Part 16

"What I said, and what I meant, had nothing at all to do with Timanyoni High Line and its fight for life," she said calmly, recalling the wandering gaze and letting him see her eyes. "I was thinking altogether of one man's attitude toward his world."

"That was night before last," he put in soberly. "I've gone a long way since night before last, Corona."

"I know you have. Why doesn't daddy come back?"

"He'll come soon enough. You're not afraid to be here alone with me, are you?"

"No; but anybody might be afraid of the man you are going to be."

His laugh was as mirthless as the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.

"You needn't put it in the future tense. I have already broken with whatever traditions there were left to break with. Last night I threatened to kill Allen, and, perhaps, I should have done it if he hadn't begged like a dog and dragged his wife and children into it."

"I know," she acquiesced, and again she was looking past him.

"And that isn't all. Yesterday, Kinzie set a trap for me and baited it with one of his clerks. For a little while it seemed as if the only way to spring the trap was for me to go after the clerk and put a bullet through him. It wasn't necessary, as it turned out, but if it had been----"

"Oh, you couldn't!" she broke in quickly. "I can't believe that of you!"

"You think I couldn't? Let me tell you of a thing that I have done. Night before last, in less than an hour after you sat and talked with me at the dam, Verda Richlander had a wire from a young fellow who wants to marry her. He had found out that she was here in Brewster, and the wire was to tell her that he was coming in that night on the delayed 'Flyer.' She asked me to meet him and tell him she had gone to bed. He is a miserable little wretch; a sort of sham reprobate; and she has never cared for him, except to keep him dangling with a lot of others. I told her I wouldn't meet him, and she knew very well that I couldn't meet him--and stay out of jail. Are you listening?"

"I'm trying to."

"It was the pinch, and I wasn't big enough--in your sense of the word--to meet it. I saw what would happen. If Tucker Jibbey came here, Stanton would pounce upon him at once; and Jibbey, with a drink or two under his belt, would tell all he knew. I fought it all out while I was waiting for the train. It was Jibbey's effacement, or the end of the world for me, and for Timanyoni High Line."

Dexter Baldwin's daughter was not of those who shriek and faint at the apparition of horror. But the gray eyes were dilating and her breath was coming in little gasps when she said:

"I _can't_ believe it! You are not going to tell me that you met this man as a friend, and then----"

"No; it didn't quite come to a murder in cold blood, though I thought it might. I had Maxwell's runabout, and I got Jibbey into it. He thought I was going to drive him to the hotel. After we got out of town he grew suspicious, and there was a struggle in the auto. I--I had to beat him over the head to make him keep quiet; I thought for the moment that I had killed him, and I knew, then, just how far I had gone on the road I've been travelling ever since a certain night in the middle of last May. The proof was in the way I felt; I wasn't either sorry or horror-stricken; I was merely relieved to think that he wouldn't trouble me, or clutter up the world with his worthless presence any longer."

"But that wasn't your real self!" she expostulated.

"What was it, then?"

"I don't know--I only know that it wasn't you. But tell me: did he die?"

"No."

"What have you done with him?"

"Do you know the old abandoned Wire-Silver mine at Little Butte?"

"I knew it before it was abandoned, yes."

"I was out there one Sunday afternoon with Starbuck. The mine is bulkheaded and locked, but one of the keys on my ring fitted the lock, and Starbuck and I went in and stumbled around for a while in the dark tunnels. I took Jibbey there and locked him up. He's there now."

"Alone in that horrible place--and without food?"

"Alone, yes; but I went out yesterday and put a basket of food where he could get it."

"What are you going to do with him?"

"I am going to leave him there until after I have put Stanton and Kinzie and the other buccaneers safely out of business. When that is done, he can go; and I'll go, too."

She had risen, and at the summing-up she turned from him and went aside to the one window to stand for a long minute gazing down into the electric-lighted street. When she came back her lips were pressed together and she was very pale.

"When I was in school, our old psychology professor used to try to tell us about the underman; the brute that lies dormant inside of us and is kept down only by reason and the super-man. I never believed it was anything more than a fine-spun theory--until now. But now I know it is true."

He spread his hands.

"I can't help it, can I?"

"The man that you are now can't help it; no. But the man that you could be--if he would only come back--" she stopped with a little uncontrollable shudder and sat down again, covering her face with her hands.

"I'm going to turn Jibbey loose--after I'm through," he vouchsafed.

She took her hands away and blazed up at him suddenly, with her face aflame.

"Yes! after you are safe; after there is no longer any risk in it for you! That is worse than if you had killed him--worse for you, I mean. Oh, _can't_ you see? It's the very depth of cowardly infamy!"

He smiled sourly. "You think I'm a coward? They've been calling me everything else but that in the past few days."

"You _are_ a coward!" she flashed back. "You have proved it. You daren't go out to Little Butte to-night and get that man and bring him to Brewster while there is yet time for him to do whatever it is that you are afraid he will do!"

Was it the quintessence of feminine subtlety, or only honest rage and indignation, that told her how to aim the armor-piercing arrow? God, who alone knows the secret workings of the woman heart and brain, can tell. But the arrow sped true and found its mark. Smith got up stiffly out of the big swing-chair and stood glooming down at her.

"You think I did it for myself?--just to save my own worthless hide? I'll show you; show you all the things that you say are now impossible. Did you bring the gray roadster?"

She nodded briefly.

"Your father is coming back; I hear the elevator-bell. I am going to take the car, and I don't want to meet him. Will you say what is needful?"

She nodded again, and he went out quickly. It was only a few steps down the corridor to the elevator landing, and the stair circled the caged elevator-shaft to the ground floor. Smith halted in the darkened corner of the stairway long enough to make sure that the colonel, with Stillings and a woman in an automobile coat and veil--a woman who figured for him in the passing glance as Corona's mother--got off at the office floor. Then he ran down to the street level, cranked the gray roadster and sprang in to send the car rocketing westward.

XXIV

A Little Leaven

The final touch of sunset pink had long since faded from the high western sky-line, and the summer-night stars served only to make the darkness visible along the road which had once been the stage route down the Timanyoni River and across to the mining-camp of Red Butte. Smith, slackening speed for the first time in the swift valley-crossing flight, twisted the gray roadster sharply to the left out of the road, and eased it across the railroad track to send it lurching and bumping over the rotting ties of an old branch-line spur from which the steel had been removed, and which ran in a course roughly paralleling the eastward-facing front of a forested mountain.

Four miles from the turn out of the main road, at a point on the spur right of way where a washed-out culvert made farther progress with the car impossible, he shut off the power and got down to continue his journey afoot. Following the line of the abandoned spur, he came, at the end of another mile, to the deserted shacks of the mining plant which the short branch railroad had been built to serve; a roofless power-house, empty ore platforms dry-rotting in disuse, windowless bunk shanties, and the long, low bulk of a log-built commissary. The mine workings were tunnel-driven in the mountainside, and a crooked ore track led out to them. Smith followed the ore track until he came to the bulkheaded entrance flanked by empty storage bins, and to the lock of a small door framed in the bulkheading he applied a key.

It was pitch dark beyond the door, and the silence was like that of the grave. Smith had brought a candle on his food-carrying visit of the day before, and, groping in its hiding-place just outside of the door, he found and lighted it, holding it sheltered in his cupped hand as he stepped into the black void beyond the bulkhead. With the feeble flame making little more than a dim yellow nimbus in the gloom, he looked about him. There was no sign of occupancy save Jibbey's suitcase lying where it had been flung on the night of the assisted disappearance. But of the man himself there was no trace.

Smith stumbled forward into the black depths and the chill of the place laid hold upon him and shook him like the premonitory shiver of an approaching ague. What if the darkness and solitude had been too much for Jibbey's untried fortitude and the poor wretch had crawled away into the dismal labyrinth to lose himself and die? The searcher stopped and listened. In some far-distant ramification of the mine he could hear the _drip, drip_, of underground water, but when he shouted there was no response save that made by the echoes moaning and whispering in the stoped-out caverns overhead.

Shielding the flickering candle again, Smith went on, pausing at each branching side-cutting to throw the light into the pockets of darkness. Insensibly he quickened his pace until he was hastening blindly through a maze of tunnels and cross driftings, deeper and still deeper into the bowels of the great mountain. Coming suddenly at the last into the chamber of the dripping water, he found what he was searching for, and again the ague chill shook him. There were no apparent signs of life in the sodden, muck-begrimed figure lying in a crumpled heap among the water pools.

"Jibbey!" he called: and then again, ignoring the unnerving, awe-inspiring echoes rustling like flying bats in the cavernous overspaces: "_Jibbey!_"

The sodden heap bestirred itself slowly and became a man sitting up to blink helplessly at the light and supporting himself on one hand.

"Is that you, Monty?" said a voice tremulous and broken; and then: "I can't see. The light blinds me. Have you come to fi-finish the job?"

"I have come to take you out of this; to take you back with me to Brewster. Get up and come on."

The victim of Smith's ruthlessness struggled stiffly to his feet. Never much more than a physical weakling, and with his natural strength wasted by a life of dissipation, the blow on the head with the pistol butt and the forty-eight hours of sharp hardship and privation had cut deeply into his scanty reserves.

"Did--did Verda send you to do it?" he queried.

"No; she doesn't know where you are. She thinks you stopped over somewhere on your way west. Come along, if you want to go back with me."

Jibbey stumbled away a step or two and flattened himself against the cavern wall. His eyes were still staring and his lips were drawn back to show his teeth.

"Hold on a minute," he jerked out. "You're not--not going to wipe it all out as easy as that. You've taken my gun away from me, but I've got my two hands yet. Stick that candle in a hole in the wall and look out for yourself. I'm telling you, right now, that one or the other of us is going to stay here--and stay dead!"

"Don't be a fool!" Smith broke in. "I didn't come here to scrap with you."

"You'd better--and you'd better make a job of it while you're about it!" shrieked the castaway, lost now to everything save the biting sense of his wrongs. "You've put it all over me--knocked my chances with Verda Richlander and shut me up here in this hell-hole to go mad-dog crazy! If you let me get out of here alive I'll pay you back, if it's the last thing I ever do on top of God's green earth! You'll go back to Lawrenceville with the bracelets on! You'll--" red rage could go no farther in mere words and he flung himself in feeble fierceness upon Smith, clutching and struggling and waking the grewsome echoes again with frantic, meaningless maledictions.

Smith dropped the candle to defend himself, but he did not strike back; wrapping the madman in a pinioning grip, he held him helpless until the vengeful ecstasy had exhausted itself. When it was over, and Jibbey had been released, gasping and sobbing, to stagger back against the tunnel wall, Smith groped for the candle and found and relighted it.

"Tucker," he said gently, "you are more of a man than I took you to be--a good bit more. And you needn't break your heart because you can't handle a fellow who is perfectly fit, and who weighs half as much again as you do. Now that you're giving me a chance to say it, I can tell you that Verda Richlander doesn't figure in this at all. I'm not going to marry her, and she didn't come out here in the expectation of finding me."

"Then what does figure in it?" was the dry-lipped query.

"It was merely a matter of self-preservation. There are men in Brewster who would pay high for the information you might give them about me."

"You might have given me a hint and a chance, Monty. I'm not _all_ dog!"

"That's all past and gone. I didn't give you your chance, but I'm going to give it to you now. Let's go--if you're fit to try it."

"Wait a minute. If you think, because you didn't pull your gun just now and drop me and leave me to rot in this hole, if you think that squares the deal----"

"I'm not making any conditions," Smith interposed. "There are a number of telegraph offices in Brewster, and for at least two days longer I shall always be within easy reach."

Jibbey's anger flared up once more.

"You think I won't do it? You think I'll be so danged glad to get to some place where they sell whiskey that I'll forget all about it and let you off? Don't you make any mistake, Monty Smith! You can't knock me on the head and lock me up as if I were a yellow dog. I'll fix you!"

Smith made no reply. Linking his free arm in Jibbey's, he led the way through the mazes, stopping at the tunnel mouth to blow out the candle and to pick up Jibbey's suitcase. In the open air the freed captive flung his arms abroad and drank in a deep breath of the clean, sweet, outdoor air. "God!" he gasped; "how good it is!" and after that he tramped in sober silence at Smith's heels until they reached the automobile.

It took some little careful manoeuvring to get the roadster successfully turned on the railroad embankment, and Jibbey stood aside while Smith worked with the controls. Past this, he climbed into the spare seat, still without a word, and the rough four miles over the rotting cross-ties were soon left behind. At the crossing of the railroad main track and the turn into the highway, the river, bassooning deep-toned among its bowlders, was near at hand, and Jibbey spoke for the first time since they had left the mine mouth.

"I'm horribly thirsty, Monty. That water in the mine had copper or something in it, and I couldn't drink it. You didn't know that, did you?--when you put me in there, I mean? Won't you stop the car and let me go stick my face in that river?"

The car was brought to a stand and Jibbey got out to scramble down the river bank in the starlight. Obeying some inner prompting which he did not stop to analyze, Smith left his seat behind the wheel and walked over to the edge of the embankment where Jibbey had descended. The path to the river's margin was down the steep slope of a rock fill made in widening the highway to keep it clear of the railroad track. With the glare of the roadster's acetylenes turned the other way, Smith could see Jibbey at the foot of the slope lowering himself face downward on his propped arms to reach the water. Then, for a single instant, the murderous underman rose up and laughed. For in that instant, Jibbey, careless in his thirst, lost his balance and went headlong into the torrent.

A battling eon had passed before Smith, battered, beaten, and half-strangled, succeeded in landing the unconscious thirst-quencher on a shelving bank three hundred yards below the stopped automobile. After that there was another eon in which he completely forgot his own bruisings while he worked desperately over the drowned man, raising and lowering the limp arms while he strove to recall more of the resuscitative directions given in the Lawrenceville Athletic Club's first-aid drills.

In good time, after an interval so long that it seemed endless to the despairing first-aider, the breath came back into the reluctant lungs. Jibbey coughed, choked, gasped, and sat up. His teeth were chattering, and he was chilled to the bone by the sudden plunge into the cold snow water, but he was unmistakably alive.

"What--what happened to me, Monty?" he shuddered. "Did I lose my grip and tumble in?"

"You did, for a fact."

"And you went in after me?"

"Of course."

"No, by Gad! It wasn't 'of course'--not by a long shot! All you had to do was to let me go, and the score--your score--would have been wiped out for good and all. Why didn't you do it?"

"Because I should have lost my bet."

"Your bet?"

"Well, yes. It wasn't exactly a bet; but I promised somebody that I would bring you back to Brewster to-night, alive and well, and able to send a telegram. And if I had let you drown yourself, I should have lost out."

"You promised somebody?--not Verda?"

"No; somebody else."

Jibbey tried to get upon his feet, couldn't quite compass it, and sat down again.

"I don't believe a word of it," he mumbled, loose-lipped. "You did it because you're not so danged tough and hard-hearted as you thought you were." And then: "Give me a lift, Monty, and get me to the auto. I guess--I'm about--all in."

Smith half led, half carried his charge up to the road and then left him to go and back the car over the three hundred-odd yards of the interspace. A final heave lifted Jibbey into his place, and it is safe to say that Colonel Dexter Baldwin's roadster never made better time than it did on the race which finally brought the glow of the Brewster town lights reddening against the eastern sky.

At the hotel Smith helped his dripping passenger out of the car, made a quick rush with him to an elevator, and so up to his own rooms on the fourth floor.

"Strip!" he commanded; "get out of those wet rags and tumble into the bath. Make it as hot as you can stand it. I'll go down and register you and have your trunk sent up from the station. You have a trunk, haven't you?"

Jibbey fished a soaked card baggage-check out of his pocket and passed it over.

"You're as bad off as I am, Monty," he protested. "Wait and get some dry things on before you go."

"I'll be up again before you're out of the tub. I suppose you'd like to put yourself outside of a big drink of whiskey, just about now, but that's one thing I won't buy for you. How would a pot of hot coffee from the cafe strike you?"

"You could make it Mellin's Food and I'd drink it if you said so," chattered the drowned one from the inside of the wet undershirt he was trying to pull off over his head.

Smith did his various errands quickly. When he reached the fourth-floor suite again, Jibbey was out of the bath; was sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in blankets, with the steaming pot of coffee sent up on Smith's hurry order beside him on a tray.

"It's your turn at the tub," he bubbled cheerfully. "I didn't have any glad rags to put on, so I swiped some of your bedclothes. Go to it, old man, before you catch cold."

Smith was already pointing for the bath. "Your trunk will be up in a few minutes, and I've told them to send it here," he said. "When you want to quit me, you'll find your rooms five doors to the right in this same corridor: suite number four-sixteen."

It was a long half-hour before Smith emerged from his bath-room once more clothed and in his right mind. In the interval the reclaimed trunk had been sent up, and Jibbey was also clothed. He had found one of Smith's pipes and some tobacco and was smoking with the luxurious enjoyment of one who had suffered the pangs imposed by two days of total abstinence.

"Just hangin' around to say good night," he began, when Smith showed himself in the sitting-room. Then he returned the borrowed pipe to its place on the mantel and said his small say to the definite end. "After all that's happened to us two to-night, Monty, I hope you're going to forget my crazy yappings and not lose any sleep about that Lawrenceville business. I'm seventeen different kinds of a rotten failure; there's no manner of doubt about that; and once in a while--just _once_ in a while--I've got sense enough to know it. You saved my life when it would have been all to the good for you to let me go. I guess the world wouldn't have been much of a loser if I had gone, and you knew that, too. Will you--er--would you shake hands with me, Monty?"

Smith did it, and lo! a miracle was wrought: in the nervous grasp of the joined hands a quickening thrill passed from man to man;, a thrill humanizing, redemptory, heart-mellowing. And, oddly enough, one would say, it was the weaker man who gave and the stronger who received.

XXV

The Pace-Setter

Smith made an early breakfast on the morning following the auto drive to the abandoned mine, hoping thereby to avoid meeting both Miss Richlander and Jibbey. The Hophra cafe was practically empty when he went in and took his accustomed place at one of the alcove tables, but he had barely given his order when Starbuck appeared and came to join him.

"You're looking a whole heap better this morning, John," said the mine owner quizzically, as he held up a finger for the waiter. "How's the grouch?"

Smith's answering grin had something of its former good nature in it. "To-day's the day, Billy," he said. "To-morrow at midnight we must have the water running in the ditches or lose our franchise. It's chasing around in the back part of my mind that Stanton will make his grand-stand play to-day. I'm not harboring any grouches on the edge of the battle. They are a handicap, anyway, and always."

"That's good medicine talk," said the older man, eying him keenly. And then: "You had us all guessing, yesterday and the day before, John. You sure was acting as if you'd gone plumb locoed."

"I was locoed," was the quiet admission.

"What cured you?"

"It's too long a story to tell over the breakfast-table. What do you hear from Williams?"

"All quiet during the night; but the weather reports are scaring him up a good bit this morning."

"Storms on the range?"

"Yes. The river gained four feet last night, and there is flood water and drift coming down to beat the band. Just the same, Bartley says he is going to make good."

Smith nodded. "Bartley is all right; the right man in the right place. Have you seen the colonel since he left the offices last evening?"

"Yes. I drove him and Corona out to the ranch in my new car. He said he'd lost his roadster; somebody had sneaked in and borrowed it."

"I suppose he told you about the latest move--our move--in the stock-selling game?"

"No, he didn't; but Stillings did. You played it pretty fine, John; only I hope to gracious we won't have to redeem those options. It would bu'st our little inside crowd wide open to have to buy in all that stock at par."

Smith laughed. "'Sufficient unto the day,' Billy. It was the only way to block Stanton. It's neck or nothing with him now, and he has only one more string that he can pull."

"The railroad right-of-way deal?"