Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 66, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 November 1917 — The Real Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Real Man

By Francis Lynde

CHAPTER I—J. Montagne 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 of the local millionaire, and meets Dunham alone at night in the bank. CHAPTER ll—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 of the Timanyonl Ditch company, gets Smith an office Job at the big dam the company is building. CHAPTER IV—Williams, chief engineer, finds the hobo Smith used to money In big chunks and to making it work. The company is fighting concealed opposition and is near ruin. Smith is jokingly suggested as a financial doctor. CHAPTER V—Williams talks business to Smith, who will tell nothing Of his past. Smith pushes a stalled auto away from an oncoming train and saves the colonel’s daughter Corona. CHAPTER Vl—While Corona looks on he drives off three bogus mining right claimants from the company’s land. CHAPTER Vll—The colonel takes Smith to his home and persuades him, in spite of Smith’s warning, to undertake the financial salvation of the company. CHAPTER Vlll—Crawford Stanton, tired by eastern interests to kill off the ditch company, sets his spies to work to find out who Smith is. CHAPTER IX—Smith reorganizes the company and gets a loan from Klnzie, the local banker. CHAPTER X—ln the midst of a “mira-cle-working” campaign Corona asks Smith alarming questions. He reads that Dunham, still living, has doubled the regard for his capture. CHAPTER XII. A Reprieve. Smith’s blood ran cold and there was fl momentary attack of shocked consternation, comparable to nothing that any past experience had to offer. But ■{here was no time to waste in curious speculations as to the why 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. 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 might venture to call himself a free man. But that was the limit. One minute later he had hailed a passing autocab 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 eve-

nlng at Hillcrest, pleading business to Mrs. Baldwin in person when she had called at the office with her daughter. 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 be always was; Mrs. Baldwin was graciously lenient —was good enough, Indeed, to thank the 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, allknowing, 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 not long ago?” There are times when any mere man may be shocked into telling the truth, and Smith had come face to face with one of them. “It is,” he said. “She is in Brewster?” “Yes. She came this evening.” “And you ran away? That was horribly unkind, don’t you think — after i she had come so far?” “Hold on,” he broke in. “Don’t let’s I go so fast. I didn’t ask her to come, i 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 I All men are a little queer, I think —always excepting colo-nel-daddy. Don’t you want to see her?” “Indeed, I don’t I” “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. If 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?” Smith’s laugh was an easing of strains. “You’ve pumped me dry,” he returned, the sardonic humor reasserting itself. A motorcar was coming up the driveway. 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.

Stnith returned to Brewster the next morning by way of the dam, making the long detour count for as much as possible in the matter of sheer timekilling. It was a little before noon when he reached town by the roundabout route, and went to the hotel to reconnoiter. The roomclerk 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 srentleman. 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 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 grillroom, 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 anrKthe financial manager the night before —the claim set up by the dead-and-gone 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 powerhouse 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 bn for a few days or weeks longer. . . , 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.

“Whgg: 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. 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 halfopened 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 letterheads, 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 Craw’ford Stajiton 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 tomorrow morning and report to Mr. Miller, the chief clerk.” 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 Shaj/ had been waiting in the anteroontoduring the better part of the dictating interval, and that on the departing applicant’s cuffs were microscopic notes of a number of the more Important letters. (TO BE CONTINUED.)

“And You Ran Away?”