Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 February 1918 — The Real Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Real Man

By Francis Lyne

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CHAPTER I—J. Montague Smith, Lawrenceville bank cashier and society man, receives tyo letters. One warns him that a note Which he has O. KL’d with consent of Watrous Dunham, the bank’s president, Is worthless. The Other Is a rumtnons 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 aggreeelve. Dunham draws a pistol and Is floored by a blow Vat apparently kills him. Smith escapes on an outgoing freight train. —■ CHAPTER Hl—Near Brewster, Colo., Dexter Baldwin, president of the Tlmanyoni Ditch company, gets Smith an office job e.t the big dam the company is building. CHAPTER IV—Williams, chief englnSr, finds the hobo Smith used to money big chunks and to making It work. le 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 ootonel’s daughter Corona. * CHAPTER Vl—While Corona looks on lie 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, 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 Klnzle, 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 reprard 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. -sx 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 has not gone away with her father. She exacts almost constant attendance from him as the price of her silence. CHAPTER XIV— Stanton and his wife fall to learn about Smith from Vera. * Stanton makes some night visits and is - trailed. CHAPTER XV—Smith tells Starbuck 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, brho knows Smith, Is coming to visit her. CHAPTER XVII—An abandoned railroad right-of-way is claimed across the darn, and Smith prepares for actual fighting. He buys options on all offered «tock and stops the panic. a CHAPTER XVIII—He tells Corona he has locked up Jlbbey In an old mine until the fight is over. She calls him a coward. CHAPTER XIX—He releases Jlbbey, and after that rescues him from drowning. CHAPTER XX—Smith tells Starbuck of Stanton’s probable moves to get Unlt•ed States court Interference. CHAPTER XXl—Vera warns him that her father has written to Klnzle about ■him. The colonel is loyal and calls Kinale a straddler. CHAPTER XXll—Vera and Jlbbey refuse to Identify Smith, and mislead Kinale. Stanton breaks with Klnzle.

CHAPTER XXill. The Flesh-Pots of Egypt. Convinced by Verda Richlander’s telephony message to the construction camp that he stood in no immediate danger, Smith spent the heel of the afternoon in the High Line offices, keeping in wire touch with Stillings, whom he had sent on a secret mission to Red Butte, and with Williams at the dam. The High Line enterprise was on the knees of the gods. If Williams could pull through in time, if the river-swell-ing storms should hold off, if Stanton should delay nis final raid past the critical hour —and there was now good reason to hope that all of these contingencies were probable—the victory was practically won. Smith closed his desk at six o’clock and went across to the hotel to dress for dinner. The day of suspense was practically at an end and disaster still held aloof rwas fairly outdistanced in the race, as it seemed. Williams’ final report had been to the effect that the concrete-pouring was completed, and the long strain was off. Smith went to his rooms, and, as once before and for a similar reason, he laid his dress clothes out on the bed. He made sure that he would be required to dine with Verda Richlander, and he was stripping his coat when he heard a tap at the door and Jibbey came ini “Glad rags, eh?” said the blase one, with a glance at the array on the bed. “I’ve Just run up to tell you that you Hadn’t. Verda’s dining with the Stantons, and she wants me to keep you out of sight until afterward. By and by, when she’s foot-loose, she wants to see you in the mezzanine. Isn’t there some quiet little Joint where we two can go for a bite? You know the town, and I don’t” Smith put his coat on, and together they circled the square to Frascati's,

taking a table in the main case. While they were giving their dinner order, Starbuck came in and joined them, and Smith was glad. For reasons which he could scarcely have defined, he was relieved not to have to talk to Jibbey alone, and Starbuck played third hand admirably, taking kindly to the sham black sheep, and filling him up, in quiet, straight-faced humor, with many and most marvelous tales of the earlier frontier. At the end of the meal, while Jibbey was still content to linger, listening open-mouthed to Starbuck's romancings, Smith excused himself and returned to the hotel. He had scarcely chosen his lounging chair in a quiet corner of the mezzanine before Miss Richlander came to join him. “It has been a long day, hasn’t it?” she began evenly. “You have been busy with your dam, I suppose, but I —l have had nothing to do but to think, and that is something that I don’t often allow myself to do. You have gone far since that night last May when you telephoned me that you would come up to the house later —and then broke your promise, Montague.” “In a way, I suppose I have,” he admitted. “You have, indeed. You are a totally different man.” “In what way, particularly?” “In every conceivable way. If one could believe in transmigration, one would say that you had changed souls with some old, hard-hitting, roughriding ancestor. Have your ambitions changed, too?” “I am not sure now that I had any ambitions in that other life.” “Oh, yes, you had,” she went on smoothly. “In the ‘other life,’ as you call it, you would have been quite willing to marry a woman who could assure you a firm social standing and money enough to put you on a footing with other men of your capabilities. You wouldn’t be willing to do that now, would you?—leaving the sentiment out as you used to leave it out then?” “No, I hardly think I should.” Her laugh was musically low and sweet, and only mildly derisive. “You are thinking that it is change of environment, wider horizons, and all that, which has changed you, Montague; but I know better. It is a woman, and, as you may remember, I have met her—twice.” Then, with a faint glow of spiteful fire in the magnificent eyes: “How can you make yourself believe that she is pretty?” He shrugged one shoulder in token of the utter uselessness of discussion in that direction. “Sentiment?” he queried. “I think we needn’t go into that, at this late day, Verda. It is a field that neither of us entered, or cared to enter, in the days that are gone. If I say that Corona Baldwin has —quite unconsciously on her part, I must ask you to believe taught me what love means, that ought to be enough.” Again she was laughing softly. “You seem to have broadly forgotten the old proverb about a woman scorned. What have you to expect from me after making such an admission as that?” Smith pulled himself together and stood the argument firmly upon its unquestionable footing. “Let us put all these Indirections aside and be for the moment merely a man and a woman, as God made us, Verda,” he said soberly. “You know, and I know, that there was never any

question of love involved in our relations past and gone. We might have married, but in that case neither of us would have got or exacted anything more than the conventional decencies and amenities. We mustn’t try to make believe at this late day. You had no illusions about me when I was Watrous Dunham’s hired man; you haven’t any illusions about me now.” “Perhaps not” was the calm rejoinder. “And yet today I have lied to save you from those who are trying to crush you.” *T told you not to do that,” he rejoined quickly. •T know you did; and yet, when you went away this morning you knew perfectly well that I was going to do it if I should get the opportunity. Didn’t you, Montague?” He nodded slowly; common honesty demanded that much. "Very well; you accepted the service, and I gave it freely. Mr. Klnzie believes now that you are another Smith —not the one who ran away from Lawrenceville last May. Tell me: would the other woman have done as much if the chance had fallen to herr It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “I hope not,” but he did not say it. Instead, he said: “But you don’t really care, Verda; in the way you are trying to make me believe you do.” “Popslbly not; possibly I am wholly ■elfish in the matter and am only lookins for some loophole of escape.”

"Escape? From whom?” She looked away and shook her head. “From Watrous Dunham, let Us say. You didn’t suspect that, did you? It is so, nevertheless. My father desires it; and I suppose Watrous Dunham would like to have my money —you know I have something in my own right. Perhaps this may help to account for some other things—for your trouble, for one. You were in his way, you see. But never mind that: there are other matters to be considered now. Though Mr. Kinzie has been put off the track. Mr. Stanton hasn’t. I have earned Mr. Stanton’s ill-will because I wouldn’t tell him about you, and this evening, at table, he took it out on me.” “In what way?” “He gave me to understand, very plainly, that he had done Something; that there was a sensation in prospect for all Brewster. He was so exultantly triumphant that it fairly frightened me. The fact that he wasn’t afraid to show some part of his hand to me—knowing that I would be sure to tell you—makes me afraid that the trap has already been set for you.” “In other words, you think he has gone over Kinzie’s head and has telegraphed to Lawrenceville?” “Montague, I’m almost certain of it!” Smith stood up and put his hands behind him. “Which means that I have only a few hours, at the longest,” he said quietly. And then: “There is a gyod bit to be done, turning over the business of the office, and all that: I’ve been putting it off from day to day, saying that there would be time enough to set my house in order after the trap had been sprung. Now I am like the man who puts off the making of his will until it is too late. Will you let me thank you very heartily and vanish?” “What shall you do?” she asked. “Set my house in order, as I say—as well as I can in the time that remains. There are others to be considered, you know.” “Oh; the plain-faced little ranch girl among them, I suppose?” “No; thank God, she is out of it entirely—in the way you mean,” he broke out fervently. “You mean that you haven’t spoken to her —yet ?” “Of course I haven’t. Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?” “But you are not really guilty.” “That doesn’t make any difference: Watrous Dunham will see to it that I get what he has planned to give me.” She was tapping an impatient tattoo on the carpet with one shapely foot.

“Why don’t you turn this new Jeaf of yours back and go home and fight it out with Watrous Dunham, once for all?” she suggested. “I shall probably go, fast enough, when Macauley or one of his deputies gets here with the extradition papers,” he returned. “But as to fighting Dunham, without money—” She looked up quickly, and this time there was no mistaking the meaning of the glow in the magnificent brown eyes. “Your friends have money, Montague—plenty of it. All you have tc do is to say that you-will defend yourself. I am not sure that Watrous

Dunham couldn’t be made to take your place In the prisoner’s dock, or that you couldn’t be put in his place in the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. You have captured Tucker Jibbey, and that means Tucker’s father; and my father —well, when it comes to the worst, my father always does what I want him to. It’s his one weakness.” For one little instant Smith felt the solid ground slipping from beneath his feet. Here was a way out, and his quick mentality was showing him that it was a perfectly feasible way. As Verda Richlander’s husband and Josiah Richlander’s son-in-law, he could fight Dunham and w’in. And the reward: once more he could take his place in the small Lawrenceville world, and settle down to the life of conventional good report and ease which he had once thought the acme of any reasonable man’s aspirations. But at the half-yielding moment a word of Corona Baldwin’s flashed Into his brain and turned the scale: “It did happen in your ease . . . giving you a chance to grow and expand, and to break with all the old traditions . . . and the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose.” It was the reincarnated Smith who met the look in the beautiful eyes and made answer. “No,” was the sober decision; and then he gave his reasons. “If I could do what you propose, I shouldn’t be worth the powder It would take to

drive a bullet through me, Verda, for now, you see, I know what love means. You say I have changed, and I have changed: I can imagine the past-and-gone J. Montague jumping at the chance you are offering. But the mill will never grind with the water that is past: I’ll take what is coming to me, and try to take it like a man. Goodnight—and good-by." And he turned his back upon the temptation and went away. , riiteeu minutes later he was in his office in the Kinzle building, trying in vain to get Colonel Baldwin on the distance wire; trying also—and also in vain—to forget the recent clash and break with Verda Richlander. He was jiggling the switch of the desk phone for the twentieth time when a nervous step echoed in the corridor and the door opened to admit William Starbuck. There was red wrath in the mine owner’s ordinarily cold eyes when he flung himself into a chair and eased the nausea of his soul in an outburst of picturesque profanity. "The jig’s up—definitely up, John," he was saying, when Ids speech became lucid enough to be understood. “We know now what Stanton’s ‘other string’ was. A half hour ago, a deputy United States marshal, with a posse big enough to capture a town, took possession of the dam and stopped the work. He says it’s a court order from Judge Lurching at Red Butte, based on the claims of that infernal paper railroad !” Smith pushed the telephone aside. "But it’s too Intel” he protested. “The dam is completed; Williams phoned - me before I went to dinner. All that remains to be done to save the charter is to shut the . spillways and let the water back up so that it will flow into the main ditch !” “Right there’s where they’ve got us!" was the rasping reply. "They won’t let Williams touch the spillway gates, and they’re not going to let him touch them until after we have lost out on the time limit! Williams’,man says they’ve put the seal of the court on the machinery and have posted armed guards everywhere. Wouldn’t that make you run around In circles and yelp like a scalded doc?” (TO BE CONTINUED.) .

“Your Friends Have Money.”