Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 103, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1918 — The ReaL Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The ReaL Man

By Francis Lynde

CHAPTER I— J. Mohtagne 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 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 ills danger. He hears the Richlanders have 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 VeraStanton 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 in unsafe cause a stock-selling panic. Smith tells the colonel of his entangleinent with Vera and the colonel wants to let 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 stock 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 Jlbbey, 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 iiijn. 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 j”dve in chambers. CHAPTER XXV—Under court oraers the sheriff raises a posse, arrests Stanton and other conspirators, and prepares to drive the alleged United States marshal’s posse off the dam. Smith and Starbuck dodge the city police, who are looking for Smith. CHAPTER XXVI—At the dam Smith Is wounded while trying to Serve papers on the fake marshal, but the fight is won and the time-limit beaten. CHAPTER XXVII. In Sunrise Gulch. William Starbuck drew the surgeon aside after the first aid had been rendered, and Smith, still unconscious, had been carried from the makeshift operating table in the commissary to Williams’ cot in the office shack. “How about it, Doc?” asked the mine owner bluntly. The surgeon shook his head doubtfully. “I can't say. He’ll be rather lucky if he doesn’t make it, won’t he?” Starbuck remembered that the doctor had come out in the auto with the police captain and the two plainclothes men. “Hackerman has been talking?” he queried. X The surgeon nodded. “He told me on the way out. If I were in Smith’s place, I’d rather pass out with a bullet in my lung. Wouldn't you?” Starbuck was frowning sourly. “Suppose you make it a case of suspended judgment, Doc,” he suggested. “The few of us here who know anything about it are giving John the benefit of the doubt. They’ll have to show me, and half a dozen of us, before they can send him over the road.” “He knew they were after him?” “Sure thing; and he. had all the chance he needed to make his getaway. He was shot while he was trying to get between and stop the war and keep others from getting killed.” “It’s a pity,” said the surgeon, glancing across at the police captain to whom Colonel Baldwin was appealing. “They’ll put him in the hospital cell at the jail, and that will cost him whatever slender chance he might otherwise have to pull through.” Starbuck looked up quickly. “Tell ’em he can’t be moved, Doc Dan,” he urged suddenly. And then: “You’re Dick Maxwell’s family physician, and Colonel Dexter’s, and mine. Surely you can do that much for us?” “I can, and I will,” said the surgeon promptly. * * * Three days after the wholesale arrest at the dam, Brewster gossip had fairly outworn itself telling and retelling the story of how the High Line charter had been saved; of how Crawford Stanton’s bold ruse of hiring an ex-train-robber to impersonate a fed-eral-court officer had fallen through leaving Stanton and his confederates, ruthlessly abandoned by the un-

•iamed principals, languishing bailless in jail; of how Smith, the hero of all these occasions, was still lying at the point of death in the office shack at the construction camp, and David Kintie, once more in keen pursuit of the loaves and fishes, was combing the market for odd shares of the stock, which was now climbing swiftly out of reach. But at this climax of exhaustion —or satiety—came a distinctly new set of thrills, more titillating. If possible, than all the others combined. It was on the morning of the third day that the Herald announced the return of Mr. Josiah Richlander from the Topaz; and in the marriage notices of the same issue the breakfasttable readers of the newspapers learned that the multimillionaire’s daughter had been privately married the previous evening to Mr. Tucker Jibbey. Two mining speculators were chuckling over the news in the Hophra House grill when a third man came in to join them. “What’s the joke?” queried the newcomer ; and when he was shown the marriage item, he nodded gravely. “That’s all Tight; but the Herald man didn’t get the full flavor of it. It was a sort of runaway match, it seems; the fond parent wasn’t Invited or consulted.” “I don’t see that the fond parent has any kick coming,” said the one who had sold Jibbey a promising prospect hole on Topaz mountain two days earlier. “The young fellow’s got all kinds of money." “I know,” the land broker put in. “But they’re whispering it around that Mr. Richlander had other plans for his daughter. They also say that Jibbey wouldn’t stay to face the music; that he left on the midnight train last night a few hours after the wedding, so as not to be among those present when the old man should blow in.” “What?” —in a chorus of two —“left his wife?” “That’s what they say. But thift’s only one of the new and startling things that isn’t in the morning papers. Have you heard about Smith? —or haven’t you been up long enough yet?” “I heard yesterday that he was beginning to mend,” replied the breakfaster on the left. a “You’re out of date,” this from the dealer in ranches. “You know the story that was going around about his being an escaped convict, or something of that sort? It gets its ‘local color’ this morning. There’s a sheriff here from back East somewhere —came in on the early train; name’s Macauley, and he’s got the requisition papers. But Smith’s fooled him good and plenty.” Again the chorus united In an eager query; “How?”

“He died last night—a little past midnight. They say they’re going to bury him out at the dam —on the job that he pulled through and stood on its feet. One of Williams’ quarrymen drifted in with the story just a little while ago. I’m here to bet you even money that the whole town goes to the funeral.” “Great gosh!” said the man who was crunching the burnt bacon. “Say, that’s tough, Bixby ! I don’t care what he’d run away from back East; he was a man, right. Harding has been telling everybody how Smith wouldn’t let the posse open fire on that gang of hold-ups last Friday night; how he chased across on the dam stagings alone and unarmed to try to serve the warrants on ’em and make ’em stop firing. It was glorious, hut it wasn’t war.” To this the other mining man adaed , a hard word. “Dead.” he gritted; j “and only a few hours earlier the girl I had taken snap judgment on him and I married somebody else! That’s the i woman of it I” _ j “Oh, hold on, Stryker,” the ranch broker protested. “Don’t you get too fierce about that. There are two .strings to that bow, and the longest I and" sorriest one runs out to Colonel Baldwin’s place on Little creek. I’m thinking. The Richlander business was only an incident. Stanton told me that much.” , „ „ _ I As the event proved, the seller or , ranch lands would have lost his bet on j the funeral attendance. For some un- . known reason the notice of Smith’s death did not appear in the afternoon papers, and only a few people went out in autos to see the coffin lowered by I Williams’ workmen into a grave on j the mesa behind the construction camp; a grave among others where the victims of an early Industrial accident at the dam had been buried. . Those who went out from town came back rather scandalized. There had 1 been a most hard-hearted lack of the 1 common formalities, they said; a 1 cheap coffin, no minister, no mourners, 1 not even the poor fellow’s business ' associates in the company he had | fought so hard to save from defeat and extinction. It was a shame ! ' With this report passing from Up to

lip in Brewster, another bit of gossip to the effect that Starbuck and Stillings had gone East vrUJ* the disappointed sheriff, “to dear SmltYt taern- 1 ory," as the street-talk had it. called forth no little comment. In the Hophra House case on the evening of the funeral day Stryker, the mining speculator. was loud in his criticisms of the High Lane people. “Yes!” he railed; “a couple of ’em will go on a junketing trip East to ‘clear his memory,' after they've let their 'wops' at the dam bury him like a yellow dog! And this Richlander woman; they say shed known him ever since he and she were school kids together; she went down and took the train with her father just about the time they were planting the poor devil.” (TO BE COXTIXUED.y