IV
The High Hills
Train Number Seventeen, the Nevada through freight, was two hours late issuing from the western portal of Timanyoni Canyon. Through the early mountain-climbing hours of the night and the later flight across the Red Desert, the dusty, travel-grimed young fellow in the empty box car midway of the train had slept soundly, with the hard car floor for a bed and his folded coat for a pillow. But on the emergence of the train from the echoing canyon depths the sudden cessation of the crash and roar of the shut-in mountain passage awoke him and he got up to open the door and look out.
It was still no later than a lazy man's breakfast time, and the May morning was perfect, with a cobalt sky above and a fine tingling quality in the air to set the blood dancing in the veins. Over the top of the eastern range the sun was looking, level-rayed, into a parked valley bounded on all sides by high spurs and distant snow peaks. In its nearer reaches the valley was dotted with round hills, some of them bare, others dark green to their summits with forestings of mountain pine and fir. Now that it was out of the canyon, the train was skirting the foot of the southern boundary spur, the railroad track holding its level by heading the gulches and rounding the alternating promontories.
From the outer loopings of the curves, the young tramp at the car door had momentary glimpses of the Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its canyon, and the swiftest of upland rivers even here where it had the valley in which to expand. A Copah switchman had told him that the railroad division town of Brewster lay at the end of the night's run, in a river valley beyond the eastern Timanyonis, and that the situation of the irrigation project which was advertising for laborers in the Denver newspapers was a few miles up the river from Brewster.
For reasons of his own, he was not anxious to make a daylight entry into the town itself. Sooner or later, of course, the scrutiny of curious eyes must be met, but there was no need of running to meet the risk. Not that the risk was very great. While he was killing time in the Copah yard the day before, waiting for a chance to board the night freight, he had picked up a bit of broken looking-glass and put it in his pocket. The picture it gave back when he took it out and looked into it was that of a husky young tramp with a stubble beard a week old, and on face and neck and hands the accumulated grime of two thousand miles of freight-train riding. Also, the week's wear and tear had been, if anything, harder on the clothes than on the man. His hat had been lost in one of the railroad-yard train-boardings and he had replaced it in Denver with a workman's cap. It was a part of the transformation, wrought and being wrought in him, that he was able to pocket the bit of looking-glass with a slow grin of satisfaction. When one is about to apply for a job as a laboring man it is well to look the part.
As the train swept along on its way down the grades the valley became more open and the prospect broadened. At one of the promontory roundings the box-car passenger had a glimpse of a shack-built construction camp on the river's margin some distance on ahead. A concrete dam was rising in sections out of the river, and dominating the dam and the shacks two steel towers, with a carrying cable stretched between them, formed the piers of the aerial spout conveyer for the placing of the material in the forms.
A mile or more short of the construction camp the railroad made another of the many gulch loopings; and on its next emergence the train had passed the site of the dam, leaving it fully a mile in the rear. Here the young man at the car door saw the ditch company's unloading side-track with a spur branching away from the main line and crossing the river on a temporary trestle. There were material yards on both sides of the stream, and in one of the opposing hills a busy quarry.
The train made no stop at the construction siding, but a half-mile farther along the brakes began to grind and the speed was slackened. Sliding the car door another foot or two, the young tramp with the week-old stubble beard on his face leaned out to look ahead. His opportunity was at hand. A block semaphore was turned against the freight and the train was slowing in obedience to the signal. Waiting until the brakes shrilled again, the tramp put his shoulder to the sliding door, sat for a moment in the wider opening, and then swung off.
After the train had gone on he drew himself up, took a deep chest-filling breath of the crisp morning air, and looked about him. The sun was an hour high over the eastern mountains, and the new world spread itself in broad detail. His alighting was upon one of the promontory embankments. To the westward, where the curving railroad track was lost in the farther windings of the river, lay the little intermountain city of Brewster, a few of its higher buildings showing clear-cut in the distance. Paralleling the railroad, on a lower level and nearer the river, a dusty wagon road pointed in one direction toward the town, and in the other toward the construction camp.
The young man who had crossed four States and the better part of a fifth as a fugitive and vagrant turned his back upon the distant town as a place to be avoided. Scrambling down the railroad embankment, he made his way to the wagon road, crossed it, and kept on until he came to the fringe of aspens on the river's edge, where he broke all the trampish traditions by stripping off the travel-worn clothes and plunging in to take a soapless bath. The water, being melted snow from the range, was icy-cold and it stabbed like knives. Nevertheless, it was wet, and some part of the travel dust, at least, was soluble in it. He came out glowing, but a thorn from his well-groomed past came up and pricked him when he had to put the soiled clothes on again. There was no present help for that, however; and five minutes later he had regained the road and was on his way to the ditch camp.
When he had gone a little distance he found that the wagon road dodged the railroad track as it could, crossing and recrossing the right of way twice before the construction camp came into view. The last of the crossings was at the temporary material yard for which the side-track had been installed, and from this point on, the wagon road held to the river bank. The ditch people were doubtless getting all their material over the railroad so there would be little hauling by wagon. But there were automobile tracks in the dust, and shortly after he had passed the material yard the tramp heard a car coming up behind him. It was a six-cylinder roadster, and its motor was missing badly.
He gave the automobile passing room when it came along, glancing up to note that its single occupant was a big, bearded man, wearing his gray tweeds as one to whom clothes were merely a convenience. He was chewing a black cigar, and the unoccupied side of his mouth was busy at the passing moment heaping objurgations upon the limping motor. A hundred yards farther along the motor gave a spasmodic gasp and stopped. When the young tramp came up, the big man had climbed out and had the hood open. What he was saying to the stalled motor was picturesque enough to make the young man stop and grin appreciatively.
"Gone bad on you?" he inquired.
Colonel Dexter Baldwin, the Timanyoni's largest landowner, and a breeder of fine horses who tolerated motor-cars only because they could be driven hard and were insensate and fit subjects for abusive language, took his head out of the hood.
"The third time this morning," he snapped. "I'd rather drive a team of wind-broken mustangs, any day in the year!"
"I used to drive a car a while back," said the tramp. "Let me look her over."
The colonel stood aside, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, while the young man sought for the trouble. It was found presently in a loosened magneto wire; found and cleverly corrected. The tramp went around in front and spun the motor, and when it had been throttled down, Colonel Baldwin had his hand in his pocket.
"That's something like," he said. "The garage man said it was carbon. You take hold as if you knew how. What's your fee?"
The tramp shook his head and smiled good-naturedly.
"Nothing; for a bit of neighborly help like that."
The colonel put his coat on, and in the act took a better measure of the stalwart young fellow who looked like a hobo and talked and behaved like a gentleman. Colonel Dexter was a fairly shrewd judge of men, and he knew that the tramping brotherhood divides itself pretty evenly on a distinct line of cleavage, with the born vagrant on one side and the man out of work on the other.
"You are hiking out to the dam?" he asked brusquely.
"I am headed that way, yes," was the equally crisp rejoinder.
"Hunting a job?"
"Just that."
"What sort of a job?"
"Anything that may happen to be in sight."
"That usually means a pick and shovel or a wheelbarrow on a construction job. We're needing quarrymen and concrete handlers, and we could use a few more rough carpenters on the forms. But there isn't much office work."
The tramp looked up quickly.
"What makes you think I'm hunting for an office job?" he queried.
"Your hands," said the colonel shortly.
The young man looked at his hands thoughtfully. They were dirty again from the tinkering with the motor, but the inspection went deeper than the grime.
"I'm not afraid of the pick and shovel, or the wheelbarrow, and on some accounts I guess they'd be good for me. But on the other hand, perhaps it
is
a pity to spoil a middling good office man to make an indifferent day-laborer – to say nothing of knocking some honest fellow out of the only job he knows how to do."
Colonel Baldwin swung in behind the steering-wheel of the roadster and held a fresh match to the black cigar. Though he was from Missouri, he had lived long enough in the high hills to know better than to judge any man altogether by outward appearances.
"Climb in," he said, indicating the vacant seat at his side. "I'm the president of the ditch company. Perhaps Williams may be able to use you; but your chances for office work would be ten to one in the town."
"I don't care to live in the town," said the man out of work, mounting to the proffered seat; and past that the big roadster leaped away up the road and the roar of the rejuvenated motor made further speech impossible.
It was a full fortnight or more after this motor-tinkering incident on the hill road to the dam, when Williams, chief engineer of the ditch project, met President Baldwin in the Brewster offices of the ditch company and spent a busy hour with the colonel going over the contractors' estimates for the month in prospect. In an interval of the business talk, Baldwin remembered the good-looking young tramp who had wanted a job.
"Oh, yes; I knew there was something else that I wanted to ask you," he said. "How about the young fellow that I unloaded on you a couple of weeks ago? Did he make good?"
"Who – Smith?"
"Yes; if that's his name."
The engineer's left eyelid had a quizzical droop when he said dryly: "It's the name he goes by in camp; 'John Smith.' I haven't asked him his other name."
The ranchman president matched the drooping eyelid of unbelief with a sober smile. "I thought he looked as if he might be out here for his health – like a good many other fellows who have no particular use for a doctor. How is he making it?"
The engineer, a hard-bitten man with the prognathous lower jaw characterizing the tribe of those who accomplish things, thrust his hands into his pockets and walked to the window to look down into the Brewster street. When he turned to face Baldwin again, it was to say: "That young fellow is a wonder, Colonel. I put him into the quarry at first, as you suggested, and in three days he had revolutionized things to the tune of a twenty-per-cent saving in production costs. Then I gave him a hack at the concrete-mixers, and he's making good again in the cost reduction. That seems to be his specialty."
The president nodded and was sufficiently interested to follow up what had been merely a casual inquiry.
"What are you calling him now? – a betterment engineer? You know your first guess was that he was somebody's bookkeeper out of a job."
Williams wagged his head.
"He's a three-cornered puzzle to me, yet. He isn't an engineer, but when you drag a bunch of cost money up the trail, he goes after it like a dog after a rabbit. I'm not anxious to lose him, but I really believe you could make better use of him here in the town office than I can on the job."
Baldwin was shaking his head dubiously.
"I'm afraid he'd have to loosen up on his record a little before we could bring him in here. Badly as we're needing a money man, we can hardly afford to put a 'John Smith' into the saddle – at least not without knowing what his other name used to be."
"No; of course not. I guess, after all, he's only a 'lame duck,' like a good many of the rest of them. Day before yesterday, Burdell, the deputy sheriff, was out at the camp looking the gangs over for the fellow who broke into Lannigan's place last Saturday night. When he came into the office Smith was busy with an estimate, and Burdell went up and touched him on the shoulder, just to let him know that it was time to wake up. Suffering cats! It took three of us to keep him from breaking Burdell in two and throwing him out of the window!"
"That looks rather bad," was the president's comment. Colonel Dexter Baldwin had been the first regularly elected sheriff of Timanyoni County in the early days and he knew the symptoms. "Was Burdell wearing his star where it could be seen?"
The engineer nodded.
"What explanation did Smith make?"
"Oh, he apologized like a gentleman, and said he was subject to little nervous attacks like that when anybody touched him unexpectedly. He took Burdell over to Pete Simm's shack saloon and bought him a drink. Perkins, the timekeeper, says he's going to get a megaphone so he can give due notice in advance when he wants to call Smith's attention."
The colonel pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of diplomatic cigars and passed it to the engineer, saying: "Light up a sure-enough good one, and tell me what you think Smith has been doing back yonder in the other country."
Williams took the cigar but he shied at the conundrum.
"Ask me something easy," he said. "I've stacked up a few guesses. He's from the Middle West – as the Bible says, his 'speech bewrayeth' him – and he's had a good job of some kind; the kind that required him to keep abreast of things. If there's anything in looks, you'd say he wasn't a thief or an embezzler, and yet it's pretty apparent that he's been used to handling money in chunks and making it work for its living. I've put it up that there's a woman in it. Perhaps the other fellow got in his way, or came up behind him and touched him unexpectedly, or something of that sort. Anyway, I'm not going to believe he's a crooked crook until I have to."
Colonel Baldwin helped himself to one of his own cigars, and the talk went back to business. In the irrigation project, Williams was a stockholder as well as the chief of construction, and Baldwin had more than once found him a safe adviser. There was need for counsel. The Timanyoni Ditch Company was in a rather hazardous condition financially, and the president and Williams rarely met without coming sooner or later to a threshing out of the situation.
The difficulties were those which are apt to confront a small and local enterprise when it is so unfortunate as to get in the way of larger undertakings. Colonel Baldwin, and a group of his neighbors on the north side of the river, were reformed cattlemen and horse breeders. Instead of drifting farther west in advance of the incoming tide of population following the coming of the railroad, they had availed themselves of their homestead rights and had taken up much of the grass-land in the favorable valleys, irrigating it at first with water taken out of the river in private or neighborhood ditches.
Later on came the sheep-feeding period, and after that the utilization of larger crop-raising areas. The small ditches proving inadequate for these, Colonel Baldwin had formed a stock company among his neighbors in the grass-lands and his friends in Brewster for the building of a substantial dam in the eastern hills. The project had seemed simple enough in the beginning. The stock was sold for cash and each stockholder would be a participating user of the water. Williams, who had been a United States reclamation man before he came to the Timanyoni, had made careful estimates, and the stock subscription provided money enough to cover the cost of the dam and the main ditch.
After some little bargaining, the dam site and the overflow land for the reservoir lake had been secured, and the work was begun. Out of a clear sky, however, came trouble and harassment. Alien holders of mining claims in the reservoir area turned up and demanded damages. Some few homesteaders who had promised to sign quitclaims changed their minds and sued for relief, and after the work was well under way it appeared that there was a cloud on the title of the dam site itself. All of these clashings were carried into court, and the rancher promoters found themselves confronting invisible enemies and obstacle-raisers at every turn.
The legal fight, as they soon found out, cost much money in every phase of it; and now, when the dam was scarcely more than half completed, a practically empty treasury was staring them in the face. This was the situation which called for its regular threshing out in every conference between Colonel Baldwin and his chief of construction. There was no disguising the fact that a crisis was approaching, a financial crisis which no one among the amateur promoters was big enough to cope with.
"We've got to go in deeper, Colonel; there is nothing else to do," was the engineer's summing up of the matter at the close of the conference. "The snow is melting pretty rapidly on the range now, and when we get the June rise we'll stand to lose everything we have if we can't keep every wheel turning to get ready for the high water."
Baldwin was holding his cigar between his fingers and scowling at it as if it had mortally offended him.
"Assessments on the stock, you mean?" he said. "I'm afraid our crowd won't stand for that. A good part of it is ready to lie down in the harness right now."
"How about a bond issue?" asked the engineer.
"Lord of heavens! What do we, or any of us, know about bond issues? Why, we knew barely enough about the business at the start to chip in together and buy us a charter and go to work on a plan a little bit bigger than the neighborhood ditch idea. You couldn't float bonds in Timanyoni Park, and we're none of us foxy enough to go East and float 'em."
"I guess that's right, too," admitted Williams. "Besides, with the stock gone off the way it has, it would take a mighty fine-haired financial sharp to sell bonds."
"What's that?" demanded the president. "Who's been selling any stock?"
"Buck Gardner, for one; and that man Bolling, up at the head of Little Creek, for another. Maxwell, the railroad superintendent, told me about it, and he says that the price offered, and accepted, was thirty-nine."
"Dad burn a cuss with a yellow streak in him!" rasped the Missouri colonel. "We had a fair and square agreement among ourselves that if anybody got scared he was to give the rest of us a chance to buy him out. Who bought from these welshers?"
"Maxwell didn't know that. He said it was done through Kinzie's bank. From what I've heard on the outside, I'm inclined to suspect that Crawford Stanton was the buyer."
"Stanton, the real-estate man?"
"The same."
Again the president stared thoughtfully at the glowing end of his cigar.
"There's another of the confounded mysteries," he growled. "Who is Crawford Stanton, and what is he here for? I know what he advertises, but everybody in Brewster knows that he hasn't made a living dollar in real estate since he came here last winter. Williams, do you know, I'm beginning to suspect that there is a mighty big nigger in our little wood-pile?"
"You mean that all these stubborn hold-ups have been bought and paid for? You'll remember that is what Billy Starbuck tried to tell us when the first of the missing mining-claim owners began to shout at us."
"Starbuck has a long head, and what he doesn't know about mining claims in this part of the country wouldn't fill a very big book. I remember he said there had never been any prospecting done in the upper Timanyoni gulches, and now you'd think half the people in the United States had been nosing around up there with a pick and shovel at one time or another. But it was a thing that Starbuck told me no longer ago than yesterday that set me to thinking," Baldwin went on. "As you know, the old Escalante Spanish Grant corners over in the western part of this park. When the old grants were made, they were ruled off on the map without reference to mountain ranges or other natural barriers."
Williams nodded.
"Well, as I say, one corner of the Escalante reaches over the Hophras and out into the park, covering about eight or ten square miles of the territory just beyond us on our side of the river. Starbuck told me yesterday that a big Eastern colonization company had got a bill through Congress alienating that tract."
The chief of construction bounded out of his chair and began to walk the floor. "By George!" he said; and again: "By George! That's what we're up against, Colonel! Where will those fellows get the water for their land? There is no site for a dam lower down than ours, and, anyway, that land lies too high to be watered by anything but a high-line ditch!"
"Nice little brace game, isn't it?" growled Baldwin. "If we hadn't been a lot of hayseed amateurs, we might have found out long ago that some one was running in a cold deck on us. What's your notion? Are we done up, world without end?"
Williams's laugh was grim.
"What we need, Colonel, is to go out on the street and yell for a doctor," he said. "It's beginning to look as if we had acquired a pretty bad case of malignant strangle-itis."
Baldwin ran his fingers through his hair and admitted that he had lost his sense of humor.
"It's hell, Williams," he said soberly. "You know how recklessly I've waded into this thing – how recklessly we've all gone into it for that matter. I'll come down like a man and admit that it has climbed up the ladder to a place where I can't reach it. This Eastern crowd is trying to freeze us out, to get our dam and reservoir and ditch rights for their Escalante scheme. When they do, they'll turn around and sell us water – at fifty dollars an inch, or something like that!"
"What breaks my heart is that we haven't been able to surround the sure-enough fact while there was still time to do something," lamented the ex-reclamation man. "The Lord knows it's been plain enough, with Stanton right here on the ground, and probably every one of the interferences traceable directly to him. He has begun to close in on us; his purchase of the Gardner and Bolling stockholdings is the beginning of the end. You know as well as I do, Colonel, what a contagious disease 'the yellows' is. Others will get it, and the first thing we know, Stanton will own a majority of t