Though the matter of calling in an expert doctor of finance to diagnose the alarming symptoms in Timanyoni Ditch had been left indeterminate in the talk between Colonel Baldwin and himself, Williams did not let it go entirely by default. On the day following the Brewster office conference the engineer sent for Smith, who was checking the output of the crushers at the quarry, and a little later the "betterment" man presented himself at the door of the corrugated-iron shack which served as a field office for the chief.

Williams looked the cost-cutter over as he stood in the doorway. Smith was thriving and expanding handsomely in the new environment. He had let his beard grow and it was now long enough to be trimmed to a point. The travel-broken clothes had been exchanged for working khaki, with lace boots and leggings, and the workman's cap had given place to the campaign felt of the engineers. Though he had been less than a month on the job, he was already beginning to tan and toughen under the healthy outdoor work – to roughen, as well, his late fellow members of the Lawrenceville Cotillon Club might have said, since he had fought three pitched battles with as many of the camp bullies, and had in each of them approved himself a man of his hands who could not only take punishment, but could hammer an opponent swiftly and neatly into any desired state of subjection.

"Come in here and sit down; I want to talk to you," was the way Williams began it; and after Smith had found a chair and had lighted a gift cigar from the headquarters desk-box, the chief went on: "Say, Smith, you're too good a man for anything I've got for you here. Haven't you realized that?"

Smith pulled a memorandum-book from his hip pocket and ran his eye over the private record he had been keeping.

"I've shown you how to effect a few little savings which total up something like fifteen per cent of your cost of production and operation," he said. "Don't you think I'm earning my wages?"

"That's all right; I've been keeping tab, too, and I know what you're doing. But you are not beginning to earn what you ought to, either for yourself or the company," put in the chief shrewdly. And then: "Loosen up, Smith, and tell me something about yourself. Who are you, and where do you come from, and what sort of a job have you been holding down?"

Smith's reply was as surprising as it was seemingly irrelevant.

"If you're not too busy, Mr. Williams, I guess you'd better make out my time-check," he said quietly.

Williams took a reflective half-minute for consideration, turning the sudden request over deliberately in his mind, as his habit was.

"I suppose, by that you mean that you'll quit before you will consent to open up on your record?" he assumed.

"You've guessed it," said the man who had sealed the book of his past.

Again Williams took a little time. It was discouraging to have his own and the colonel's prefigurings as to Smith's probable state and standing so promptly verified.

"I suppose you know the plain inference you're leaving, when you say a thing like that?"

Smith made the sign of assent. "It leaves you entirely at liberty to finish out the story to suit yourself," he admitted, adding: "The back numbers – my back numbers – are my own, Mr. Williams. I've kept a file of them, as everybody does, but I don't have to produce it on request."

"Of course, there's nothing compulsory about your producing it. But unless you are what they call in this country a 'crooked' crook, you are standing in your own light. You have such a staving good head for figures and finances that it seems a pity for you to be wasting it here on an undergraduate's job in cost-cutting. Any young fellow just out of a technical school could do what you're doing in the way of paring down expenses."

The cost-cutter's smile was mildly incredulous.

"Nobody seemed to be doing it before I came," he offered.

"No," Williams allowed, "that's the fact. To tell the plain truth, we've had bigger things to wrestle with; and we have them yet, for that matter – enough of them to go all around the job twice and tie in a bow-knot."

"Finances?" queried Smith, feeling some of the back-number instincts stirring within him.

The chief engineer nodded; then he looked up with a twinkle in his closely set gray eyes. "If you'll tell me why you tried to kill Burdell the other day, maybe I'll open up the record – our record – for you."

This time the cost-cutter's smile was good-naturedly derisive, and it ignored the reference to Burdell.

"You don't have to open up your record – for me; it's the talk of the camp. You people are undercapitalized – to boil it down into one word. Isn't that about the way it sizes up?"

"That is the way it has turned out; though we had capital enough to begin with. We've been bled to death by damage suits."

Smith shook his head. "Why haven't you hired a first-class attorney, Mr. Williams?"

"We've had the best we could find, but the other fellows have beaten us to it, every time. But the legal end of it hasn't been the whole thing or the biggest part of it. What we are needing most is a man who knows a little something about corporation fights and high finance." And at this the engineer forgot the Smith disabilities, real or inferential, and went on to explain in detail the peculiar helplessness of the Timanyoni Company as the antagonist of the as yet unnamed land and irrigation trust.

Smith heard him through, nodding understandingly when the tale was told.

"It's the old story of the big fish swallowing the little one; so old that there is no longer any saving touch of novelty in it," he commented. "I've been wondering if there wasn't something of that kind in your background. And you say you haven't any Belmonts or Morgans or Rockefellers in your company?"

"We have a bunch of rather badly scared-up ranch owners and local people, with Colonel Baldwin in command, and that's all. The colonel is a fighting man, all right, and he can shoot as straight as anybody, when you have shown him what to shoot at. But he is outclassed, like all the rest of us, when it comes to a game of financial freeze-out. And that is what we are up against, I'm afraid."

"There isn't the slightest doubt in the world about that," said the one who had been called in as an expert. "What I can't understand is why some of you didn't size the situation up long ago – before it got into its present desperate shape. You are at the beginning of the end, now. They've caught you with an empty treasury, and these stock sales you speak of prove that they have already begun to swallow you by littles. Timanyoni Common – I suppose you haven't any Preferred – at thirty-nine is an excellent gamble for any group of men who can see their way clear to buying the control. With an eager market for the water – and they can sell the water to you people, even if they don't put their own Escalante project through – the stock can be pushed to par and beyond, as it will be after you folks are all safely frozen out. More than that, they can charge you enough, for the water you've got to have, to finance the Escalante scheme and pay all the bills; and their investment, at the present market, will be only thirty-nine cents in the dollar. It's a neat little play."

Williams was by this time far past remembering that his adviser was a man with a possible alias and presumably a fugitive from justice.

"Can't something be done, Smith? You've had experience in these things; your talk shows it. Have we got to stand still and be shot to pieces?"

"The necessity remains to be demonstrated. But you will be shot to pieces, to a dead moral certainty, if you don't put somebody on deck with the necessary brains, and do it quickly," said Smith with frank bluntness.

"Hold on," protested the engineer. "Every man to his trade. When I said that we had nobody but the neighbors and our friends in the company, I didn't mean to give the impression that they were either dolts or chuckleheads. As a matter of fact, we have a pretty level-headed bunch of men in Timanyoni Ditch – though I'll admit that some of them are nervous enough, just now, to want to get out on almost any terms. What I meant to say was that they don't happen to be up in all the crooks and turnings of the high-finance buccaneers."

"I didn't mean to reflect upon Colonel Baldwin and his friends," rejoined the ex-cashier good-naturedly. "It is nothing especially discrediting to them that they are not up in all the tricks of a trade which is not theirs. The financing of a scheme like this has come to be a business by itself, Mr. Williams, and it is hardly to be expected that a group of inexperienced men could do it successfully."

"I know that, blessed well. That is what I said from the beginning, and I think Colonel Baldwin leaned that way, too. But it seemed like a very simple undertaking. A number of stockmen and crop growers wanted a dam and a ditch, and they had the money to pay for them. That seemed to be all there was to it in the beginning."

Smith was leaning back in his chair and smoking reflectively.

"Did you call me in here to get an expert opinion?" he asked, half humorously.

"Something of that kind – yes; just on the bare chance that you could, and would, give us one," Williams admitted.

"Well, I'm hardly an expert," was the modest reply; "but if I were in your place I should hire the best financial scrapper that money could pay for. I can't attempt to tell you what such a man would do, but he would at least rattle around in the box and try to give you a fighting chance, which is more than you seem to have now."

The construction chief turned abruptly upon his cost-cutter.

"Keeping in mind what you said a few minutes ago about 'back numbers,' would it be climbing over the fence too far for me to ask if your experience has been such as would warrant you in tackling a job of this kind?"

"That is a fair question, and I can answer it straight," said the man under fire. "I've had the experience."

"I thought so; and that brings on more talk. I'm not authorized to make you any proposal. But Colonel Baldwin and I were talking the matter over yesterday and your name was mentioned. I told the colonel that it was very evident that you were accustomed to handling bigger financial matters than these labor-and-material cost-cuttings you've been figuring on out here. If the colonel should ask you to, would you consider as a possibility the taking of the doctor's job on this sick project of ours?"

"No," was the brief rejoinder.

"Why not?"

Smith looked away out of the one square window in the shack at the busy scene on the dam stagings.

"Let us say that I don't care to mix and mingle with my kind, Mr. Williams, and let it go at that," he said.

"You are not interested in that side of it?"

"Interested, but not to the point of enlisting."

"You don't think of anything that might make you change your mind?"

"There is nothing that you could offer which would be a sufficient inducement."

"Why isn't there?"

"Because I'm not exactly a born simpleton, Mr. Williams. There are a number of reasons which are purely personal to me, and at least one which cuts ice on your side of the pond. Your financial 'doctor,' as you call him, would have to be trusted absolutely in the handling of the company's money and its negotiable securities. You would have a perfect right to demand any and every assurance of his fitness and trustworthiness. You could, and should, put him under a fairly heavy bond. I'll not go into it any deeper than to say that I can't give a bond."

Williams took his defeat, if it could be called a defeat, without further protest.

"I thought it might not be amiss to talk it over with you," he said. "I don't know that the colonel will make any move, but if he does, he will deal with you direct. You say it is impossible, and perhaps it is. But it won't do any harm for you to think it over, and if I were you, I shouldn't burn all the bridges behind me. There ought to be considerable money in it for the right man, if he succeeds, and nothing much to lose if he should fail."

Smith went back to his work in the quarry with a troubled mind. The little heart-to-heart talk with Williams had been sharply depressive. It had shown him, as nothing else could, how limited for all the remainder of his life his chances must be. That he would be pursued, that descriptions and photographs of the ex-cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust Company were already circulating from hand to hand among the paid man-catchers, he did not doubt for a moment. While he could remain as a workman unit in an isolated construction camp, there was some little hope that he might be overlooked. But to become the public character of Williams's suggestion in a peopled city was to run to meet his fate.

In a way the tentative offer was a keen temptation. One of the lustiest growths pushing its way up through the new soil of the metamorphosis was a strong and mounting conviction that J. Montague Smith, of the Lawrenceville avatar, had been only half a man; was, at his best, only a pale shadow of the plain John Smith to whom accident and a momentary impulse of passion had given birth. With a clear field he would have asked for nothing better than a chance to take the leadership in the fight which Williams had outlined, and the new and elemental stirrings were telling him that he could win the fight. But with a price on his head it was not to be thought of.

That night, when he rolled himself in his blankets in the bunk tent, he had renewed his prudent determination and it was crystallizing itself in words.

"No, not for money or gratitude or any other argument they can bring to bear," he said to himself, and thereupon fell asleep with the mistaken notion that he had definitely pushed the temptation aside for good and all.

VI
The Twig

It is said that the flow of a mighty river may owe its most radical change in direction to the chance thrusting of a twig into the current at some critical instant in the rise or fall of the flood. To the reincarnated Smith, charting his course upon the conviction that his best chance of immunity lay in isolation and a careful avoidance of the peopled towns, came the diverting twig in this wise.

On the second morning following the unofficial talk with Bartley Williams in the iron-sheeted headquarters office at the dam, a delayed consignment of cement, steel, and commissary supplies was due at the side-track a mile below the camp. Perkins, the timekeeper, took the telephone call from Brewster giving notice of the shipment, and started the camp teams to meet the train, sending a few men along to help with the unloading. Later, he called Smith in from the quarry and gave him the invoices covering the shipment.

"I guess you'd better go down to the siding and check this stuff in, so that we'll know what we're getting," was his suggestion to the general utility man; and Smith put the invoices into his pocket and took the road, a half-hour or more behind the teams.

When the crookings of the tote-road let him get his first sight of the side-track, he saw that the train was already in and the mixed shipment of camp supplies had been transferred to the wagons. A few minutes sufficed for the checking, and since there was nothing more to be done, he sent the unloading gang back to camp with the teams, meaning to walk back, himself, after he should have seen the car of steel and the two cars of cement kicked in at the upper end of the side-track.

While he was waiting for the train to pull up and make the shift he was commenting idly upon the clumsy lay-out of the temporary unloading yard, and wondering if Williams were responsible for it. The siding was on the outside of a curve and within a hundred yards of the river bank. There was scanty space for the unloading of material, and a good bit of what there was was taken up by the curving spur which led off from the siding to cross the river on a trestle, and by the wagon road itself, which came down a long hill on the south side of the railroad and made an abrupt turn to cross the main track and the siding fairly in the midst of things.

As the long train pulled up to clear the road crossing, Smith stepped back and stood between the two tracks. A moment later the cut was made, and the forward section of the train went on to set the three loaded cars out at the upper switch, leaving the rear half standing on the main line. From his position between the tracks there was a clear view past the caboose at the end of the halted section and beyond, to the road crossing and the steep grade down which the dusty wagon road made a rough gash in the shoulder of the mountain spur which had crowded it from the river-bank side of the railroad right of way. At the bottom of the steep grade, where the road swerved to cross the two tracks, there was a little sag; and between the sag and the crossing a sharp bit of up-grade made to gain the level of the railroad embankment.

One of the men of the unloading gang, a leather-faced grade shoveller who had helped to build the Nevada Short Line, had lagged behind the departing wagons to fill and light his pipe.

"Wouldn't that jar you up right good and hard f'r a way to run a railroad," he said to Smith, indicating the wholly deserted standing section of the freight with the burnt match-end. "Them fellies 've all gone off up ahead, a-leavin' this yere hind end without a sign of a man'r a flag to take keer of it. S'pose another train 'd come boolgin' 'round that curve. Wouldn't it rise merry hell with things 'long about this-away?"

Smith was listening only with the outward ear to what the pipelighter was saying. Somewhere in the westward distances a thunderous murmur was droning upon the windless air of the June morning, betokening, as it seemed, the very catastrophe the ex-grade-laborer was prefiguring. Smith stripped his coat for a flag and started to run toward the crossing, but before he had caught his stride a dust cloud swept up over the shoulder of the wagon-road hill and the portentous thunderings were accounted for. A big gray automobile, with the cut-out open, was topping the side-hill grade, and Smith recognized it at once. It was Colonel Dexter Baldwin's roadster, and it held a single occupant – namely, the young woman who was driving it.

Smith stopped running and transferred his anxiety from the train and railroad affairs to the young woman. Being himself a skilful driver of cars – and a man – he had a purely masculine distrust of the woman, any woman, behind a steering-wheel. To be sure, there was no danger, as yet. Turning to look up the track, he saw that the three loaded cars had been set out, that the forward section of the train had been pulled up over the switch, and that it was now backing to make the coupling with the standing half. He hoped that the trainmen had seen the automobile, and that they would not attempt to make the coupling until after the gray car had crossed behind the caboose. But in the same breath he guessed, and guessed rightly, that they were too far around the curve to be able to see the wagon-road approach.

Still there was time enough, and room enough. The caboose on the rear end of the standing section was fully a hundred feet clear of the road crossing; and if the entire train should start backward at the coupling collision, the speed at which the oncoming roadster was running should take it across and out of danger. Nevertheless, there was no margin for the unexpected. Smith saw the young woman check the speed for the abrupt turn at the bottom of the hill, saw the car take the turn in a skidding slide, heard the renewed roar of the motor as the throttle was opened for a run at the embankment grade. Then the unexpected dropped its bomb. There was a jangling crash and the cars on the main track were set in motion toward the crossing. The trainmen had tried to make their coupling, the drawheads had failed to engage, and the rear half of the train was surging down upon the point of hazard.

Smith's shout, or the sight of the oncoming train, one of the two, or both, put the finishing touch on the young woman's nerve. There was still time in which to clear the train, but at the critical instant the young woman apparently changed her mind and tried to stop the big car short of the crossing. The effort was unsuccessful. When the stop was made, the front wheels of the roadster were precisely in the middle of the main track, and the motor was killed.

By this time Smith had thrown his coat away and was racing the backing train, with the ex-grade-laborer a poor second a dozen yards to the rear. Having ridden in the roadster, Smith knew that it had no self-starter. "Jump!" he yelled. "Get out of the car!" and then his heart came into his mouth when he saw that she was struggling to free herself and couldn't; that she was entangled in some way behind the low-hung tiller-wheel.

Smith was running fairly abreast of the caboose when he made this discovery, and the hundred feet of clearance had shrunk to fifty. In imagination he could already see the gray car overturned and crushed under the wheels of the train. In a flying spurt he gained a few yards on the advancing menace and hurled himself against the front of the stopped roadster. He did not attempt to crank the motor. There was time only for a mighty heave and shove to send the car backing down the slope of the crossing approach; for this and for the quick spring aside to save himself; and the thing was done.