputies."

"But you believe me guilty, don't you?"

The handsome shoulders twitched in the barest hint of indifference. "As I have said, I am not in Bart Macauley's employ--nor in Mr. Watrous Dunham's. Neither am I the judge and jury to put you in the prisoner's box and try you. I suppose you knew what you were doing, and why you did it. But I do think you might have written me a line, Montague. That would have been the least you could have done."

The serving of the salad course broke in just here, and for some time afterward the talk was not resumed. Miss Richlander was apparently enjoying her dinner. Smith was not enjoying his, but he ate as a troubled man often will; mechanically and as a matter of routine. It was not until the dessert had been served that the young woman took up the thread of the conversation precisely as if it had never been dropped.

"I think you know that you have no reason to be afraid of me, Montague; but I can't say as much for father. He will be back in a few days, and when he comes it will be prudent for you to vanish. That is a future, however."

Smith's laugh was brittle.

"We'll leave it a future, if you like. 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'"

"Oh; so you class me as an evil, do you?"

"No; you know I didn't mean that; I merely mean that it's no use crossing the bridges before we come to them. I've been living from day to day so long now, that I am becoming hardened to it."

Again there was a pause, and again it was Miss Richlander who broke it.

"You don't want to go back to Lawrenceville?" she suggested.

"Hardly--in the circumstances."

"What will you do?--go away from Brewster and stay until father has finished buying his mine?"

"No; I can't very well go away--for business reasons."

The slow smile was dimpling again at the corners of the perfect mouth.

"You are going to need a little help, Montague--my help--aren't you? It occurs to me that you can well afford to show me some little friendly attention while I am Robinson-Crusoed here waiting for father to come back."

"Let me understand," he broke in, frowning across the table at her. "You are willing to ignore what has happened--to that extent? You are not forgetting that in the eyes of the law I am a criminal?"

She made a faint little gesture of impatience.

"Why do you persist in dragging that in? I am not supposed to know anything about your business affairs, with Watrous Dunham or anybody else. Besides, no one knows me here, and no one cares. Besides, again, I am a stranger in a strange city and we are--or we used to be--old friends."

Her half-cynical tone made him frown again, thoughtfully, this time.

"Women are curious creatures," he commented. "I used to think I knew a little something about them, but I guess it was a mistake. What do you want me to do?"

"Oh, anything you like; anything that will keep me from being bored to death."

Smith laid his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.

"There is a play of some kind on at the opera-house, I believe," he said, rising and going around to draw her chair aside. "If you'd care to go, I'll see if I can't hold somebody up for a couple of seats."

"That is more like it. I used to be afraid that you hadn't a drop of sporting blood in you, Montague, and I am glad to learn, even at this late day, that I was mistaken. Take me up-stairs, and we'll go to the play."

They left the dining-room together, and there was more than one pair of eyes to follow them in frank admiration. "What a strikingly handsome couple," said a bejewelled lady who sat at the table nearest the door; and her companion, a gentleman with restless eyes and thin lips and a rather wicked jaw, said: "Yes; I don't know the woman, but the man is Colonel Baldwin's new financier; the fellow who calls himself 'John Smith.'"

The bediamonded lady smiled dryly. "You say that as if you had a mortal quarrel with his name, Crawford. If I were the girl, _I_ shouldn't find fault with the name. You say you don't know her?"

Stanton had pushed his chair back and was rising. "Take your time with the ice-cream, and I'll join you later up-stairs. I'm going to find out who the girl is, since you want to know."

On the progress through the lobby to the elevators there were others to make remarks upon the handsome pair; among them the ex-cowboy mine owner whose name was still "Billy" Starbuck to everybody in the Timanyoni region.

"Say! wouldn't that jar you, now?" he muttered to himself. And again: "This John Smith fellow sure does need a guardian--and for just this one time I reckon I might as well butt in and be it. If he's fixing to shake that little Corona girl he's sure going to earn what's coming to him. That's my ante."

XVI

Broken Threads

Mr. Crawford Stanton's attempt to find out who Smith's dinner companion was began with a casual question shot at the hotel clerk; with that, and a glance at the register. From the clerk he learned Miss Richlander's name and the circumstances under which she had become a waiting transient in the hotel. From the register he got nothing but the magnate's name and the misleading address, "Chicago."

"Is Mr. Richlander a Chicago man?" he asked of the clerk.

"No. He merely registered from his last stop--as a good many people do. His home town is Lawrenceville."

"Which Lawrenceville is that?" Stanton inquired; but the clerk shook his head.

"You may search me, Mr. Stanton. I didn't ask. It's in Indiana, isn't it? You might find out from Miss Richlander."

Stanton became thoughtful for a moment and then crossed the lobby to his business office, which had an entrance from the hotel ground floor. Behind the closed door, which he took the precaution to lock, he turned on the light and opened a large atlas. A glance at the town listings revealed some half-dozen Lawrencevilles, in as many different States, one State offering two, for good measure. That ended the search for the moment, and a little later he went up-stairs to rejoin the resplendent lady, who was taking her after-dinner ease in the most comfortable lounging-chair the mezzanine parlors afforded.

"No good," he reported. "The girl's name is Richlander, and she--or her father--comes from one of half a dozen 'Lawrencevilles'--you can take your choice among 'em."

"Money?" queried the comfortable one.

"Buying mines in the Topaz," said the husband mechanically. He was not thinking specially of Mr. Josiah Richlander's possible or probable rating with the commercial agencies; he was wondering how well Miss Richlander knew John Smith, and in what manner she could be persuaded to tell what she might know. While he was turning it over in his mind the two in question, Smith and the young woman, passed through the lobby on their way to the theatre. Stanton, watching them narrowly from the vantage-point afforded by the galleried mezzanine, drew his own conclusions. By all the little signs they were not merely chance acquaintances or even casual friends. Their relations were closer--and of longer standing.

Stanton puzzled over his problem a long time, long after Mrs. Stanton had forsaken the easy chair and had disappeared from the scene. His Eastern employers were growing irascibly impatient, and the letters and telegrams were beginning to have an abrasive quality disagreeably irritating to a hard-working field captain. Who was this fellow Smith, and what was his backing? they were beginning to ask; and with the asking there were intimations that if Mr. Crawford Stanton were finding his task too difficult, there was always an alternative.

As a business man Stanton was usually able to keep irritating personalities at a proper distance. But the Timanyoni-Escalante war was beginning to get on his nerves. At first, it had presented itself as the simplest of business campaigns. A great land grab had been carried through, and there was an ample water-supply to transform the arid desert into ranch acres with enormous increases in values. A farmers' ditch company, loosely organized and administered, was the sole obstacle in the way, and upon his arrival in Brewster, Stanton had set blithely about removing it.

Just when all was going well, when the farmers were almost in sight of their finish, and the actual stock absorption had fairly begun, the new factor had broken in; a young man capable and daring to a degree that was amazing, even in the direct and courageous West. Where and how Smith would strike, Stanton never knew until after the blow had been sent home. Secrecy, the most difficult requirement in any business campaign, had been so strictly maintained that up to the present evening of cogitations in the Hophra House mezzanine, Stanton was still unable to tell his New York and Washington employers positively whether Smith had money--Eastern money--behind him, or was engineering the big coup alone. Kinzie was steadfastly refusing to talk, and the sole significant fact, thus far, was that practically all of the new High Line stock had been taken up by local purchasers.

Stanton was still wrestling with his problem when the "handsome couple" returned from the play. The trust field captain saw them as they crossed the lobby to the elevator and again marked the little evidences of familiarity. "That settles it," he mused, with an outthrust of the pugnacious jaw. "She knows more about Smith than anybody else in this neck of woods--_and she's got it to tell_!"

Stanton began his inquisition for better information the following day, with the bejewelled lady for his ally. Miss Richlander was alone and unfriended in the hotel--and also a little bored. Hence she was easy of approach; so easy that by luncheon time the sham promoter's wife was able to introduce her husband. Stanton lost no moment investigative. For the inquiring purpose, Smith was made to figure as a business acquaintance, and Stanton was generous in his praises of the young man's astounding financial ability.

"He's simply a wonder, Miss Richlander!" he confided over the luncheon-table. "Coming here a few weeks ago, absolutely unknown, he has already become a prominent man of affairs in Brewster. And so discreetly reticent! To this good day nobody knows where he comes from, or anything about him."

"No?" said Miss Verda. "How singular!" But she did not volunteer to supply any of the missing biographical facts.

"Absolutely nothing," Stanton went on smoothly. "And, of course, his silence about himself has been grossly misinterpreted. I have even heard it said that he is an escaped convict."

"How perfectly absurd!" was the smiling comment.

"Isn't it? But you know how people will talk. They are saying now that his name isn't Smith; that he has merely taken the commonest name in the category as an _alias_."

"I can contradict that, anyway," Miss Richlander offered. "His name is really and truly John Smith."

"You have known him a long time, haven't you?" inquired the lady with the headlight diamonds.

"Oh, yes; for quite a long time, indeed."

"That was back in New York State?" Stanton slipped in.

"In the East, yes. He comes of an excellent family. His father's people were well-to-do farmers, and one of his great-uncles on his mother's side was on the supreme bench in our State; he was chief justice during the later years of his life."

"What State did you say?" queried Stanton craftily. But Miss Verda was far too wide-awake to let him surprise her.

"Our home State, of course. I don't believe any member of Mr. Smith's immediate family on either side has ever moved out of it."

Stanton gave it up for the time being, and was convinced upon two points. Miss Richlander's reticence could have but one meaning: for some good reason, Smith would not, or dare not, give any home references. That was one point, and the second was that Miss Richlander knew, and knew that others wanted to know--and refused to tell. Stanton weighed the probabilities thoughtfully in the privacy of his office. There were two hypotheses: Smith might have business reasons for the secrecy--he might have backers who wished to remain completely unknown in their fight against the big land trust; but if he had no backers the other hypothesis clinched itself instantly--he was in hiding; he had done something from which he had run away.

It was not until after office hours that Stanton was able to reduce his equation to its simplest terms, and it was Shaw, dropping in to make his report after his first day's work as clerk and stenographer in the High Line headquarters, who cleared the air of at least one fog bank of doubts.

"I've been through the records and the stock-books," said the spy, when, in obedience to orders, he had locked the office door. "Smith is playing a lone hand. He flimflammed Kinzie for his first chunk of money, and after that it was easy. Every dollar invested in High Line has been dug up right here in the Timanyoni. Here's the list of stockholders."

Stanton ran his eye down the string of names and swore when he saw Maxwell's subscription of $25,000. "Damn it!" he rasped; "and he's Fairbairn's own son-in-law!"

"So is Starbuck, for that matter; and he's in for twenty thousand," said Shaw. "And, by the way, Billy is a man who will bear watching. He's hand-in-glove with Smith, and he's onto all of our little crooks and turns. I heard him telling Smith to-day that he owed it to the company to carry a gun."

Stanton's smile showed his teeth.

"I wish he would; carry one and kill somebody with it. Then we'd know what to do with him."

The spy was rolling a cigarette and his half-closed eyes had a murderous glint in them.