Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 82, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1918 — The Real Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Real Man

By Francis Lynde

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Illustrations OlrwiaMyerA

SYNOPSIS. 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 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 ana is floored by a blow' that apparently kills him. Smith escapes on an outgoing freight train. CHAPTER IV—Williams, chief engineer, finds the hobo Smith used to money in big chunks and to malting it work. The company is lighting concealed opposition and is nea r 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 eolonel’s daughter CoronaCH APTER 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 •plte of Smith’s warning, to undertake the financial salvation of the company.

CHAPTER Vlll—Crawford Stanton, hired 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 reward for his capture. CHAPTER Xl—Smith gets encouragement in his fight from Corona, but realizes that he must stay away from her. Vera Richlander and her father come to Brewster. CHAPTER Xll—Smith tells Corona of his danger. He hears the Richlanders have gone up to the mines. He hires a new stenographer, Shaw, who is a spy es Stanton’s. CHAPTER XIII—He meets Vera, who lias not gone away with her father. She exacts almost constant attendance from him as the price of her silence. CHAPTER XlV—Stanton and his wife fall to learn about Smith from Vera. Stanton makes some night visits and Is trailed. ■ CHAPTER XV—Smith tells Starbuc* of the time limit on the dam. Starbuck cautions him about Vera and tells him of a plot to kill him or blow up the dam. They catch Shaw listening, but he escapes. CHAPTER XVl—Rumors that the dam Is unsafe cause a stock-selling panic. Smith tells the colonel of his entanglement with Vera and the colonel wants to let her talk if she wants to. She tells Smith that Tucker Jibbey, another suitor, yrho knows Smith, is coming to visit her.

CHAPTER XVIII. The Arrow to the Mark. Smith, concentrating abstractedly, as his habit was, updn thfe work in hand, was still deep in the voucher-auditing when the office door was opened and a small shocked voice said :« “Oh, wooh! how you startled me! I saw the light, and I supposed, of course, it was colonel-daddy. Where is he?” Smith pushed the papers aside and looked up scowling. “He was here a minute ago, with Stillings. Said he’d be back. You’ve come to take him home?” She nodded and came to- sit in a chair at the desk-end, saying: “Don’t let me interrupt you, please. I’ll be quiet.” “I don’t mean to let anything interrupt me until I have finished what I have undertaken to do ; I’m past all that, now.” “I have heard about what you did last night.” “About the newspaper fracas? You don’# approve of anything like that, of course. Neither did I, once. But there is no middle way. You know what the animal tamers tell us about the beasts. I’ve had my taste of blood. There are a good many men in this world who need killing. Crawford Stanton is one of thent, and I’m not sure that Mr. David, Kinzie isn’t another.” “I can’t hear what you say when you talk like that,” she objected, looking past him with the gray eyes veiled. . “Do you want me to lie down and let them put the steam roller over me?” he demanded irritably. “Is that your ideal of the perfect man?” “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 some' time ago,” he put in soberly. “I’ve gone a long way since then, Corona,” “I know you have. Why doesn’t daddy comeback?” “He’ll come "soon enough. You’re not afraid to be here alone with mes 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 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 chiK dren into it.” “I know,” -slie acquiesced, and again she was looking past him. “And that isn't all. Yesterday Kinzie set a trap for me and bated 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 l>.een —” “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 Verda Richlander had a wipe 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 around 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 wa coming in little gasps when she said: “I can’t believe it! You tire not going to tell me that you met this man as a friend, and then —” “No; it didn’t quite come to.a mur. der 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 ne grew suspicious, and there was a struggle in the auto I—l had to beat him over the head tc make him keep quiet; I thought for, the moment that I had killed him, ano ( I knew, then, just how far I had gone on the road I’ve been traveling evei since a certain night in the middle ol last May. The proof was in the way I felt; I wasn’t either sorry or horror stricken; I was merely relieved tc think that he wouldn’t trouble me, 01 clutter up the world with his worth less presence any longfer.” “But that wasn’t your real self!’ she expostulated. “What was it, then?” “I don’t know —I only know that il 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 bulk headed and locked, but one of the keys on my ring fitted the lock, and Starbuck and I went in and stumblec 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—anc without food?” “Alone, yes ; but I wept out yesterday and put a basket of food where he could get it.”" .“What are you going to do witt him?” “I am going to leave him there until after I have put Stanton and Kinzie and the other buccaneers safely out ol business.- When that is done, he car 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 superman. 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 hack—” she stepped with a little ury controllable 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.” j “You are a coward!” she flashed back. “You have proved it. Yotf daren’t go out to Little Butte tonight 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 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?” I 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 stair- ■ way 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. Yhen he ran down to the street level, cranked the gray roadster and sprang in to send the car rocketing westward. (TO BE CONTINUED.)

“You Are a Coward,” She Flashed Back.