Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1918 — The Real Man [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Real Man

By Francis Lynde

CKas. Scribner* Sans

Illustrations

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 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 Rlchlanders have gone up to the mines. He hires a new stenographer, Shaw, who is a spy of Stanton’s. CHAPTER XIH—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 fail to learn about Smith from Vera. Stanton makes some night visits and is trails. CHAPTER XV—Smith tells StarbucM 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 entangleinent’with Vera and the colonel wants to Set her talk if she wants tb. She tells Smith that Tucker Jlbbey, another suitor, Who knows Smith, is coming to visit her. « CHAPTER XVII—An abandoned railroad right-of-way ia claimed across ths 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 tip 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 him. The colonel is loyal and calls Kinsle a straddler. CHAPTER XXll—Vera and Jlbbey refuse to identify Smith, and mislead Klnxie. 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 —in chambers. CHAPTER XXV—Under court oroers 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. Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by without Incident other tiw'the indictment by the grand jury of Crawford Stanton, Barney M’Graw, and a number of others on a charge of conspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of- the grand battle in which Sheriff Hatding had figured as the master off the hunt, had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery in the lately finished power house.

Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni a wandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike in Sunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty years earlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely, the talebringei* confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike; but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading to the old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he had seen smoke arising.. l As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was. not at fault. On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, clad in serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy headgear and buff top-boots in good countenance by riding astride in a man’s saddle, was pushing her mount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little rise’the abandoned. camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravel sprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and its crumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitable entirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch. At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and Shaded her eyes with a gantleted hand. On a bench beside the door on the single tenanted cabin a man was sitting, end she saw him stand answer her hand-wave. A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in a sling? and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands, was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, but she pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing at him out of the slate-gray eyes and saying: “How often have I got to tell you that you simply can’t help a woman out of a man’s saddle?” The man smiled at that. “It’s automatic,” he returned. “I shall never get over wanting to help you, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I Can «o?” '

Flinging the bridle reins over the head of the wiry litjle cow-pony which was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creek valley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sit down. “You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?” she teased, sitting beside him. “Every time I come it’s always the same thing: ‘When can I go?’ You're not well yet.” ‘Tin well enough to do what Tve got to do, Corona ; and until it's done. . . . Besides, there is Jibbev.”

“Where is Mr. Jibbey this morning?” “He gone up the creek, fishing. I made him go. If I didn't take a club to 'him now and then he’d hang over me all the time. There never was another man like him. Corona. And at home we used to call him ‘the black ‘the failure,’ and cross the street to dodge him when he’d been drinking too much I” “He says you’ve made a man of him; that you saved his life when you had every reason not to. You never told me that, John.” “No ; I didn't mean to tell anyone. But to think of his coming out here to nurse me. leaving Verda on the night he married her! A brother of my own blood wouldn’t have done it.” The young woman was looking* up with a shrewd little smile. “Maybe the blood brother would do even that, if you had just made it possible for him to, marry the girl he’d set his heart on, John.” “Piffle!” growled the man. And then: “Hasn't the time come when you can tell me a little more about what happened to me after the doctor put me to sleep that night at the dam?” “Yes. The only reason you haven’t been told was because we didn’t want you to worry; we wanted you to have a chance to get well and strong again.” The man’s eyes filled suddenly, and he took no shame. He was still shaky enough in nerve and muscle to excuse it, “Nobody ever had such friends, Corona,” he said. “You all knew Td have to go back to Lawrenceville and fight it out, and you didn’t want me to go handicapped and halfdead. But how did they come to let you take me away? Tve known Macauley ever since I was in knickers. He is not the man to take any chances.” The young woman’s laugh was soundless. “Mr. Macauley wasn’t asked. He thinks you are dead,” she said. “What!” “It’s so. You were not the only one wounded in the fight at the dam. There were two others—two of M’Graw’s men. Three days later, just as colonel-daddy and Billy Starbuck were getting ready to steal you away, one of the others died. In some way the report got out that you were the one who died, and that made everything quite easy. The report has never been contradicted, and when Mr. Macauley reached Brewster the police people told him that he was too late.” “Good heavens! Does everybody in Brewster think I'm dead?”

Nearly everybody. But yon needn’t look so horrified. You’re not dead, you know; and there were no obituaries in the newspapers, or anything like that.” The man got upon his feet rather unsteadily. . “That’s the limit,” he said definitively. “I'm a man now. Corona; too much of a man, I hope, to hide behind another man’s grave. Tm going back to Brewster, today!” The young woman made a quaint little grimace at him. “How are you going to get there?” she asked. “It’s twenty miles, and the walking is awfully bad —In spots.” "But I must go. Can’t you see what everybody will say of me?—that I was too cowardly to face the music when my time came? Nobody will believe that I wasn’t a consenting party to this hide-away!”

“Sit down,” she commanded calmly; and when he obeyed: “From day to [day, since I began coming out here, ‘ John, I’ve been trying to rediscover the man whom I met just once, one ' evening over a year ago, at Cousin ' Adda’s house in Guthrievllle: I can’t find him —he’s gone.” j “Corona!” he said. “Then you recognized me?” | “Not at first. But after a while things began to come back; and what : you told me —about Miss Richlander, ‘ you know, and the hint you gave me 'of your trouble —did the rest.” ( “Then you knew —or yoti thought— I was a criminal?” I She nodded, and her gaze was resting upon the nearby gravel heaps.' “Cousin Adda wrote me. But that made no difference. I didn t know whether you had done the things they said you had. or not. -What I did know was that you had broken your shackles in some way and were trying to get free. You were, weren’t you?” “I suppose so; in some blind fashion. But it is you who have set me free. Corona. It began that night in Guthrieville when I stole one of your gloves; it wasn’t anything you said; it was what you so evidently believed and lived. And out here: I was simply a raw* savage when you first saw .me. I had tumbled headlong into the abyss of the new and the elemental, and if I am trying to scramble out now on the side of honor and clean • manhood, it is chiefly because you have shown me the way.” “When did I ever, John?” —with an up-glance of the gray eyes that was almost wistful. I “Always, and with a wisdom that makes me almost afraid of you. For example, there was the night when I j was fairly on the edge of letting Jibbey stay in the mine and go mad if he wanted to: you lashed me with the ' one word that made me save his life Instead of taking it. How did you I know that was the one word to say?” “How do we know anything?" she inquired softly. “The moment brings | its own inspiration, it broke my heart to see what you could be, and to think that you might not be It, after all. But I came out here this morning to talk about something else.’ What are you going to do when you are able to leave Sunrise Gulch?” “The one straightforward thing there is for pie to do. I shall go back to Lawrenceville and take my medicine.” I “And after that?’ |. “That is for you to say, Corona. Would you marry a convict?” • “You are not guilty.” ‘That is neither here nor there. They will probably send me to prison, just the same, and the stigma will be mine to wear for the remainder of my life. ■ I can wear it now, thank God! But to ' pass it on to you—and to your children, Corona ... if I could get my own consent to that, you couldn’t get yours.” ♦ “Yes, I could, John; I got it the first time colonel-daddy brought me out ( here and let me see you. You were out of your head, and you thought you were talking to Billy Starbuck —in the automobile on the night when you were going with him to the fight at the dam. It made me go down on my two knees, John, and kiss your poor, hot hands.” He slipped his one good arm around her and drew her close. “Now I can go back like a man and fight it through to the end,” he exulted soberly. “Jibbey will take me; I know he is wearing himself out trying to make me believe that he can wait, and that Verda understands, though he

won’t admit it. And when it is’ all over, when they have done their worst to me—” With a*quick little twist she broke away from the encircling arm. “John, dear,” she said, and her voice was trembling between a laugh and a sob. “I’m the wickedest, wickedest

woman mat ever lived and breathed — and the happiest! I knew what you Tould do, blit I couldn’t resist the temptation to make you say it. Listen : this morning colonel-daddy got a night-letter from Billy Starbuck. You Have been wondering why Billy never came out here to see you—it was because he and Mr. Stillings have been tn Lawrenceville, trying to clear you. They are there now, and the wire says that Watrous Dunham has been arrested and that he has broketi down and confessed. You are a free man, John; you—” The grass-cropping pony had widened its circle by a full yard, and the westward-pointing shadows of the firs were growing shorter and more clearly defined as the August sun swung higher over the summits of the eastern Titnanyonis. For the two on the house bench, time, having all its interspaces filled with beatific silences, had no measure that was worth recording. In one of the more coherent intervals it was the man who said: “Some things in this world are very wonderful, Corona. We call them happenings, and try to account for las we maylby the laws of chance. Was it chance that threw us together at your cousin’s house in Guthrlevllle a year ago last June?” She laughed happily. “I suppose it was —though I’d like to ..be romantic enough to believe that it wasn’t." “Debritt would say that it was the Absolute Ego,” he said, half musingly. “And who is Mr. Debritt?” “He is the man I dined with on my last evening in Lawrenceville. He had joking me about my various little smugnesses—good job, good clothes, easy life, and all that, and hewound up by warning me to watch out for the Absolute Ego.” “What is the Absolute Ego?" she asked dutifully. John Montague Smith, with his curling yellow beard three weeks untrimmed, with his clothes dressing the part of a neglected camper, and with a steel-jacketed bullet trying to encyst itself under his right shoulder blade, grinned exultantly. “Debritt didn’t know, himself; but I know now: It’s the primitive mansoul; the T that is able to refuse t 6 be bound down and tied by environment or habit or petty conventions, or any of the things we misname ‘limitations.’ It’s asleep in most of us; It wasn’t asleep in me. You made it sit up and rub its eyes for a minute or two that evening in Guthrlevllle, but it dozed off again, and there had to be an earthquake at the last to shake it alive. Do you know the first thing it did when it took hold again and began to drive?" “No.” “Here is where the law of chances falls to pieces, Corona. Without telling me anything about it, this newly emancipated man-soul of mine made a bee-line for the only Absolute Ego woman it had ever known. And It found her.” ~ Again the young woman laughed happily. “If you are going to call me names, Ego-man, you’ll have to make It up to me some other way,” she said. Whereupon, the moment being strictly elemental and sacred to demonstrations of the absolute, he did. < (THE END.)

“How Often Have I Got to Tell You?"

“Go Back Like a Man and Fight"