Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 September 1917 — The Real Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Real Man

By Francis Lynde

CHAPTER I—J. Montague Smith, Lawrenceville bank cashier and society man, receives two letters. One warns him that a note which he has O. K.’d with consent of Watrous Dunham, the bank’s president, is worthless. The other is a summons from Dunham. He breaks an appointment with Vera Richlander, daughter q£..(he local millionaire, and meets Dunham alone*at night in the bank. CHAPTER II —Dunham threatens Smith with the police. Smith becomes aggressive. Dunham draws a pistol and is floored by a blow that apparently kills him. Smith escapes on an outgoing freight train. CHAPTER lll—Near Brewster, Colo., Dexter Baldwin,- president <-f the Timanyoni Ditch company, gets Smith an office job at the big dam the company is building. CHAPTER IV. Wanted —A Financier. It was a full fortnight dr 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-bitted 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 20 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 w r e 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 w*ho 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. Col. 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 attentloh”. 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

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 tile Bible says, his ‘speech betrayeth’ 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 soft,. 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 stock-holder-as well as 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 1 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 cqmpany 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 trpuble and harass* ment. 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 ciashings 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 ih 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. 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 gpt 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 snpw 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. “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 ns 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 presi-

dent. “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 son? I know what he advertises, but every* body in Brewster knows that he hasn’t made a living dollar in real estate since he came here last summer. 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 holdups have been bought and paid i >r? 3 * You’ll remember that ik what i illy Starbuck tried to tell lis when the first of the missing mining-claim owners began to shout at us.” “Starbuck has a long head, and what he doesn’t knew 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 someone was running in a cold deck on us. What’s your notion? Are we done up. world without end?” Williams’ 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-ltis.” Baldwin ran his fingers through his hair and admitted that he had lost his sense of humor. “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 sureenough fact whiie there was still time to do something,” lamented the exreclaination man. “The first thing we know, Stanton will own a majority of the stock and be voting us all out of a job. You’ll have to come around to my suggestion, After all, and advertise for a doctor.” It was said of the chief of construction that he would have joked on his death-bed, and, as a follower for the joke, he added: “Why don’t you call Smith in and give him the job?” '“You don’t really mean that, Williams, do you?” growled the colonel. “No, I didn’t mean it when I said it,” was the engineer’s admission; “I was only trying to get a rise out of you. But really, colonel, on second thought, I don’t know but it is worth considering. As I say, Smith seems to know the money game from start to finish. What Is better still, he is a fighter from the word go—what you might call a joyous fighter. Suppose you drive out tomorrow or next day and pry into him a little.”

The rancher-president had relapsed once more Into the slough of discouragement- " “You are merely grabbing for handholds. Bartley—as I was a minute ago. We are in a bad row of stumps when we can sit here and talk seriously about roping down a young hobo and putting him into the financial harness. Let’s go around to Frascati’s and eat before you go back tp camp. It’s breadtime. anyway.” The chief of construction said no more about his joking sugxestion at the moment, but when they were walking around the square to the Brewster Delmonico’s he went back to the dropped subject in all seriousness, saying: “Just the same. I wish you could know Smith and size him up as I hare. I can’t help believing, some way, that he’s all to the good.” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

“ —and Yell for a Doctor.”