Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 98, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1918 — 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 Rich lander, daughter of the local millionaire, and meets Dunham alone at night in the bank. CHAPTER H—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 lll—Near Brewster, Colo., Dexter Baldwin, president of the Timanyonl Ditch company, gets Smith an office Job at the big dam the company la building. , CHAPTER IV—Williams, efiWf engineer, finds the hobo Smith used to money in big chunks and to making It work. The company Is fighting concealed opposition and is nea>* 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 CoronaCHAPTER Vl—While Corona looks on be drives off three bogus mining right claimants from the company's land. CHAPTER VH—The colonel takes Smith to his home and persuades him. In Site of Smith’s warning, to undertake a financial salvation of the company. CHAPTER Vlll—Crawford Stanton, hired by eastern Interests to kin off the ditch company, sets,his spies to .work to find out who Smith is. I 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 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 nave gone up to the mines. He hires a new stenographer, Shaw, who is a spy of 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 XlV—Stanton and his wife fall to learn about Smith from Vera. Stanton makes some night visits and is trailed. CHAPTER XV—Smith tells Starbucfc 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 Set her talk if she wants to. She tells Smith that Tucker Jibbey, another suitor, Who knows Smith, is coming to visit her. CHAPTER XVII—An abandoned railroad right-of-way is claimed across the dam, and > Smith prepares for actual fighting. He buys options on all offered jstock and stops the panic. CHAPTER XVIII—He tells Corona he has locked up Jibbey in an old mine until the fight is over. She calls him a coward. CHAPTER XIX—He releases Jibbey, and after that rescues him from drowning. CHAPTER XX—Smith tells Starbuck of Stanton’s probable moves to get United States court interference. CHAPTER XXl—Vera warns him that her father has written to Kinzie about him. The colonel is loyal and calls Kinale a straddler. CHAPTER XXll—Vera and Jibbey refuse to identify Smith, and mislead Kinzie. Stanton breaks with Kinzie. CHAPTER XXIII—Vera offers Smith wealth, position and a cleared name at home, but he refuses. The dam is captured by Stanton’s men. CHAPTER XXlV—Smith, warned that Stanton has telegraphed to Lawrenceville for his arrest, goes with Starbuck to the ■iirttzli in chambers.

CHAPTER XXV. A Race to the Swift. Since Sheriff Harding had left his office in the county jail and had gone home to his ranch on the north side of the river some hours earlier, not a little precious time was consumed in hunting him up. Beyond this, there was another delay in securing the deputy. When Starbuck’s car came to a stand for a second time before the mesa-fronting entrance of the courthouse, Smith came quickly across the walk from the portal. > . “Mr. Harding,” he began abruptly, “Judge Warner has gone home and he has made me his messenger. There is a bit of sharp work to be done, and you’ll need a strong posse. Can you deputize fifteen or twenty good men who can be depended upon in a fight and rendezvous them on the northside river road in two hours from now?” The sheriff, a big, bearded man who might have sat for the model of one of Frederic Remington’s frontiersmen, took time to consider. *Ts it a scrap?” he asked. » “It is likely to be. There are warrants to be served, and there will most probably be resistance. Your posse should be well armed.” “We’ll try for it,” was the decision! “On the north-side river road, yoq say? You’ll want us mounted?” / “It will be better to take horses. We could get autos, but Judge Warner agrees with me that the thing had better be done quietly and without making too much of a stir in town.”

"AH right,” said the man of the law. “It that all?” “No, not quite all. The first of the warrants is to be served here in Brewster —upon Mr. Crawford Stanton. Your deputy will probably find him at the Hophra House. Here is the paper: it is a bench warrant of commitment on a charge of conspiracy, and Stanton is to be locked up. Also you are to see to it that your jail telephone is out of order, so that Stanton won't be able to make any attempt to get a hearing and bail before tomorrow.” “That part of it is mighty risky,” said Harding. “Does the judge know about that, too?” “He does; and for the ends of pure justice, he concurs with me —-though, of course, he couldn’t give a mandatory order.” The sheriff turned to his jail deputy, who had descended from the rumble seat in the rear.

“You’ve heard the dope, Jimmie,” he said shortly. “Go and get His Nobs and lock him up. And if he wants to be yelling ‘Help!’ and sending for his lawyer or somebody, why, the telephone’s takin’ a lay-off. Savvy?” The deputy nodded and turned upon his heel, stuffing the warrant for Stanton’s arrest into his pocket as he went. Smith swung up beside Starbuck, saying: “In a couple of hours, then, Mr. Harding; somewhere near the bridge approach on the other side of the river.” Starbuck had started the motor and was bending forward to adjust the oil feed when the sheriff left them. “You seem to have made a tenstrike with Judge Warner,” the excowpuncher remarked, replacing the flash-lamp in its seat pocket. “Judge Warner is a man in every inch of him; but there is something behind this night’s work that I don’t quite understand,” was the quick reply. “I had hardly begun to state the case when the judge interrupted me. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I have been waiting for you people to come and ask for relief.’ What do you make of that, Billy?” “I don’t know; unless someone in Stanton’s outfit has welshed. Shaw might have done it. He has been to Bob Stillings, and Stillings says he is sore at Stanton for some reason. Shaw

was trying to get Stillings to agree to drop the railroad case against him, and Bob says he made some vague promise of help in the High Line business if the railroad people would agree not to prosecute.” “There is a screw loose somewhere; I know by the way Judge Warner took hold. When I proposed to swear out the warrant for Stanton’s arrest, he said, ‘I can’t understand, Mr. Smith, why you haven’t done this before,’ and he sat down and filled out the blank. But we can let that go for the present. How are you going to get me across the river without taking me through’ the heart of the town and giving the Brewster police a shy at me?” Starbuck’s answer was wordless. With a quick twist of the pilot wheel he sent the car skidding around the cornqy, using undue haste, as It seemed, since they had two hours before them. A few minutes farther along the lights of the town had been left behind and the car was speeding swiftly westward on a country road paralleling the railway track; the road over which Smith had twice driven with the kidnapped Jibbey. “I’m still guessing,” the passenger ventured, when the last of the railroad distance signals had flashed to the rear. And then: “What’s the frantic hurry, Billy?” Starbuck was - running with ''the muffler cut out, but now he cut it in and the roar of the motor sank to a humming murmur. “I thought so,” he remarked, turning his head to listen. "You didn’t

notice that police whistle just as we were leaving the courthouse, did you? —nor the answers to It while we were dodging through the suburbs? Somebody has marked us down and passed the word, and now they’re chasing us with a buzz-wagon. Don’t you hear it?” By this time Smith could hear the sputtering roar of the following car only too plainly. “It’s a big one,” he commented. “You can’t outrun it, Billy >; and, besides, there is nowhere to run to in this direction.” Again Starbuck’s reply translated itself into action. With a skillful touch of the controls he sent the car ahead at top speed, and for a matter of ten miles or more held a diminishing lead in the race through sheer good driving and an accurate knowledge of the road and its twistings and turnings. But the road would soon become a cart track in the mountains ; there was no outlet to the north save by means of the railroad bridge at Little Butte station, and from somewhere up the valley and beyond the railroad bridge came the distancesoftened whistle of a train. Starbuck set a high mark for himself as a courageous driver of motorcars when he came to the last of the three road crossings. Jerking the car around sharply at the instant of trackcrossing, he headed straight out over the ties for the railroad bridge. It was a courting of death. To drive the bridge at racing speed was hazardous enough, but to drive it thus in the face Of a downcoming train seemed nothing less than madness. It was after the car had shot Into the first of the three bridge spans that the pursuers pulled up and opened fire. Starbuck bent lower over his wheel, and Smith clutched for handholds. Far ■up the track on the north side of the river a headlight flashed in the darkness, and the hoarse blast of a locomotive, whistling for the bridge, echoed and re-echoed among the hills. Starbuck drove for his life. With the bridge fairly crossed, he found himself on a high embankment; and the oncoming train was now less than half a mile away. Somewhere beyond the bridge approach thepe was a road; so much Starbuck could recall. If they could reach its crossing before the collision should come — They did reach it, by what seemed to Smith a margin of no more than the length of the heavy freight train which went jangling past them a scant secdnd or so after the car had been wrenched aside into the obscure mesa road. They had gone a mile or more on the reverse leg of the long downriver detour before Starbuck cut the speed and turned the wheel over to his seat-mate. “Take her a minute while I get the makings,” he said, dry-lipped, feeling in his pockets for tobacco and the rice paper. Then he added: “Holy Solomon! I never wanted a smoke so bad in all my life!” Smith’s laugh was a chuckle. “Gets next to you—after the sact — doesn’t it? That’s where we split. I had my scare before we hit the bridge, and it tasted like a mouthful of bitter aloes. Does this road take us back up the river?” “It takes us twenty miles around through the Park and comes in at the head of Little creek. But we have plenty of time. You told Harding two hours, didn’t you?” “Yes; but I must have a few minutes at Hillcrest before we get action, Billy.”

Starbuck took the wheel again and said nothing until the roundabout race had been fully run and he was easing the car down the last of the hills into the Little Creek road. There had been three-quarters of an hour of skillful driving over a bad road to come between Smith’s remark and Its reply, but Starbuck apparently made no account of the length of the interval. “You’re aiming to go and see Corry?” he asked, while the car was coasting to the hill bottom. “Yes.” * With a sudden flick of the controls and a quick jamming of the brakes, Starbuck brought the car to a stand just as it came into the level road. “We're man to man here under the canopy, John; and Corry Baldwin ' hasn’t got any brother,” he offered gravely. “I’m backing you in this business fight for all I’m worth —for Dick Maxwell’s sake and the colonel’s, and maybe a little bit for the sake of my own ante of twenty thousand. And I’m ready to back you in this oldhome scrap with all the money you’ll need to make your fight. But wheh it I comes to the little girl it’s different. ■ Have you any good and fair right to ' hunt up Corry Baldwin while things are shaping themselves up as tlpjy are?” Smith met the shrewd inquisition fairly. “Give it a name,” he said shortly. “I will: I’ll give it the one you gave it a while back. You said you were ;an outlaw, on two charges: embezzle- ’ ment and assault. We’ll let the as- | sault go. But the other thing doesn’t . taste good.” | “I dldnft embezzle anything, Billy. I thought I made that plain.” I “Sb you did. But you also made It plain that the home court would be likely to send you up for it, guilty or I not guilty. And with a thing like that hanging over you . . . you see, I know Corry Baldwin, John. If you put it up to her tonight, and she happens to fall in with your side of it—which is what you’re aiming to makj her do —all hell won’t keep her fronj 1 going back home with you and seeing you through!” ( I “Billy, I may never see her again. I said I wouldn’t tell her —that .1 loved her too well th tell her - . -

’ but now the final pinch has come, nnd I—” 1 “And that isn't all,” Starbuck went 'on relentlessly. “There’s this Miss Rich-acres. Your hands ain’t clean. 1 John; not clean enough to let you go to Hillcrest tonight.” | Smith groped in his pockets, found a cigar and lighted it. I “Puli out to the side of the road and i we’ll kill what time there is to kill right here,” he directed soberly. And then: “What you <ay is right as right, Billy. Once more, I guess, I was lo- ! coed for the minute. Forget it; and while you’re about It,. forget Miss RichTander, too. Luckily for her, she is out of it—as far out of it as I am.” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

"You’ve Heard the Dope, Jimmie."