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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ridgway of Montana, by William MacLeod Raine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Ridgway of Montana
+       A story of to-day, in which the hero is also the villain
+
+Author: William MacLeod Raine
+
+Release Date: August, 2000 [eBook #2285]
+[Most recently updated: December 12, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Mary Starr
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIDGWAY OF MONTANA ***
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Ridgway of Montana
+
+
+A story of to-day,
+in which the hero is also the villain
+
+by William Macleod Raine
+
+
+
+
+To JEAN
+AND THAT KINGDOM
+
+“Where you and I through this world’s weather
+Work, and give praise and thanks together.”
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER I. Two Men and a Woman
+ CHAPTER II. The Freebooter
+ CHAPTER III. One to One
+ CHAPTER IV. Fort Salvation
+ CHAPTER V. Enter Simon Harley
+ CHAPTER VI. On the Snow-trail
+ CHAPTER VII. Back from Arcadia
+ CHAPTER VIII. The Honorable Thomas B. Pelton
+ CHAPTER IX. An Evening Call
+ CHAPTER X. Harley Makes a Proposition
+ CHAPTER XI. Virginia Intervenes
+ CHAPTER XII. Aline Makes a Discovery
+ CHAPTER XIII. First Blood
+ CHAPTER XIV. A Conspiracy
+ CHAPTER XV. Laska Opens a Door
+ CHAPTER XVI. An Explosion in the Taurus
+ CHAPTER XVII. The Election
+ CHAPTER XVIII. Further Developments
+ CHAPTER XIX. One Million Dollars
+ CHAPTER XX. A Little Lunch at Alphonse’s
+ CHAPTER XXI. Harley Scores
+ CHAPTER XXII. “Not Guilty”—“Guilty”
+ CHAPTER XXIII. Aline Turns a Corner
+ CHAPTER XXIV. A Good Samaritan
+ CHAPTER XXV. Friendly Enemies
+ CHAPTER XXVI. Breaks One and Makes Another Engagement
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+TWO MEN AND A WOMAN
+
+
+“Mr. Ridgway, ma’am.”
+
+The young woman who was giving the last touches to the very effective
+picture framed in her long looking-glass nodded almost imperceptibly.
+
+She had come to the parting of the ways, and she knew it, with a shrewd
+suspicion as to which she would choose. She had asked for a week to
+decide, and her heart-searching had told her nothing new. It was
+characteristic of Virginia Balfour that she did not attempt to deceive
+herself. If she married Waring Ridgway it would be for what she
+considered good and sufficient reasons, but love would not be one of
+them. He was going to be a great man, for one thing, and probably a
+very rich one, which counted, though it would not be a determining
+factor. This she could find only in the man himself, in the masterful
+force that made him what he was. The sandstings of life did not disturb
+his confidence in his victorious star, nor did he let fine-spun moral
+obligations hamper his predatory career. He had a genius for success in
+whatever he undertook, pushing his way to his end with a shrewd, direct
+energy that never faltered. She sometimes wondered whether she, too,
+like the men he used as tools, was merely a pawn in his game, and her
+consent an empty formality conceded to convention. Perhaps he would
+marry her even if she did not want to, she told herself, with the
+sudden illuminating smile that was one of her chief charms.
+
+But Ridgway’s wary eyes, appraising her mood as she came forward to
+meet him, read none of this doubt in her frank greeting. Anything more
+sure and exquisite than the cultivation Virginia Balfour breathed he
+would have been hard put to it to conceive. That her gown and its
+accessories seemed to him merely the extension of a dainty personality
+was the highest compliment he could pay her charm, and an entirely
+unconscious one.
+
+“Have I kept you waiting?” she smiled, giving him her hand.
+
+His answering smile, quite cool and unperturbed, gave the lie to his
+words. “For a year, though the almanac called it a week.”
+
+“You must have suffered,” she told him ironically, with a glance at the
+clear color in his good-looking face.
+
+“Repressed emotion,” he explained. “May I hope that my suffering has
+reached a period?”
+
+They had been sauntering toward a little conservatory at the end of the
+large room, but she deflected and brought up at a table on which lay
+some books. One of these she picked up and looked at incuriously for a
+moment before sweeping them aside. She rested her hands on the table
+behind her and leaned back against it, her eyes meeting his fairly.
+
+“You’re still of the same mind, are you?” she demanded.
+
+“Oh! very much.”
+
+She lifted herself to the table, crossing her feet and dangling them
+irresponsibly. “We might as well be comfy while we talk;” and she
+indicated, by a nod, a chair.
+
+“Thanks. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take it standing.”
+
+She did not seem in any hurry to begin, and Ridgway gave evidence of no
+desire to hasten her. But presently he said, with a little laugh that
+seemed to offer her inclusion in the joke:
+
+“I’m on the anxious seat, you know—waiting to find out whether I’m to
+be the happiest man alive.”
+
+“You know as much about it as I do.” She echoed his laugh ruefully.
+“I’m still as much at sea as I was last week. I couldn’t tell then, and
+I can’t now.”
+
+“No news is good news, they say.”
+
+“I don’t want to marry you a bit, but you’re a great catch, as you are
+very well aware.”
+
+“I suppose I am rather a catch,” he agreed, the shadow of a smile at
+the corners of his mouth.
+
+“It isn’t only your money; though, of course, that’s a temptation,” she
+admitted audaciously.
+
+“I’m glad it’s not only my money.” He could laugh with her about it
+because he was shrewd enough to understand that it was not at all his
+wealth. Her cool frankness might have frightened away another man. It
+merely served to interest Ridgway. For, with all his strength, he was a
+vain man, always ready to talk of himself. He spent a good deal of his
+spare time interpreting himself to attractive and attracted young
+women.
+
+Her gaze fastened on the tip of her suede toe, apparently studying it
+attentively. “It would be a gratification to my vanity to parade you as
+the captive of my bow and spear. You’re such a magnificent specimen,
+such a berserk in broadcloth. Still. I shan’t marry you if I can help
+it—but, then, I’m not sure that I can help it. Of course, I disapprove
+of you entirely, but you’re rather fascinating, you know.” Her eye
+traveled slowly up to his, appraising the masterful lines of his square
+figure, the dominant strength of his close-shut mouth and resolute
+eyes. “Perhaps ‘fascinating’ isn’t just the word, but I can’t help
+being interested in you, whether I like you or not. I suppose you
+always get what you want very badly?” she flung out by way of question.
+
+“That’s what I’m trying to discover”—he smiled.
+
+“There are things to be considered both ways,” she said, taking him
+into her confidence. “You trample on others. How do I know you wouldn’t
+tread on me?”
+
+“That would be one of the risks you would take,” he agreed
+impersonally.
+
+“I shouldn’t like that at all. If I married you it would be because as
+your wife I should have so many opportunities. I should expect to do
+exactly as I please. I shouldn’t want you to interfere with me, though
+I should want to be able to influence you.”
+
+“Nothing could be fairer than that,” was his amiably ironical comment.
+
+“You see, I don’t know you—not really—and they say all sorts of things
+about you.”
+
+“They don’t say I am a quitter, do they?”
+
+She leaned forward, chin in hand and elbow on knee. It was a part of
+the accent of her distinction that as a rebel she was both demure and
+daring. “I wonder if I might ask you some questions—the intimate kind
+that people think but don’t say—at least, they don’t say them to you.”
+
+“It would be a pleasure to me to be put on the witness-stand. I should
+probably pick up some interesting side-lights about myself.”
+
+“Very well.” Her eyes danced with excitement. “You’re what they call a
+buccaneer of business, aren’t you?”
+
+Here were certainly diverting pastimes. “I believe I have been called
+that; but, then, I’ve had the hardest names in the dictionary thrown at
+me so often that I can’t be sure.”
+
+“I suppose you are perfectly unscrupulous in a business way—stop at
+nothing to gain your point?”
+
+He took her impudence smilingly.
+
+“‘Unscrupulous’ isn’t the word I use when I explain myself to myself,
+but as an unflattered description, such as one my enemies might use to
+describe me, I dare say it is fairly accurate.”
+
+“I wonder why. Do you dispense with a conscience entirely?”
+
+“Well, you see, Miss Balfour, if I nursed a New England conscience I
+could stand up to the attacks of the Consolidated about as long as a
+dove to a hawk. I meet fire with fire to avoid being wiped off the map
+of the mining world. I play the game. I can’t afford to keep a button
+on my foil when my opponent doesn’t.”
+
+She nodded an admission of his point. “And yet there are rules of the
+game to be observed, aren’t there? The Consolidated people claim you
+steal their ore, I believe.” Her slanted eyes studied the effect of her
+daring.
+
+He laughed grimly. “Do they? I claim they steal mine. It’s rather
+difficult to have an exact regard for mine and thine before the courts
+decide which is which.”
+
+“And meanwhile, in order to forestall an adverse decision, you are
+working extra shifts to get all the ore out of the disputed veins.”
+
+“Precisely, just as they are,” he admitted dryly. “Then the side that
+loses will not be so disappointed, since the value of the veins will be
+less. Besides, stealing ore openly doesn’t count. It is really a moral
+obligation in a fight like this,” he explained.
+
+“A moral obligation?”
+
+“Exactly. You can’t hit a trust over the head with the decalogue.
+Modern business is war. Somebody is bound to get hurt. If I win out it
+will be because I put up a better fight than the Consolidated, and
+cripple it enough to make it let me alone. I’m looking out for myself,
+and I don’t pretend to be any better than my neighbors. When you get
+down to bed-rock honesty, I’ve never seen it in business. We’re all of
+us as honest as we think we can afford to be. I haven’t noticed that
+there is any premium on it in Mesa. Might makes right. I’ll win if I’m
+strong enough; I’ll fail if I’m not. That’s the law of life. I didn’t
+make this strenuous little world, and I’m not responsible for it. If I
+play I have to take the rules the way they are, not the way I should
+like them to be. I’m not squeamish, and I’m not a hypocrite. Simon
+Harley isn’t squeamish, either, but he happens to be a hypocrite. So
+there you have the difference between us.”
+
+The president of the Mesa Ore-producing Company set forth his creed
+jauntily, without the least consciousness of need for apology for the
+fact that it happened to be divorced from morality. Its frank disregard
+of ethical considerations startled Miss Balfour without shocking her.
+She liked his candor, even though it condemned him. It was really very
+nice of him to take her impudence so well. He certainly wasn’t a prig,
+anyway.
+
+“And morality,” she suggested tentatively.
+
+“—hasn’t a thing to do with success, the parsons to the contrary
+notwithstanding. The battle is to the strong.”
+
+“Then the Consolidated will beat you finally.”
+
+He smiled. “They would if I’d let them; but brains and resource and
+finesse all count for power. Granted that they have a hundred dollars
+to my one. Still, I have elements of strength they can’t even estimate.
+David beat Goliath, you know, even though he didn’t do it with a big
+stick.”
+
+“So you think morality is for old women?”
+
+“And young women,” he amended, smiling.
+
+“And every man is to be a law unto himself?”
+
+“Not quite. Some men aren’t big enough to be. Let them stick to the
+conventional code. For me, if I make my own laws I don’t break them.”
+
+“And you’re sure that you’re on the road to true success?” she asked
+lightly.
+
+“Now, you have heaven in the back of your mind.”
+
+“Not exactly,” she laughed. “But I didn’t expect you to understand.”
+
+“Then I won’t disappoint you,” he said cheerfully.
+
+She came back to the concrete.
+
+“I should like to know whether it is true that you own the courts of
+Yuba County and have the decisions of the judges written at your
+lawyer’s offices in cases between you and the Consolidated.”
+
+“If I do,” he answered easily, “I am doing just what the Consolidated
+would do in case they had been so fortunate as to have won the last
+election and seated their judicial candidates. One expects a friendly
+leaning from the men one put in office.”
+
+“Isn’t the judiciary supposed to be the final, incorruptible bulwark of
+the nation?” she pretended to want to know.
+
+“I believe it is supposed to be.”
+
+“Isn’t it rather—loading the dice, to interfere with the courts?”
+
+“I find the dice already loaded. I merely substitute others of my own.”
+
+“You don’t seem a bit ashamed of yourself.”
+
+“I’m ashamed of the Consolidated”—he smiled.
+
+“That’s a comfortable position to be able to take.” She fixed him for a
+moment with her charming frown of interrogation. “You won’t mind my
+asking these questions? I’m trying to decide whether you are too much
+of a pirate for me. Perhaps when I’ve made up my mind you won’t want
+me,” she added.
+
+“Oh, I’ll want you!” Then coolly: “Shall we wait till you make up your
+mind before announcing the engagement?”
+
+“Don’t be too sure,” she flashed at him.
+
+“I’m horribly unsure.”
+
+“Of course, you’re laughing at me, just as you would”—she tilted a
+sudden sideways glance at him—“if I asked you WHY you wanted to marry
+me.”
+
+“Oh, if you take me that way——”
+
+She interrupted airily. “I’m trying to make up my mind whether to take
+you at all.”
+
+“You certainly have a direct way of getting at things.”
+
+He studied appreciatively her piquant, tilted face; the long, graceful
+lines of her slender, perfect figure. “I take it you don’t want the
+sentimental reason for my wishing to marry you, though I find that
+amply justified. But if you want another, you must still look to
+yourself for it. My business leads me to appreciate values correctly.
+When I desire you to sit at the head of my table, to order my house, my
+judgment justifies itself. I have a fancy always for the best. When I
+can’t gratify it I do without.”
+
+“Thank you.” She made him a gay little mock curtsy “I had heard you
+were no carpet-knight, Mr. Ridgway. But rumor is a lying jade, for I am
+being told—am I not?—that in case I don’t take pity on you, the lone
+future of a celibate stretches drear before you.”
+
+“Oh, certainly.”
+
+Having come to the end of that passage, she tried another. “A young man
+told me yesterday you were a fighter. He said he guessed you would
+stand the acid. What did he mean?”
+
+Ridgway was an egoist from head to heel. He could voice his own praises
+by the hour when necessary, but now he side-stepped her little trap to
+make him praise himself at second-hand.
+
+“Better ask him.”
+
+“ARE you a fighter, then?”
+
+Had he known her and her whimsies less well, he might have taken her
+audacity for innocence.
+
+“One couldn’t lie down, you know.”
+
+“Of course, you always fight fair,” she mocked.
+
+“When a fellow’s attacked by a gang of thugs he doesn’t pray for
+boxing-gloves. He lets fly with a coupling-pin if that’s what comes
+handy.”
+
+Her eyes, glinting sparks of mischief, marveled at him with mock
+reverence, but she knew in her heart that her mockery was a fraud. She
+did admire him; admired him even while she disapproved the magnificent
+lawlessness of him.
+
+For Waring Ridgway looked every inch the indomitable fighter he was. He
+stood six feet to the line, straight and strong, carrying just
+sufficient bulk to temper his restless energy without impairing its
+power. Nor did the face offer any shock of disappointment to the
+promise given by the splendid figure. Salient-jawed and forceful, set
+with cool, flinty, blue-gray eyes, no place for weakness could be found
+there. One might have read a moral callousness, a colorblindness in
+points of rectitude, but when the last word had been said, its
+masterful capability, remained the outstanding impression.
+
+“Am I out of the witness-box?” he presently asked, still leaning
+against the mantel from which he had been watching her impersonally as
+an intellectual entertainment.
+
+“I think so.”
+
+“And the verdict?”
+
+“You know what it ought to be,” she accused.
+
+“Fortunately, kisses go by favor, not by, merit.”
+
+“You don’t even make a pretense of deserving.”
+
+“Give me credit for being an honest rogue, at least.”
+
+“But a rogue?” she insisted lightly.
+
+“Oh, a question of definitions. I could make a very good case for
+myself as an honest man.”
+
+“If you thought it worth while?”
+
+“If I didn’t happen to want to be square with you”—he smiled.
+
+“You’re so fond of me, I suppose, that you couldn’t bear to have me
+think too well of you.”
+
+“You know how fond of you I am.”
+
+“Yes, it is a pity about you,” she scoffed.
+
+“Believe me, yes,” he replied cheerfully.
+
+She drummed with her pink finger-tips on her chin, studying him
+meditatively. To do him justice, she had to admit that he did not even
+pretend much. He wanted her because she was a step up in the social
+ladder, and, in his opinion, the most attractive girl he knew. That he
+was not in love with her relieved the situation, as Miss Balfour
+admitted to herself in impersonal moods. But there were times when she
+could have wished he were. She felt it to be really due her attractions
+that his pulses should quicken for her, and in the interests of
+experience she would have liked to see how he would make love if he
+really meant it from the heart and not the will.
+
+“It’s really an awful bother,” she sighed.
+
+“Referring to the little problem of your future?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Can’t make up your mind whether I come in?”
+
+“No.” She looked up brightly, with an effect of impulsiveness. “I don’t
+suppose you want to give me another week?”
+
+“A reprieve! But why? You’re going to marry me.”
+
+“I suppose so.” She laughed. “I wish I could have my cake, and eat it,
+too.”
+
+“It would be a moral iniquity to encourage such a system of ethics.”
+
+“So you won’t give me a week?” she sighed. “All sorts of things might
+have happened in that week. I shall always believe that the fairy
+prince would have come for me.”
+
+“Believe that he HAS come,” he claimed.
+
+“Oh, I didn’t mean a prince of pirates, though there is a triumph in
+having tamed a pirate chief to prosaic matrimony. In one way it will be
+a pity, too. You won’t be half so picturesque. You remember how
+Stevenson puts it: ‘that marriage takes from a man the capacity for
+great things, whether good or bad.’”
+
+“I can stand a good deal of taming.”
+
+“Domesticating a pirate ought to be an interesting process,” she
+conceded, her rare smile flashing. “It should prove a cure for ENNUI,
+but then I’m never a victim of that malady.”
+
+“Am I being told that I am to be the happiest pirate alive?”
+
+“I expect you are.”
+
+His big hand gripped hers till it tingled. She caught his eye on a
+roving quest to the door.
+
+“We don’t have to do that,” she announced hurriedly, with an
+embarrassed flush.
+
+“I don’t do it because I have to,” he retorted, kissing her on the
+lips.
+
+She fell back, protesting. “Under the circumstances—”
+
+The butler, with a card on a tray, interrupted silently. She glanced at
+the card, devoutly grateful his impassive majesty’s entrance had not
+been a moment earlier.
+
+“Show him in here.”
+
+“The fairy prince, five minutes too late?” asked Ridgway, when the man
+had gone.
+
+For answer she handed him the card, yet he thought the pink that
+flushed her cheek was something more pronounced than usual. But he was
+willing to admit there might be a choice of reasons for that.
+
+“Lyndon Hobart” was the name he read.
+
+“I think the Consolidated is going to have its innings. I should like
+to stay, of course, but I fear I must plead a subsequent engagement and
+leave the field to the enemy.”
+
+Pronouncing “Mr. Hobart” without emphasis, the butler vanished. The
+newcomer came forward with the quiet assurance of the born aristocrat.
+He was a slender, well-knit man, dressed fastidiously, with clear-cut,
+classical features; cool, keen eyes, and a gentle, you-be-damned manner
+to his inferiors. Beside him Ridgway bulked too large, too florid. His
+ease seemed a little obvious, his prosperity overemphasized. Even his
+voice, strong and reliant, lacked the tone of gentle blood that Hobart
+had inherited with his nice taste.
+
+When Miss Balfour said: “I think you know each other,” the manager of
+the Consolidated bowed with stiff formality, but his rival laughed
+genially and said: “Oh, yes, I know Mr. Hobart.” The geniality was
+genuine enough, but through it ran a note of contempt. Hobart read in
+it a veiled taunt. To him it seemed to say:
+
+“Yes, I have met him, and beaten him at every turn of the road, though
+he has been backed by a power with resources a hundred times as great
+as mine.”
+
+In his parting excuses to Miss Balfour, Ridgway’s audacity crystallized
+in words that Hobart could only regard as a shameless challenge. “I
+regret that an appointment with Judge Purcell necessitates my leaving
+such good company,” he said urbanely.
+
+Purcell was the judge before whom was pending a suit between the
+Consolidated and the Mesa Ore-producing Company, to determine the
+ownership of the Never Say Die Mine; and it was current report that
+Ridgway owned him as absolutely as he did the automobile waiting for
+him now at the door.
+
+If Ridgway expected his opponent to pay his flippant gibe the honor of
+repartee, he was disappointed. To be sure, Hobart, admirably erect in
+his slender grace, was moved to a slight, disdainful smile, but it
+evidenced scarcely the appreciation that anybody less impervious to
+criticism than Ridgway would have cared to see.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+THE FREEBOOTER
+
+
+When next Virginia Balfour saw Waring Ridgway she was driving her trap
+down one of the hit-or-miss streets of Mesa, where derricks,
+shaft-houses, and gray slag-dumps shoulder ornate mansions conglomerate
+of many unharmonious details of architecture. To Miss Balfour these
+composites and their owners would have been joys unalloyed except for
+the microbe of society ambition that was infecting the latter, and
+transforming them from simple, robust, self-reliant Westerners into a
+class of servile, nondescript newly rich, that resembled their
+unfettered selves as much as tame bears do the grizzlies of their own
+Rockies. As she had once complained smilingly to Hobart, she had not
+come to the West to study ragged edges of the social fringe. She might
+have done that in New York.
+
+Virginia was still a block or two from the court-house on the hill,
+when it emptied into the street a concourse of excited men. That this
+was an occasion of some sort it was easy to guess, and of what sort she
+began to have an inkling, when Ridgway came out, the center of a circle
+of congratulating admirers. She was obliged to admit that he accepted
+their applause without in the least losing his head. Indeed, he took it
+as imperturbably as did Hobart, against whom a wave of the enthusiasm
+seemed to be directed in the form of a jeer, when he passed down the
+steps with Mott, one of the Consolidated lawyers. Miss Balfour timed
+her approach to meet Hobart at a right angle.
+
+“What is it all about?” she asked, after he had reached her side.
+
+“Judge Purcell has just decided the Never Say Die case in favor of Mr.
+Ridgway and against the Consolidated.”
+
+“Is that a great victory for him?”
+
+“Yes, it’s a victory, though, of course, we appeal,” admitted Hobart.
+“But we can’t say we didn’t expect it,” he added cheerfully.
+
+“Mayn’t I give you a lift if you are going down-town?” she said
+quickly, for Ridgway, having detached himself from the group, was
+working toward her, and she felt an instinctive sympathy for the man
+who had lost. Furthermore, she had something she wanted to tell him
+before he heard it on the tongue of rumor.
+
+“Since you are so kind;” and he climbed to the place beside her.
+
+“Congratulate me, Miss Balfour,” demanded Ridgway, as he shook hands
+with her, nodding coolly at her companion. “I’m a million dollars
+richer than I was an hour ago. I have met the enemy and he is mine.”
+
+Virginia, resenting the bad taste of his jeer at the man who sat beside
+her, misunderstood him promptly. “Did you say you had met the enemy and
+won his mine?”
+
+He laughed. “You’re a good one!”
+
+“Thank you very much for this unsolicited testimonial,” she said
+gravely. “In the meantime, to avoid a congestion of traffic, we’ll be
+moving, if you will kindly give me back my front left wheel.”
+
+He did not lift his foot from the spoke on which it rested. “My
+congratulations,” he reminded her.
+
+“I wish you all the joy in your victory that you deserve, and I hope
+the supreme court will reaffirm the decision of Judge Purcell, if it is
+a just one,” was the form in which she acceded to his demand.
+
+She flicked her whip, and Ridgway fell back, laughing. “You’ve been
+subsidized by the Consolidated,” he shouted after her.
+
+Hobart watched silently the businesslike directness with which the girl
+handled the ribbons. She looked every inch the thoroughbred in her
+well-made covert coat and dainty driving gauntlets. The grace of the
+alert, slender figure, the perfect poise of the beautiful little tawny
+head, proclaimed her distinction no less certainly than the fine
+modeling of the mobile face. It was a distinction that stirred the
+pulse of his emotion and disarmed his keen, critical sense. Ridgway
+could study her with an amused, detached interest, but Hobart’s
+admiration had traveled past that point. He found it as impossible to
+define her charm as to evade it. Her inheritance of blood and her
+environment should have made her a finished product of civilization,
+but her salty breeziness, her nerve, vivid as a flame at times,
+disturbed delightfully the poise that held her when in repose.
+
+When Virginia spoke, it was to ask abruptly: “Is it really his mine?”
+
+“Judge Purcell says so.”
+
+“But do YOU think so—down in the bottom of your heart?”
+
+“Wouldn’t I naturally be prejudiced?”
+
+“I suppose you would. Everybody in Mesa seems to have taken sides
+either with Mr. Ridgway or the Consolidated. Still, you have an option.
+Is he what his friends proclaim him—the generous-hearted independent
+fighting against trust domination? Or is he merely an audacious
+ore-thief, as his enemies say? The truth must be somewhere.”
+
+“It seems to lie mostly in point of view here the angle of observation
+being determined by interest,” he answered.
+
+“And from your angle of observation?”
+
+“He is the most unusual man I ever saw, the most resourceful and the
+most competent. He never knows when he is beaten. I suppose that’s the
+reason he never is beaten finally. We have driven him to the wall a
+score of times. My experience with him is that he’s most dangerous when
+one thinks he must be about hammered out. He always hits back then in
+the most daring and unexpected way.”
+
+“With a coupling-pin,” she suggested with a little reminiscent laugh.
+
+“Metaphorically speaking. He reaches for the first effective weapon to
+his hand.”
+
+“You haven’t quite answered my question yet,” she reminded him. “Is he
+what his friends or what his enemies think him?”
+
+“If you ask me I can only say that I’m one of his enemies.”
+
+“But a fair-minded man,” she replied quickly.
+
+“Thank you. Then I’ll say that perhaps he is neither just what his
+friends or his foes think him. One must make allowances for his
+training and temperament, and for that quality of bigness in him.
+‘Mediocre men go soberly on the highroads, but saints and scoundrels
+meet in the jails,’” he smilingly quoted.
+
+“He would make a queer sort of saint,” she laughed.
+
+“A typical twentieth century one of a money-mad age.”
+
+She liked it in him that he would not use the opportunity she had made
+to sneer at his adversary, none the less because she knew that Ridgway
+might not have been so scrupulous in his place. That Lyndon Hobart’s
+fastidious instincts for fair play had stood in the way of his success
+in the fight to down Ridgway she had repeatedly heard. Of late, rumors
+had persisted in reporting dissatisfaction with his management of the
+Consolidated at the great financial center on Broadway which controlled
+the big copper company. Simon Harley, the dominating factor in the
+octopus whose tentacles reached out in every direction to monopolize
+the avenues of wealth, demanded of his subordinates results. Methods
+were no concern of his, and failure could not be explained to him. He
+wanted Ridgway crushed, and the pulse of the copper production
+regulated lay the Consolidated. Instead, he had seen Ridgway rise
+steadily to power and wealth despite his efforts to wipe him off the
+slate. Hobart was perfectly aware that his head was likely to fall when
+Harley heard of Purcell’s decision in regard to the Never Say Die.
+
+“He certainly is an amazing man,” Virginia mused, her fiancee in mind.
+“It would be interesting to discover what he can’t do—along utilitarian
+lines, I mean. Is he as good a miner underground as he is in the
+courts?” she flung out.
+
+“He is the shrewdest investor I know. Time and again he has leased or
+bought apparently worthless claims, and made them pay inside of a few
+weeks. Take the Taurus as a case in point. He struck rich ore in a
+fortnight. Other men had done development work for years and found
+nothing.”
+
+“I’m naturally interested in knowing all about him, because I have just
+become engaged to him,” explained Miss Virginia, as calmly as if her
+pulse were not fluttering a hundred to the minute.
+
+Virginia was essentially a sportsman. She did not flinch from the guns
+when the firing was heavy. It had been remarked of her even as a child
+that she liked to get unpleasant things over with as soon as possible,
+rather than postpone them. Once, _aetat_ eight, she had marched in to
+her mother like a stoic and announced: “I’ve come to be whipped,
+momsie, ’cause I broke that horrid little Nellie Vaile’s doll. I did it
+on purpose, ’cause I was mad at her. I’m glad I broke it, so there!”
+
+Hobart paled slightly beneath his outdoors Western tan, but his eyes
+met hers very steadily and fairly. “I wish you happiness, Miss Balfour,
+from the bottom of my heart.”
+
+She nodded a brisk “Thank you,” and directed her attention again to the
+horses.
+
+“Take him by and large, Mr. Ridgway is the most capable, energetic, and
+far-sighted business man I have ever known. He has a bigger grasp of
+things than almost any financier in the country. I think you’ll find he
+will go far,” he said, choosing his words with care to say as much for
+Waring Ridgway as he honestly could.
+
+“I have always thought so,” agreed Virginia.
+
+She had reason for thinking so in that young man’s remarkable career.
+When Waring Ridgway had first come to Mesa he had been a draftsman for
+the Consolidated at five dollars a day. He was just out of Cornell, and
+his assets consisted mainly of a supreme confidence in himself and an
+imposing presence. He was a born leader, and he flung himself into the
+raw, turbid life of the mining town with a readiness that had not a
+little to do with his subsequent success.
+
+That success began to take tangible form almost from the first. A
+small, independent smelter that had for long been working at a loss was
+about to fall into the hands of the Consolidated when Ridgway bought it
+on promises to pay, made good by raising money on a flying trip he took
+to the East. His father died about this time and left him fifty
+thousand dollars, with which he bought the Taurus, a mine in which
+several adventurous spirits had dropped small fortunes. He acquired
+other properties; a lease here, an interest there. It began to be
+observed that he bought always with judgment. He seemed to have the
+touch of Midas. Where other men had lost money he made it.
+
+When the officers of the Consolidated woke up to the menace of his
+presence, one of their lawyers called on him. The agent of the
+Consolidated smiled at his luxurious offices, which looked more like a
+woman’s boudoir than the business place of a Western miner. But that
+was merely part of Ridgway’s vanity, and did not in the least interfere
+with his predatory instincts. Many people who walked into that parlor
+to do business played fly to his spider.
+
+The lawyer had been ready to patronize the upstart who had ventured so
+boldly into the territory of the great trust, but one glance at the
+clear-cut resolute face of the young man changed his mind.
+
+“I’ve come to make you an offer for your smelter, Mr. Ridgway,” he
+began. “We’ll take it off your hands at the price it cost you.”
+
+“Not for sale, Mr. Bartel.”
+
+“Very well. We’ll give you ten thousand more than you paid for it.”
+
+“You misunderstand me. It is not for sale.”
+
+“Oh, come! You bought it to sell to us. What can you do with it?”
+
+“Run it,” suggested Ridgway.
+
+“Without ore?”
+
+“You forget that I own a few properties, and have leases on others.
+When the Taurus begins producing, I’ll have enough to keep the smelter
+going.”
+
+“When the Taurus begins producing?”—Bartel smiled skeptically. “Didn’t
+Johnson and Leroy drop fortunes on that expectation?”
+
+“I’ll bet five thousand dollars we make a strike within two weeks.”
+
+“Chimerical!” pronounced the graybeard as he rose to go, with an air of
+finality. “Better sell the smelter while you have the chance.”
+
+“Think not,” disagreed Ridgway.
+
+At the door the lawyer turned. “Oh, there’s another matter! It had
+slipped my mind.” He spoke with rather elaborate carelessness. “It
+seems that there is a little triangle—about ten and four feet
+across—wedged in between the Mary K, the Diamond King, and the Marcus
+Daly. For some reason we accidentally omitted to file on it. Our chief
+engineer finds that you have taken it up, Mr. Ridgway. It is really of
+no value, but it is in the heart of our properties, and so it ought to
+belong to us. Of course, it is of no use to you. There isn’t any
+possible room to sink a shaft. We’ll take it from you if you like, and
+even pay you a nominal price. For what will you sell?”
+
+Ridgway lit a cigar before he answered: “One million dollars.”
+
+“What?” screamed Bartel.
+
+“Not a cent less. I call it the Trust Buster. Before I’m through,
+you’ll find it is worth that to me.”
+
+The lawyer reported him demented to the Consolidated officials, who
+declared war on him from that day.
+
+They found the young adventurer more than prepared for them. If he had
+a Napoleonic sense of big vital factors, he had no less a genius for
+detail. He had already picked up an intimate knowledge of the hundreds
+of veins and crossveins that traverse the Mesa copper-fields, and he
+had delved patiently into the tangled history of the litigation that
+the defective mining laws in pioneer days had made possible. When the
+Consolidated attempted to harass him by legal process, he countered by
+instituting a score of suits against the company within the week. These
+had to do with wills, insanity cases, extra lateral rights, mine
+titles, and land and water rights. Wherever Ridgway saw room for an
+entering wedge to dispute the title of the Consolidated, he drove a new
+suit home. To say the least, the trust found it annoying to be enjoined
+from working its mines, to be cited for contempt before judges employed
+in the interests of its opponent, to be served with restraining orders
+when clearly within its rights. But when these adverse legal decisions
+began to affect vital issues, the Consolidated looked for reasons why
+Ridgway should control the courts. It found them in politics.
+
+For Ridgway was already dominating the politics of Yuba County,
+displaying an amazing acumen and a surprising ability as a
+stumpspeaker. He posed as a friend of the people, an enemy of the
+trust. He declared an eight-hour day for his own miners, and called
+upon the Consolidated to do the same. Hobart refused, acting on orders
+from Broadway, and fifteen thousand Consolidated miners went to the
+polls and reelected Ridgway’s corrupt judges, in spite of the fight the
+Consolidated was making against them.
+
+Meanwhile, Ridgway’s colossal audacity made the Consolidated’s copper
+pay for the litigation with which he was harassing it. In following his
+ore-veins, or what he claimed to be his veins, he crossed boldly into
+the territory of the enemy. By the law of extra lateral rights, a man
+is entitled to mine within the lines of other property than his own,
+provided he is following the dip of a vein which has its apex in his
+claim. Ridgway’s experts were prepared to swear that all the best veins
+in the field apexed in his property. Pending decisions of the courts,
+they assumed it, tunneling through granite till they tapped the veins
+of the Consolidated mines, meanwhile enjoining that company from
+working the very ore of which Ridgway was robbing it.
+
+Many times the great trust back of the Consolidated had him close to
+ruin, but Ridgway’s alert brain and supreme audacity carried him
+through. From their mines or from his own he always succeeded in
+extracting enough ore to meet his obligations when they fell due. His
+powerful enemy, as Hobart had told Miss Balfour, found him most
+dangerous when it seemed to have him with his back to the wall. Then
+unexpectedly would fall some crushing blow that put the financial kings
+of Broadway on the defensive long enough for him to slip out of the
+corner into which they had driven him. Greatly daring, he had the
+successful cavalryman’s instinct of risking much to gain much. A
+gambler, his enemies characterized him fitly enough. But it was also
+true, as Mesa phrased it, that he gambled “with the lid off,” playing
+for large stakes, neither asking nor giving quarter.
+
+At the end of five years of desperate fighting, the freebooter was more
+strongly entrenched than he had been at any previous time. The
+railroads, pledged to give rebates to the Consolidated, had been forced
+by Ridgway, under menace of adverse legislation from the men he
+controlled at the State-house, to give him secretly a still better rate
+than the trust. He owned the county courts, he was supported by the
+people, and had become a political dictator, and the financial outlook
+for him grew brighter every day.
+
+Such were the conditions when Judge Purcell handed down his Never Say
+Die decision. Within an hour Hobart was reading a telegram in cipher
+from the Broadway headquarters. It announced the immediate departure
+for Mesa of the great leader of the octopus. Simon Harley, the Napoleon
+of finance, was coming out to attend personally to the destruction of
+the buccaneer who had dared to fire on the trust flag.
+
+Before night some one of his corps of spies in the employ of the enemy
+carried the news to Waring Ridgway. He smiled grimly, his bluegray eyes
+hardening to the temper of steel. Here at last was a foeman worthy of
+his metal; one as lawless, unscrupulous, daring, and far-seeing as
+himself, with a hundred times his resources.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+ONE TO ONE
+
+
+The solitary rider stood for a moment in silhouette against the somber
+sky-line, his keen eyes searching the lowering clouds.
+
+“Getting its back up for a blizzard,” he muttered to himself, as he
+touched his pony with the spur.
+
+Dark, heavy billows banked in the west, piling over each other as they
+drove forward. Already the advance-guard had swept the sunlight from
+the earth, except for a flutter of it that still protested near the
+horizon. Scattering snowflakes were flying, and even in a few minutes
+the temperature had fallen many degrees.
+
+The rider knew the signs of old. He recognized the sudden stealthy
+approach that transformed a sun-drenched, friendly plain into an
+unknown arctic waste. Not for nothing had he been last year one of a
+search-party to find the bodies of three miners frozen to death not
+fifty yards from their own cabin. He understood perfectly what it meant
+to be caught away from shelter when the driven white pall wiped out
+distance and direction; made long familiar landmarks strange, and
+numbed the will to a helpless surrender. The knowledge of it was spur
+enough to make him ride fast while he still retained the sense of
+direction.
+
+But silently, steadily, the storm increased, and he was forced to
+slacken his pace. As the blinding snow grew thick, the sound of the
+wind deadened, unable to penetrate the dense white wall through which
+he forced his way. The world narrowed to a space whose boundaries he
+could touch with his extended hands. In this white mystery that wrapped
+him, nothing was left but stinging snow, bitter cold, and the silence
+of the dead.
+
+So he thought one moment, and the next was almost flung by his swerving
+horse into a vehicle that blocked the road. Its blurred outlines
+presently resolved themselves into an automobile, crouched in the
+bottom of which was an inert huddle of humanity.
+
+He shouted, forgetting that no voice could carry through the muffled
+scream of the storm. When he got no answer, he guided his horse close
+to the machine and reached down to snatch away the rug already heavy
+with snow. To his surprise, it was a girl’s despairing face that looked
+up at him. She tried to rise, but fell back, her muscles too numb to
+serve.
+
+“Don’t leave me,” she implored, stretching her, arms toward him.
+
+He reached out and lifted her to his horse. “Are you alone?”
+
+“Yes. He went for help when the machine broke down—before the storm,”
+she sobbed. He had to put his ear to her mouth to catch the words.
+
+“Come, keep up your heart.” There was that in his voice pealed like a
+trumpet-call to her courage.
+
+“I’m freezing to death,” she moaned.
+
+She was exhausted and benumbed, her lips blue, her flesh gray. It was
+plain to him that she had reached the limit of endurance, that she was
+ready to sink into the last torpor. He ripped open his overcoat and
+shook the snow from it, then gathered her close so that she might get
+the warmth of his body. The rugs from the automobile he wrapped round
+them both.
+
+“Courage!” he cried. “There’s a miner’s cabin near. Don’t give up,
+child.”
+
+But his own courage was of the heart and will, not of the head. He had
+small hope of reaching the hut at the entrance of Dead Man’s Gulch or,
+if he could struggle so far, of finding it in the white swirl that
+clutched at them. Near and far are words not coined for a blizzard. He
+might stagger past with safety only a dozen feet from him. He might lie
+down and die at the very threshold of the door. Or he might wander in
+an opposite direction and miss the cabin by a mile.
+
+Yet it was not in the man to give up. He must stagger on till he could
+no longer stand. He must fight so long as life was in him. He must
+crawl forward, though his forlorn hope had vanished. And he did. When
+the worn-out horse slipped down and could not be coaxed to its feet
+again, he picked up the bundle of rugs and plowed forward blindly, soul
+and body racked, but teeth still set fast with the primal instinct
+never to give up. The intense cold of the air, thick with gray sifted
+ice, searched the warmth from his body and sapped his vitality. His
+numbed legs doubled under him like springs. He was down and up again a
+dozen times, but always the call of life drove him on, dragging his
+helpless burden with him.
+
+That he did find the safety of the cabin in the end was due to no
+wisdom on his part. He had followed unconsciously the dip of the ground
+that led him into the little draw where it had been built, and by sheer
+luck stumbled against it. His strength was gone, but the door gave to
+his weight, and he buckled across the threshold like a man helpless
+with drink. He dropped to the floor, ready to sink into a stupor, but
+he shook sleep from him and dragged himself to his feet. Presently his
+numb fingers found a match, a newspaper, and some wood. As soon as he
+had control over his hands, he fell to chafing hers. He slipped off her
+dainty shoes, pathetically inadequate for such an experience, and
+rubbed her feet back to feeling. She had been torpid, but when the
+blood began to circulate, she cried out in agony at the pain.
+
+Every inch of her bore the hall-mark of wealth. The ermine-lined
+motoring-cloak, the broadcloth cut on simple lines of elegance, the
+quality of her lingerie and of the hosiery which incased the
+wonderfully small feet, all told of a padded existence from which the
+cares of life had been excluded. The satin flesh he massaged, to renew
+the flow of the dammed blood, was soft and tender like a babe’s. Quite
+surely she was an exotic, the last woman in the world fitted for the
+hardships of this frontier country. She had none of the deep-breasted
+vitality of those of her sex who have fought with grim nature and won.
+His experience told him that a very little longer in the storm would
+have snuffed out the wick of her life.
+
+But he knew, too, that the danger was past. Faint tints of pink were
+beginning to warm the cheeks that had been so deathly pallid. Already
+crimson lips were offering a vivid contrast to the still, almost
+colorless face.
+
+For she was biting the little lips to try and keep back the cries of
+pain that returning life wrung from her. Big tears coursed down her
+cheeks, and broken sobs caught her breath. She was helpless as an
+infant before the searching pain that wracked her.
+
+“I can’t stand it—I can’t stand it,” she moaned, and in her distress
+stretched out her little hand for relief as a baby might to its mother.
+
+The childlike appeal of the flinching violet eyes in the tortured face
+moved him strangely. He was accounted a hard man, not without reason.
+His eyes were those of a gambler, cold and vigilant. It was said that
+he could follow an undeviating course without relenting at the ruin and
+misery wrought upon others by his operations. But the helpless
+loveliness of this exquisitely dainty child-woman, the sense of
+intimacy bred of a common peril endured, of the strangeness of their
+environment and of her utter dependence upon him, carried the man out
+of himself and away from conventions.
+
+He stooped and gathered her into his arms, walking the floor with her
+and cheering her as if she had indeed been the child they both for the
+moment conceived her.
+
+“You don’t know how it hurts,” she pleaded between sobs, looking up
+into the strong face so close to hers.
+
+“I know it must, dear. But soon it will be better. Every twinge is one
+less, and shows that you are getting well. Be brave for just a few
+minutes more now.”
+
+She smiled wanly through her tears. “But I’m not brave. I’m a little
+coward—and it does pain so.”
+
+“I know—I know. It is dreadful. But just a few minutes now.”
+
+“You’re good to me,” she said presently, simply as a little girl might
+have said it.
+
+To neither of them did it seem strange that she should be there in his
+arms, her fair head against his shoulder, nor that she should cling
+convulsively to him when the fierce pain tingled unbearably. She had
+reached out for the nearest help, and he gave of his strength and
+courage abundantly.
+
+Presently the prickling of the flowing blood grew less sharp. She began
+to grow drowsy with warmth after the fatigue and pain. The big eyes
+shut, fluttered open, smiled at him, and again closed. She had fallen
+asleep from sheer exhaustion.
+
+He looked down with an odd queer feeling at the small aristocratic face
+relaxed upon his ann. The long lashes had drooped to the cheeks and
+shuttered the eyes that had met his with such confident appeal, but
+they did not hide the dark rings underneath, born of the hardships she
+had endured. As he walked the floor with her, he lived once more the
+terrible struggle through which they had passed. He saw Death
+stretching out icy hands for her, and as his arms unconsciously
+tightened about the soft rounded body, his square jaw set and the
+fighting spark leaped to his eyes.
+
+“No, by Heaven,” he gave back aloud his defiance.
+
+Troubled dreams pursued her in her sleep. She clung close to him, her
+arm creeping round his neck for safety. He was a man not given to fine
+scruples, but all the best in him responded to her unconscious trust.
+
+It was so she found herself when she awakened, stiff from her cramped
+position. She slipped at once to the floor and sat there drying her
+lace skirts, the sweet piquancy of her childish face set out by the
+leaping fire-glow that lit and shadowed her delicate coloring. Outside
+in the gray darkness raged the death from which he had snatched her by
+a miracle. Beyond—a million miles away—the world whose claim had
+loosened on them was going through its routine of lies and love, of
+hypocrisies and heroisms. But here were just they two, flung back to
+the primordial type by the fierce battle for existence that had
+encompassed them—Adam and Eve in the garden, one to one, all else
+forgot, all other ties and obligations for the moment obliterated. Had
+they not struggled, heart beating against heart, with the breath of
+death icing them, and come out alive? Was their world not contracted to
+a space ten feet by twelve, shut in from every other planet by an
+illimitable stretch of storm?
+
+“Where should I have been if you had not found me?” she murmured, her
+haunting eyes fixed on the flames.
+
+“But I should have found you—no matter where you had been, I should
+have found you.”
+
+The words seemed to leap from him of themselves. He was sure he had not
+meant to speak them, to voice so soon the claim that seemed to him so
+natural and reasonable.
+
+She considered his words and found delight in acquiescing at once. The
+unconscious demand for life, for love, of her starved soul had never
+been gratified. But he had come to her through that fearful valley of
+death, because he must, because it had always been meant he should.
+
+Her lustrous eyes, big with faith, looked up and met his.
+
+The far, wise voices of the world were storm-deadened. They cried no
+warning to these drifting hearts. How should they know in that moment
+when their souls reached toward each other that the wisdom of the ages
+had decreed their yearning futile?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+FORT SALVATION
+
+
+She must have fallen asleep there, for when she opened her eyes it was
+day. Underneath her was a lot of bedding he had found in the cabin, and
+tucked about her were the automobile rugs. For a moment her brain,
+still sodden with sleep, struggled helplessly with her surroundings.
+She looked at the smoky rafters without understanding, and her eyes
+searched the cabin wonderingly for her maid. When she remembered, her
+first thought was to look for the man. That he had gone, she saw with
+instinctive terror.
+
+But not without leaving a message. She found his penciled note,
+weighted for security by a dollar, at the edge of the hearth.
+
+“Gone on a foraging expedition. Back in an hour, Little Partner,” was
+all it said. The other man also had promised to be back in an hour, and
+he had not come, but the strong chirography of the note, recalling the
+resolute strength of this man’s face, brought content to her eyes. He
+had said he would come back. She rested secure in that pledge.
+
+She went to the window and looked out over the great white wastes that
+rose tier on tier to the dull sky-line. She shuddered at the arctic
+desolation of the vast snow-fields. The mountains were sheeted with
+silence and purity. It seemed to the untaught child-woman that she was
+face to face with the Almighty.
+
+Once during the night she had partially awakened to hear the roaring
+wind as it buffeted snow-clouds across the range. It had come tearing
+along the divide with the black storm in its vanguard, and she had
+heard fearfully the shrieks and screams of the battle as it raged up
+and down the gulches and sifted into them the deep drifts.
+
+Half-asleep as she was, she had been afraid and had cried out with
+terror at this strange wakening; and he had been beside her in an
+instant.
+
+“It’s all right, partner. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he had said
+cheerfully, taking her little hand in his big warm one.
+
+Her fears had slipped away at once. Nestling down into her rug, she had
+smiled sleepily at him and fallen asleep with her cheek on her hand,
+her other hand still in his.
+
+While she had been asleep the snow-tides had filled the gulch, had
+risen level with the top of the lower pane of the window. Nothing broke
+the smoothness of its flow save the one track he had made in breaking a
+way out. That he should have tried to find his way through such an
+untracked desolation amazed her. He could never do it. No puny human
+atom could fight successfully against the barriers nature had dropped
+so sullenly to fence them. They were set off from the world by a
+quarantine of God. There was something awful to her in the knowledge.
+It emphasized their impotence. Yet, this man had set himself to fight
+the inevitable.
+
+With a little shudder she turned from the window to the cheerless room.
+The floor was dirty; unwashed dishes were piled upon the table. Here
+and there were scattered muddy boots and overalls, just as their owner,
+the prospector, had left them before he had gone to the nearest town to
+restock his exhausted supply of provisions. Disorder and dirt filled
+the rough cabin, or so it seemed to her fastidious eye.
+
+The inspiration of the housewife seized her. She would surprise him on
+his return by opening the door to him upon a house swept and garnished.
+She would show him that she could be of some use even in such a
+primitive topsy-turvy world as this into which Fate had thrust her
+willy-nilly.
+
+First, she carried red live coals on a shovel from the fireplace to the
+cook-stove, and piled kindling upon them till it lighted. It was a new
+experience to her. She knew nothing of housework; had never lit a fire
+in her life, except once when she had been one of a camping party. The
+smoke choked her before she had the lids back in their places, but
+despite her awkwardness, the girl went about her unaccustomed tasks
+with a light heart. It was for her new-found hero that she played at
+housekeeping. For his commendation she filled the tea-kettle, enveloped
+herself in a cloud of dust as she wielded the stub of a broom she
+discovered, and washed the greasy dishes after the water was hot. A
+childish pleasure suffused her. All her life her least whims had been
+ministered to; she was reveling in a first attempt at service. As she
+moved to and fro with an improvised dust-rag, sunshine filled her
+being. From her lips the joy notes fell in song, shaken from her throat
+for sheer happiness. This surely was life, that life from which she had
+so carefully been hedged all the years of her young existence.
+
+As he came down the trail he had broken, with a pack on his back, the
+man heard her birdlike carol in the clear frosty air. He emptied his
+chest in a deep shout, and she was instantly at the window, waving him
+a welcome with her dust-rag.
+
+“I thought you were never coming,” she cried from the open door as he
+came up the path.
+
+Her eyes were starry in their eagerness. Every sensitive feature was
+alert with interest, so that the man thought he had never seen so
+mobile and attractive a face.
+
+“Did it seem long?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, weeks and weeks! You must be frozen to an icicle. Come in and get
+warm.”
+
+“I’m as warm as toast,” he assured her.
+
+He was glowing with exercise and the sting of the cold, for he had
+tramped two miles through drifts from three to five feet deep, battling
+with them every step of the way, and carrying with him on the return
+trip a box of provisions.
+
+“With all that snow on you and the pack on your back, it’s like Santa
+Claus,” she cried, clapping her hands.
+
+“Before we’re through with the adventure we may think that box a sure
+enough gift from Santa,” he replied.
+
+After he had put it down, he took off his overcoat on the threshold and
+shook the snow from it. Then, with much feet stamping and scattering of
+snow, he came in. She fluttered about him, dragging a chair up to the
+fire for him, and taking his hat and gloves. It amused and pleased him
+that she should be so solicitous, and he surrendered himself to her
+ministrations.
+
+His quick eye noticed the swept floor and the evanishment of disorder.
+“Hello! What’s this clean through a fall house-cleaning? I’m not the
+only member of the firm that has been working. Dishes washed, floor
+swept, bed made, kitchen fire lit. You’ve certainly been going some,
+unless the fairies helped you. Aren’t you afraid of blistering these
+little hands?” he asked gaily, taking one of them in his and touching
+the soft palm gently with the tip of his finger.
+
+“I should preserve those blisters in alcohol to show that I’ve really
+been of some use,” she answered, happy in his approval.
+
+“Sho! People are made for different uses. Some are fit only to shovel
+and dig. Others are here simply to decorate the world. Hard world. Hard
+work is for those who can’t give society anything else, but beauty is
+its own excuse for being,” he told her breezily.
+
+“Now that’s the first compliment you have given me,” she pouted
+prettily. “I can get them in plenty back in the drawing-rooms where I
+am supposed to belong. We’re to be real comrades here, and compliments
+are barred.”
+
+“I wasn’t complimenting you,” he maintained. “I was merely stating a
+principle of art.”
+
+“Then you mustn’t make your principles of art personal, sir. But since
+you have, I’m going to refute the application of your principle and
+show how useful I’ve been. Now, sir, do you know what provisions we
+have outside of those you have just brought?”
+
+He knew exactly, since he had investigated during the night. That they
+might possibly have to endure a siege of some weeks, he was quite well
+aware, and his first thought, after she had gone to sleep before the
+fire, had been to make inventory of such provisions as the prospector
+had left in his cabin. A knuckle of ham, part of a sack of flour, some
+navy beans, and some tea siftings at the bottom of a tin can; these
+constituted the contents of the larder which the miner had gone to
+replenish. But though the man knew he assumed ignorance, for he saw
+that she was bubbling over with the desire to show her forethought.
+
+“Tell me,” he begged of her, and after she had done so, he marveled
+aloud over her wisdom in thinking of it.
+
+“Now tell me about your trip,” she commanded, setting herself tailor
+fashion on the rug to listen.
+
+“There isn’t much to tell,” he smiled “I should like to make an
+adventure of it, but I can’t. I just went and came back.”
+
+“Oh, you just went and came back, did you?” she scoffed. “That won’t do
+at all. I want to know all about it. Did you find the machine all
+right?”
+
+“I found it where we left it, buried in four feet of snow. You needn’t
+be afraid that anybody will run away with it for a day or two. The
+pantry was cached pretty deep itself, but I dug it out.”
+
+Her shy glance admired the sturdy lines of his powerful frame. “I am
+afraid it must have been a terrible task to get there through the
+blizzard.”
+
+“Oh, the blizzard is past. You never saw a finer, more bracing morning.
+It’s a day for the gods,” he laughed boyishly.
+
+She could have conceived no Olympian more heroic than he, and certainly
+none with so compelling a vitality. “Such a warm, kind light in them!”
+she thought of the eyes others had found hard and calculating.
+
+It was lucky that the lunch the automobilists had brought from
+Avalanche was ample and as yet untouched. The hotel waiter, who had
+attended to the packing of it, had fortunately been used to reckon with
+outdoor Montana appetites instead of cloyed New York ones. They
+unpacked the little hamper with much gaiety. Everything was frozen
+solid, and the wine had cracked its bottle.
+
+“Shipped right through on our private refrigerator-car. That
+cold-storage chicken looks the finest that ever happened. What’s this
+rolled up in tissue-paper? Deviled eggs and ham sandwiches AND caviar,
+not to speak of claret frappe. I’m certainly grateful to the gentleman
+finished in ebony who helped to provision us for this siege. He’ll
+never know what a tip he missed by not being here to collect.”
+
+“Here’s jelly, too, and cake,” she said, exploring with him.
+
+“Not to mention peaches and pears. Oh, this is luck of a special brand!
+I was expecting to put up at Starvation Camp. Now we may name it Point
+Plenty.”
+
+“Or Fort Salvation,” she suggested shyly. “Because you brought me here
+to save my life.”
+
+She was such a child, in spite of her charming grown-up airs, that he
+played make-believe with a zest that surprised himself when he came to
+think of it. She elected him captain of Fort Salvation, with full power
+of life and death over the garrison, and he appointed her second in
+command. His first general order was to put the garrison on two meals a
+day.
+
+She clapped her little hands, eyes sparkling with excitement. “Are we
+really snow-bound? Must we go on half-rations?”
+
+“It is the part of wisdom, lieutenant,” he answered, smiling at her
+enthusiasm. “We don’t know how long this siege is going to last. If it
+should set in to snow, we may be here several days before the
+relief-party reaches us.” But, though he spoke cheerfully, he was aware
+of sinister possibilities in the situation. “Several weeks” would have
+been nearer his real guess.
+
+They ate breakfast at the shelf-table nailed in place underneath the
+western window. They made a picnic of it, and her spirits skipped upon
+the hilltops. For the first time she ate from tin plates, drank from a
+tin cup, and used a tin spoon the worse for rust. What mattered it to
+her that the teapot was grimy and the fryingpan black with soot! It was
+all part of the wonderful new vista that had suddenly opened before her
+gaze. She had awakened into life and already she was dimly realizing
+that many and varied experiences lay waiting for her in that untrodden
+path beyond her cloistered world.
+
+A reconnaissance in the shed behind the house showed him no plethora of
+firewood. But here was ax, shovel, and saw, and he asked no more. First
+he shoveled out a path along the eaves of the house where she might
+walk in sentry fashion to take the deep breaths of clear sharp air he
+insisted upon. He made it wide enough so that her skirt would not sweep
+against the snow-bank, and trod down the trench till the footing was
+hard and solid. Then with ax and saw he climbed the hillside back of
+the house and set himself to get as much fuel as he could. The sky was
+still heavy with unshed snow, and he knew that with the coming of night
+the storm would be renewed.
+
+Came noon, mid-afternoon, the early dusk of a mountain winter, and
+found him still hewing and sawing, still piling load after load in the
+shed. Now and again she came out and watched him, laughing at the
+figure he made as he would come plunging through the snow with his
+armful of fuel.
+
+She did not know, as he did, the vital necessity of filling the lean-to
+before winter fell upon them in earnest and buried them deep with his
+frozen blanket, and she was a little piqued that he should spend the
+whole day away from her in such unsocial fashion.
+
+“Let me help,” she begged so often that he trod down a path, made boots
+for her out of torn gunny-sacks which he tied round her legs, and let
+her drag wood to the house on a pine branch which served for a sled.
+She wore her gauntlets to protect her tender hands, and thereafter was
+happy until, detecting signs of fatigue, he made her go into the house
+and rest.
+
+As soon as she dared she was back again, making fun of him and the
+earnestness with which he worked.
+
+“Robinson Crusoe” was one name she fastened upon him, and she was not
+satisfied till she had made him call her “Friday.”
+
+Twilight fell austere and sudden upon them with an immediate fall of
+temperature that found a thermometer in her blue face.
+
+He recommended the house, but she was of a contrary mood.
+
+“I don’t want to,” she announced debonairly.
+
+In a stiff military attitude he gave raucous mandate from his throat.
+
+“Commanding officer’s orders, lieutenant.”
+
+“I think I’m going to mutiny,” she informed him, with chin saucily in
+air.
+
+This would not do at all. The chill wind sweeping down the canon was
+searching her insufficient clothing already. He picked her up in his
+arms and ran with her toward the house, setting her down in the trench
+outside the door. She caught her startled breath and looked at him in
+shy, dubious amazement.
+
+“Really you” she was beginning when he cut her short.
+
+“Commanding officer’s orders, lieutenant,” came briskly from lips that
+showed just a hint of a smile.
+
+At once she clicked her heels together, saluted, and wheeled into the
+cabin.
+
+From the grimy window she watched his broad-shouldered vigor, waving
+her hand whenever his face was turned her way. He worked like a Titan,
+reveling in the joy of physical labor, but it was long past dark before
+he finished and came striding to the hut.
+
+They made a delightful evening of it, living in the land of Never Was.
+For one source of her charm lay in the gay, childlike whimsicality of
+her imagination. She believed in fairies and heroes with all her heart,
+which with her was an organ not located in her brain. The delicious
+gurgle of gaiety in her laugh was a new find to him in feminine
+attractions.
+
+There had been many who thought the career of this pirate of industry
+beggared fiction, though, few had found his flinty personality a
+radiaton of romance. But this convent-nurtured child had made a
+discovery in men, one out of the rut of the tailor-made,
+convention-bound society youths to whom her experience for the most
+part had been limited. She delighted in his masterful strength, in the
+confidence of his careless dominance. She liked to see that look of
+power in his gray-blue eyes softened to the droll, half-tender,
+expression with which he played the game of make-believe. There were no
+to-morrows; to-day marked the limit of time for them. By tacit consent
+they lived only in the present, shutting out deliberately from their
+knowledge of each other, that past which was not common to both. Even
+their names were unknown to each other, and both of them were glad that
+it was so.
+
+The long winter evening had fallen early, and they dined by
+candle-light, considering merrily how much they might with safety eat
+and yet leave enough for the to-morrows that lay before them. Afterward
+they sat before the fire, in the shadow and shine of the flickering
+logs, happy and content in each other’s presence. She dreamed, and he,
+watching her, dreamed, too. The wild, sweet wonder of life surged
+through them, touching their squalid surroundings to the high mystery
+of things unreal.
+
+The strangeness of it was that he was a man of large and not very
+creditable experience of women, yet her deep, limpid eyes, her sweet
+voice, the immature piquancy of her movements that was the expression
+of her, had stirred his imagination more potently than if he had been
+the veriest schoolboy nursing a downy lip. He could not keep his eyes
+from this slender, exquisite girl, so dainty and graceful in her mobile
+piquancy. Fire and passion were in his heart and soul, restraint and
+repression in his speech and manner. For the fire and passion in him
+were pure and clean as the winds that sweep the hills.
+
+But for the girl—she was so little mistress of her heart that she had
+no prescience of the meaning of this sweet content that filled her. And
+the voices that should have warned her were silent, busy behind the
+purple hills with lies and love and laughter and tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+ENTER SIMON HARLEY
+
+
+The prospector’s house in which they had found refuge was perched on
+the mountainside just at one edge of the draw. Rough as the girl had
+thought it, there was a more pretentious appearance to it than might
+have been expected. The cabin was of hewn logs mortared with mud, and
+care had been taken to make it warm. The fireplace was a huge affair
+that ate fuel voraciously. It was built of stone, which had been
+gathered from the immediate hillside.
+
+The prospect itself showed evidence of having been worked a good deal,
+and it was an easy guess for the man who now stood looking into the
+tunnel that it belonged to some one of the thousands of miners who
+spend half their time earning a grubstake, and the other half
+dissipating it upon some hole in the ground which they have duped
+themselves into believing is a mine.
+
+From the tunnel his eye traveled up the face of the white mountain to
+the great snow-comb that yawned over the edge of the rock-rim far
+above. It had snowed again heavily all night, and now showed symptoms
+of a thaw. Not once nor twice, but a dozen times, the man’s anxious
+gaze had swept up to that great overhanging bank. Snowslides ran every
+year in this section with heavy loss to life and property. Given a
+rising temperature and some wind, the comb above would gradually settle
+lower and lower, at last break off, plunge down the precipitous slope,
+bringing thousands of tons of rock and snow with it, and, perhaps, bury
+them in a Titanic grave of ice. There had been a good deal of timber
+cut from the shoulder of the mountain during the past summer, and this
+very greatly increased the danger. That there was a real peril the man
+looking at it did not attempt to deny to himself. It would be enough to
+deny it to her in case she should ever suspect.
+
+He had hoped for cold weather, a freeze hard enough to crust the
+surface of the snow. Upon this he might have made shift somehow to get
+her to Yesler’s ranch, eighteen miles away though it was, but he knew
+this would not be feasible with the snow in its present condition. It
+was not certain that he could make the ranch alone; encumbered with
+her, success would be a sheer impossibility. On the other hand, their
+provisions would not last long. The outlook was not a cheerful one,
+from whichever point of view he took it; yet there was one phase of it
+he could not regret. The factors which made the difficulties of the
+situation made also its delights. Though they were prisoners in this
+solitary untrodden canyon, the sentence was upon both of them. She
+could look to none other than he for aid; and, at least, the drifts
+which kept them in held others out.
+
+Her voice at his shoulder startled him.
+
+“Wherefore this long communion with nature, my captain?” she gaily
+asked. “Behold, my lord’s hot cakes are ready for the pan and his
+servant to wait upon him.” She gave him a demure smiling little curtsy
+of mock deference.
+
+Never had her distracting charm been more in evidence. He had not seen
+her since they parted on the previous night. He had built for himself a
+cot in the woodshack, and had contrived a curtain that could be drawn
+in front of her bed in the living-room. Thus he could enter in the
+morning, light the fires, and start breakfast without disturbing her.
+She had dressed her hair, now in a different way, so that it fell in
+low waves back from the forehead and was bunched at the nape of her
+neck. The light swiftness of her dainty grace, the almost exaggerated
+carnation of the slightly parted lips, the glad eagerness that sparked
+her eyes, brought out effectively the picturesqueness of her beauty.
+
+His grave eyes rested on her so long that a soft glow mantled her
+cheeks. Perhaps her words had been too free, though she had not meant
+them so. For the first time some thought of the conventions distressed
+her. Ought she to hold herself more in reserve toward him? Must she
+restrain her natural impulses to friendliness?
+
+His eyes released her presently, but not before she read in them the
+feelings that had softened them as they gazed into hers. They mirrored
+his poignant pleasure at the delight of her sweet slenderness so close
+to him, his perilous joy at the intimacy fate had thrust upon them.
+Shyly her lids fell to the flushed cheeks.
+
+“Breakfast is ready,” she added self-consciously, her girlish innocence
+startled like a fawn of the forest at the hunter’s approach.
+
+For whereas she had been blind now she saw in part. Some flash of
+clairvoyance had laid bare a glimpse of his heart and her own to her.
+Without misunderstanding the perfect respect for her which he felt, she
+knew the turbid banked emotions which this dammed. Her heart seemed to
+beat in her bosom like an imprisoned dove.
+
+It was his voice, calm and resonant with strength, that brought her to
+earth again.
+
+“And I am ready for it, lieutenant. Right about face. Forward—march!”
+
+After breakfast they went out and tramped together the little path of
+hard-trodden snow in front of the house. She broached the prospect of a
+rescue or the chances of escape.
+
+“We shall soon be out of food, and, anyhow, we can’t stay here all
+winter,” she suggested with a tremulous little laugh.
+
+“You are naturally very tired of it already,” he hazarded.
+
+“It has been the experience of my life. I shall fence it off from all
+the days that have passed and all that are to come,” she made answer
+vividly.
+
+Their eyes met, but only for an instant.
+
+“I am glad,” he said quietly.
+
+He began, then, to tell her what he must do, but at the first word of
+it she broke out in protest.
+
+“No—no—no! We shall stay together. If you go I am going, too.”
+
+“I wish you could, but it is not possible. You could never get there.
+The snow is too soft and heavy for wading and not firm enough to bear
+your weight.”
+
+“But you will have to wade.”
+
+“I am stronger than you, lieutenant.”
+
+“I know, but——” She broke down and confessed her terror. “Would you
+leave me here—alone—with all this snow Oh, I couldn’t stay—I couldn’t.”
+
+“It’s the only way,” he said steadily. Every fiber in him rebelled at
+leaving her here to face peril alone, but his reason overrode the
+desire and rebellion that were hot within him. He must think first of
+her ultimate safety, and this lay in getting her away from here at the
+first chance.
+
+Tears splashed down from the big eyes. “I didn’t think you would leave
+me here alone. With you I don’t mind it, but— Oh, I should die if I
+stayed alone.”
+
+“Only for twenty-four hours. Perhaps less. I shouldn’t think of it if
+it weren’t necessary.”
+
+“Take me with you. I am strong. You don’t know how strong I am. I
+promise to keep up with you. Please!”
+
+He shook his head. “I would take you with me if I could. You know that.
+But it’s a man’s fight. I shall have to stand up to it hour after hour
+till I reach Yesler’s ranch. I shall get through, but it would not be
+possible for you to make it.”
+
+“And if you don’t get through?”
+
+He refused to consider that contingency. “But I shall. You may look to
+see me back with help by this time to-morrow morning.”
+
+“I’m not afraid with you. But if you go away Oh, I can’t stand it. You
+don’t know—you don’t know.” She buried her face in her hands.
+
+He had to swallow down his sympathy before he went on. “Yes, I know.
+But you must be brave. You must think of every minute as being one
+nearer to the time of my return.”
+
+“You will think me a dreadful coward, and I am. But I can’t help it. I
+AM afraid to stay alone. There’s nothing in the world but mountains of
+snow. They are horrible—like death—except when you are here.”
+
+Her child eyes coaxed him to stay. The mad longing was in him to kiss
+the rosy little mouth with the queer alluring droop to its corners. It
+was a strange thing how, with that arched twist to her eyebrows and
+with that smile which came and went like sunshine in her eyes, she
+toppled his lifelong creed. The cardinal tenet of his faith had been a
+belief in strength. He had first been drawn to Virginia by reason of
+her pluck and her power. Yet this child’s very weakness was her
+fountain of strength. She cried out with pain, and he counted it an
+asset of virtue in her. She acknowledged herself a coward, and his
+heart went out to her because of it. The battle assignments of life
+were not for the soft curves and shy winsomeness of this dainty lamb.
+
+“You will be brave. I expect you to be brave, lieutenant.” Words of
+love and comfort were crowding to his brain, but he would not let them
+out.
+
+“How long will you be gone?” she sobbed.
+
+“I may possibly get back before midnight, but you mustn’t begin to
+expect me until to-morrow morning, perhaps not till to-morrow
+afternoon.”
+
+“Oh, I couldn’t—I couldn’t stay here at night alone. Don’t go, please.
+I’ll not get hungry, truly I won’t, and to-morrow they will find us.”
+
+He rose, his face working. “I MUST go, child. It’s the thing to do. I
+wish to Heaven it weren’t. You must think of yourself as quite safe
+here. You ARE safe. Don’t make it hard for me to go, dear.”
+
+“I AM a coward. But I can’t help it. There is so much snow—and the
+mountains are so big.” She tried valiantly to crush down her sobs. “But
+go. I’ll—I’ll not be afraid.”
+
+He buried her little hands in his two big ones and looked deep into her
+eyes. “Every minute of the time I am away from you I shall be with you
+in spirit. You’ll not be alone any minute of the day or night. Whether
+you are awake or asleep I shall be with you.”
+
+“I’ll try to remember that,” she answered, smiling up at him but with a
+trembling lip.
+
+She put him up some lunch while he made his simple preparations. To the
+end of the trench she walked with him, neither of them saying a word.
+The moment of parting had come.
+
+She looked up at him with a crooked wavering little smile. She wanted
+to be brave, but she could not trust herself to say a word.
+
+“Remember, dear. I am not leaving you. My body has gone on an errand.
+That is all.”
+
+Just now she found small comfort in this sophistry, but she did not
+tell him so.
+
+“I—I’ll remember.” She gulped down a sob and still smiled through the
+mist that filmed her sight.
+
+In his face she could see how much he was moved at her distress. Always
+a creature of impulse, one mastered her now, the need to let her
+weakness rest on his strength. Her arms slipped quickly round his neck
+and her head lay buried on his shoulder. He held her tight, eyes
+shining, the desire of her held in leash behind set teeth, the while
+sobs shook her soft round body in gusts.
+
+“My lamb—my sweet precious lamb,” she heard him murmur in anguish.
+
+From some deep sex trait it comforted her that he suffered. With the
+mother instinct she began to regain control of herself that she might
+help him.
+
+“It will not be for long,” she assured him. “And every step of your way
+I shall pray for, your safety,” she whispered.
+
+He held her at arm’s length while his gaze devoured her, then silently
+he wheeled away and plunged waist deep into the drifts. As long as he
+was in sight he saw her standing there, waving her handkerchief to him
+in encouragement. Her slight, dark figure, outlined against the snow,
+was the last thing his eyes fell upon before he turned a corner of the
+gulch and dropped downward toward the plains.
+
+But when he was surely gone, after one fearful look at the white sea
+which encompassed her, the girl fled to the cabin, slammed the door
+after her, and flung herself on the bed to weep out her lonely terror
+in an ecstasy of tears. She had spent the first violence of her grief,
+and was sitting crouched on the rug before the open fire when the sound
+of a footstep, crunching the snow, startled her. The door opened, to
+let in the man who had just left her.
+
+“You are back—already,” she cried, her tear? stained face lifted toward
+him.
+
+“Yes,” he smiled’ from the doorway. “Come here, little partner.”
+
+And when she had obediently joined him her eye followed his finger up
+the mountain-trail to a bend round which men and horses were coming.
+
+“It’s a relief-party,” he said, and caught up his field-glasses to look
+them over more certainly. Two men on horseback, leading a third animal,
+were breaking a way down the trail, black spots against the background
+of white. “I guess Fort Salvation’s about to be relieved,” he added
+grimly, following the party through the glasses.
+
+She touched the back of his hand with a finger. “Are you glad?” she
+asked softly.
+
+“No, by Heaven!” he cried, lowering his glasses swiftly.
+
+As he looked into her eyes the blood rushed to his brain with a surge.
+Her face turned to his unconsciously, and their lips met.
+
+“And I don’t even know your name,” she murmured.
+
+“Waring Ridgway; and yours?”
+
+“Aline Hope,” she said absently. Then a hot Rush ran over the girlish
+face. “No, no, I had forgotten. I was married last week.”
+
+The gates of paradise, open for two days, clanged to on Ridgway. He
+stared out with unseeing eyes into the silent wastes of snow. The
+roaring in his ears and the mountainsides that churned before his eyes
+were reflections of the blizzard raging within him.
+
+“I’ll never forget—never,” he heard her falter, and her voice was a
+thousand miles away.
+
+From the storm within him he was aroused by a startled cry from the
+girl at his side. Her fascinated gaze was fixed on the summit of the
+ridge above them. There was a warning crackle. The overhanging comb
+snapped, slid slowly down, and broke off. With gathering momentum it
+descended, sweeping into its heart rocks, trees, and debris. A terrific
+roar filled the air as the great white cloud came tearing down like an
+express-train.
+
+Ridgway caught her round the waist and flung the girl against the wall
+of the cabin, protecting her with his body. The avalanche was upon
+them, splitting great trees to kindling-wood in the fury of its rush.
+The concussion of the wind shattered every window to fragments, almost
+tore the cabin from its foundations. Only the extreme tail of the slide
+touched them, yet they were buried deep in flying snow.
+
+He found no great difficulty in digging a way out, and when he lifted
+her to the surface she was conscious. Yet she was pale even to the lips
+and trembled like an aspen in the summer breeze, clinging to him for
+support helplessly.
+
+His cheerful voice rang like a bugle to her shocked brain.
+
+“It’s all past. We’re safe now, dear—quite safe.”
+
+The first of the trail-breakers had dismounted and was plowing his way
+hurriedly to the cabin, but neither of them saw him as he came up the
+slope.
+
+“Are you sure?” She shuddered, her hands still in his. “Wasn’t it
+awful? I thought—” Her sentence trailed out unfinished.
+
+“Are you unhurt, Aline?” cried the newcomer. And when he saw she was,
+he added: “Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for He is
+good: for His mercy endureth forever. He saved them for His name’s
+sake, that He might make His mighty power to be known.”
+
+At sound of the voice they turned and saw the man hurrying toward them.
+He was tall, gray, and seventy, of massive frame and gaunt, still
+straight and vigorous, with the hooked nose and piercing eyes of a
+hawk. At first glance he looked always the bird of prey, but at the
+next as invariably the wolf, an effect produced by the salient reaching
+jaw and the glint of white teeth bared for a lip smile. Just now he was
+touched to a rare emotion. His hands trembled and an expression of
+shaken thankfulness rested in his face.
+
+Aline, still with Ridgway’s strong arms about her, slowly came back to
+the inexorable facts of life.
+
+“You—here?”
+
+“As soon as we could get through—and thank God in time.”
+
+“I would have died, except for—” This brought her immediately to an
+introduction, and after she had quietly released herself the man who
+had saved her heard himself being formally presented: “Mr. Ridgway, I
+want you to meet my husband, Mr. Harley.”
+
+Ridgway turned to Simon Harley a face of hammered steel and bowed,
+putting his hands deliberately behind his back.
+
+“I’ve been expecting you at Mesa, Mr. Harley,” he said rigidly. “I’ll
+be glad to have the pleasure of welcoming you there.”
+
+The great financier was wondering where he had heard the man’s name
+before, but he only said gravely: “You have a claim on me I can never
+forget, Mr. Ridgway.”
+
+Scornfully the other disdained this proffer. “Not at all. You owe me
+nothing, Mr. Harley—absolutely nothing. What I have done I have done
+for her. It is between her and me.”
+
+At this moment the mind of Harley fitted the name Ridgway to its niche
+in his brain. So this was the audacious filibuster who had dared to
+fire on the trust flag, the man he had come West to ruin and to humble.
+
+“I think you will have to include me, Mr. Ridgway,” he said suavely.
+“What is done for my wife is done, also, for me.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+ON THE SNOW-TRAIL
+
+
+Aline had passed into the house, moved by an instinct which shrank from
+publicity in the inevitable personal meeting between her and her
+husband. Now, Harley, with the cavalier nod of dismissal, which only a
+multimillionaire can afford, followed her and closed the door. A
+passionate rush of blood swept Ridgway’s face. He saw red as he stood
+there with eyes burning into that door which had been shut in his face.
+The nails of his clenched fingers bit into his palms, and his muscles
+gathered themselves tensely. He had been cast aside, barred from the
+woman he loved by this septuagenarian, as carelessly as if he had no
+claim.
+
+And it came home to him that now he had no claim, none before the law
+and society. They had walked in Arcadia where shepherds pipe. They had
+taken life for granted as do the creatures of the woods, forgetful of
+the edicts of a world that had seemed far and remote. But that world
+had obtruded itself and shattered their dream. In the person of Simon
+Harley it had shut the door which was to separate him and her. Hitherto
+he had taken from life what he had wanted, but already he was grappling
+with the blind fear of a fate for once too strong for him.
+
+“Well, I’m damned if it isn’t Waring Ridgway,” called a mellow voice
+from across the gulch.
+
+The man named turned, and gradually the set lines of his jaw relaxed.
+
+“I didn’t notice it was you, Sam. Better bring the horses across this
+side of that fringe of aspens.”
+
+The dismounted horseman followed directions and brought the floundering
+horses through, and after leaving them in the cleared place where
+Ridgway had cut his firewood he strolled leisurely forward to meet the
+mine-owner. He was a youngish man, broad of shoulder and slender of
+waist, a trifle bowed in the legs from much riding, but with an elastic
+sufficiency that promised him the man for an emergency, a pledge which
+his steady steel-blue eyes, with the humorous lines about the corners,
+served to make more valuable. His apparel suggested the careless
+efficiency of the cow-man, from the high-heeled boots into which were
+thrust his corduroys to the broad-brimmed white Stetson set on his
+sunreddened wavy hair. A man’s man, one would vote him at first sight,
+and subsequent impressions would not contradict the first.
+
+“Didn’t know you were down in this neck of woods, Waring,” he said
+pleasantly, as they shook hands.
+
+An onlooker might have noticed that both of them gripped hands heartily
+and looked each other squarely in the eye.
+
+“I came down on business and got caught in the blizzard on my way back.
+Came on her freezing in the machine and brought her here along with me.
+I had my eye on that slide. The snow up there didn’t look good to me,
+and the grub was about out, anyhow, so I was heading for the C B Ranch
+when I sighted you.”
+
+“Golden luck for her. I knew it was a chance in a million that she was
+still alive, but Harley wanted to take it. Say, that old fellow’s made
+of steel wire. Two of my boys are plugging along a mile or two behind
+us, but he stayed right with the game to a finish—and him
+seventy-three, mind you, and a New Yorker at that. The old boy rides
+like he was born in a saddle,” said Sam Yesler with enthusiasm.
+
+“I never said he was a quitter,” conceded Ridgway ungraciously.
+
+“You’re right he ain’t. And say, but he’s fond of his wife. Soon as he
+struck the ranch the old man butted out again into the blizzard to get
+her—slipped out before we knew it. The boys rounded him up wandering
+round the big pasture, and none too soon neither. All the time we had
+to keep herd on him to keep him from taking another whirl at it. He was
+like a crazy man to tackle it, though he must a-known it was suicide.
+Funny how a man takes a shine to a woman and thinks the sun rises and
+sets by her. Far, as I have been able to make out women are much of a
+sameness, though I ain’t setting up for a judge. Like as not this woman
+don’t care a hand’s turn for him.”
+
+“Why should she? He bought her with his millions, I suppose. What right
+has an old man like that with one foot in the grave to pick out a child
+and marry her? I tell you, Sam, there’s something ghastly about it.”
+
+“Oh, well, I reckon when she sold herself she knew what she was
+getting. It’s about an even thing—six of one and half a dozen of the
+other. There must be something rotten about a woman who will do a thing
+of that sort.”
+
+“Wait till you’ve seen her before passing judgment. And after you have
+you’ll apologize if you’re a white man for thinking such a thing about
+her,” the miner said hotly.
+
+Yesler looked at his friend in amiable surprise. “I don’t reckon we
+need to quarrel about Simon Harley’s matrimonial affairs, do we?” he
+laughed.
+
+“Not unless you want to say any harm of that lamb.”
+
+A glitter of mischief gleamed from the cattleman’s eyes. “Meaning
+Harley, Waring?”
+
+“You know who I mean. I tell you she’s an angel from heaven, pure as
+the driven snow.”
+
+“And I tell you that I’ll take your word for it without quarreling with
+you,” was the goodhumored retort. “What’s up, anyhow? I never saw you
+so touchy before. You’re a regular pepper-box.”
+
+The rescuers had brought food with them, and the party ate lunch before
+starting back. The cow-punchers of the C B had now joined them, both of
+them, as well as their horses, very tired with the heavy travel.
+
+“This here Marathon race business through three-foot snow ain’t for
+invalids like me and Husky,” one of them said cheerfully, with his
+mouth full of sandwich. “We’re also rans, and don’t even show for
+place.”
+
+Yet though two of them had, temporarily at least, been rescued from
+imminent danger, and success beyond their expectations had met the
+others, it was a silent party. A blanket of depression seemed to rest
+upon it, which the good stories of Yesler and the genial nonsense of
+his man, Chinn, were unable to lift. Three of them, at least, were
+brooding over what the morning had brought forth, and trying to realize
+what it might mean for them.
+
+“We’d best be going, I expect,” said Yesler at last. “We’ve got a right
+heavy bit of work cut out for us, and the horses are through feeding.
+We can’t get started any too soon for me.”
+
+Ridgway nodded silently. He knew that the stockman was dubious, as he
+himself was, about being able to make the return trip in safety. The
+horses were tired; so, too, were the men who had broken the heavy trail
+for so many miles, with the exception of Sam himself, who seemed built
+of whipcord and elastic. They would be greatly encumbered by the woman,
+for she would certainly give out during the journey. The one point in
+their favor was that they could follow a trail which had already been
+trodden down.
+
+Simon Harley helped his wife into the boy’s saddle on the back of the
+animal they had led, but his inexperience had to give way to Yesler’s
+skill in fitting the stirrups to the proper length for her feet. To
+Ridgway, who had held himself aloof during this preparation, the
+stockman now turned with a wave of his hand toward his horse.
+
+“You ride, Waring.”
+
+“No, I’m fresh.”
+
+“All right. We’ll take turns.”
+
+Ridgway led the party across the gulch, following the trail that had
+been swept by the slide. The cowboys followed him, next came Harley,
+his wife, and in the rear the cattleman. They descended the draw, and
+presently dipped over rolling ground to the plain beyond. The
+procession plowed steadily forward mile after mile, the pomes
+floundering through drifts after the man ahead.
+
+Chinn, who had watched him breasting the soft heavy blanket that lay on
+the ground so deep and hemmed them in, turned to his companion.
+
+“On the way coming I told you, Husky, we had the best man in Montana at
+our head. We got that beat now to a fare-you-well. We got the two best
+in this party, by crickey.”
+
+“He’s got the guts, all right, but there ain’t nothing on two legs can
+keep it up much longer,” replied the other. “If you want to know, I’m
+about all in myself.”
+
+“Here, too,” grunted the other. “And so’s the bronc.”
+
+It was not, however, until dusk was beginning to fall that the leader
+stopped. Yesler’s voice brought him up short in his tracks.
+
+“Hold on, Waring. The lady’s down.”
+
+Ridgway strode back past the exhausted cowboys and Harley, the latter
+so beaten with fatigue that he could scarce cling to the pommel of his
+saddle.
+
+“I saw it coming. She’s been done for a long time, but she hung on like
+a thoroughbred,” explained Yesler from the snow-bank where Aline had
+fallen.
+
+He had her in his arms and was trying to get at a flask of whisky in
+his hip-pocket.
+
+“All right. I’ll take care of her, Sam. You go ahead with your horse
+and break trail. I don’t like the way this wind is rising. It’s wiping
+out the path you made when you broke through. How far’s the ranch now?”
+
+“Close to five miles.”
+
+Both men had lowered their voices almost to a whisper.
+
+“It’s going to be a near thing, Sam. Your men are played out. Harley
+will never make it without help. From now on every mile will be worse
+than the last.”
+
+Yesler nodded quietly. “Some one has got to go ahead for help. That’s
+the only way.”
+
+“It will have to be you, of course. You know the road best and can get
+back quickest. Better take her pony. It’s the fittest.”
+
+The owner of the C B hesitated an instant before he answered. He was
+the last man in the world to desert a comrade that was down, but his
+common sense told him his friend had spoken wisely. The only chance for
+the party was to get help to it from the ranch.
+
+“All right. If anybody plays out beside her try to keep him going. If
+it comes to a showdown leave him for me to pick up. Don’t let him stop
+the whole outfit.”
+
+“Sure. Better leave me that bottle of whisky. So-long.”
+
+“You’re going to ride, I reckon?”
+
+“Yes. I’ll have to.”
+
+“Get up on my horse and I’ll give her to you. That’s right Well, I’ll
+see you later.”
+
+And with that the stockman was gone. For long they could see him,
+plunging slowly forward through the drifts, getting always smaller and
+smaller, till distance and the growing darkness swallowed him.
+
+Presently the girl in Ridgway’s arms opened her eyes.
+
+“I heard what you and he said,” she told him quietly.
+
+“About what?” he smiled down into the white face that looked up into
+his.
+
+“You know. About our danger. I’m not afraid, not the least little bit.”
+
+“You needn’t be. We’re coming through, all right. Sam will make it to
+the ranch. He’s a man in a million.”
+
+“I don’t mean that. I’m not afraid, anyway, whether we do or not.”
+
+“Why?” he asked, his heart beating wildly.
+
+“I don’t know, but I’m not,” she murmured with drowsy content.
+
+But he knew if she did not. Her fear had passed because he was there,
+holding her in his arms, fighting to the last ounce of power in him for
+her life. She felt he would never leave her, and that, if it came to
+the worst, she would pass from life with him close to her. Again he
+knew that wild exultant beat of blood no woman before this one had ever
+stirred in him.
+
+Harley was the first to give up. He lurched forward and slipped from
+the saddle to the snow, and could not be cursed into rising. The man
+behind dismounted, put down his burden, and dragged the old man to his
+feet.
+
+“Here! This won’t do. You’ve got to stick it out.”
+
+“I can’t. I’ve reached my limit.” Then testily: “‘Are not my days few?
+Cease then, and let me alone,’” he added wearily, with his everready
+tag of Scripture.
+
+The instant the other’s hold on him relaxed the old man sank back.
+Ridgway dragged him up and cuffed him like a troublesome child. He knew
+this was no time for reasoning.
+
+“Are you going to lie down and quit, you old loafer? I tell you the
+ranch is only a mile or two. Here, get into the saddle.”
+
+By sheer strength the younger man hoisted him into the seat. He was
+very tired himself, but the vital sap of youth in him still ran strong
+in his blood. For a few yards farther they pushed on before Harley slid
+down again and his horse stopped.
+
+Ridgway passed him by, guiding his bronco in a half-circle through the
+snow.
+
+“I’ll send back help for you,” he promised.
+
+“It will be too late, but save her—save her,” the old man begged.
+
+“I will,” called back the other between set teeth.
+
+Chinn was the next to drop out, and after him the one he called Husky.
+Both their horses had been abandoned a mile or two back, too exhausted
+to continue. Each of them Ridgway urged to stick to the trail and come
+on as fast as they could.
+
+He knew the horse he was riding could not much longer keep going with
+the double weight, and when at length its strength gave out completely
+he went on afoot, carrying her in his arms as on that eventful night
+when he had saved her from the blizzard.
+
+It was so the rescue-party found him, still staggering forward with her
+like a man in a sleep, flesh and blood and muscles all protestant
+against the cruelty of his indomitable will that urged them on in spite
+of themselves. In a dream he heard Yesler’s cheery voice, gave up his
+burden to one of the rescuers, and found himself being lifted to a
+fresh horse. From this dream he awakened to find himself before the
+great fire of the living-room of the ranch-house, wakened from it only
+long enough to know that somebody was undressing him and helping him
+into bed.
+
+Nature, with her instinct for renewing life, saw to it that Ridgway
+slept round the clock. He arose fit for anything. His body, hard as
+nails, suffered no reaction from the terrific strain he had put upon
+it, and he went down to his breakfast with an appetite ravenous for
+whatever good things Yesler’s Chinese cook might have prepared for him.
+
+He found his host already at work on a juicy steak.
+
+“Mornin’,” nodded that gentleman. “Hope you feel as good as you look.”
+
+“I’m all right, barring a little stiffness in my muscles. I’ll feel
+good as the wheat when I’ve got outside of the twin steak to that one
+you have.”
+
+Yesler touched a bell, whereupon a soft-footed Oriental appeared,
+turned almond eyes on his proprietor, took orders and padded silently
+back to his kingdom—the kitchen. Almost immediately he reappeared with
+a bowl of oatmeal and a pitcher of cream.
+
+“Go to it, Waring.”
+
+His host waved him the freedom of the diningroom, and Ridgway fell to.
+Never before had food tasted so good. He had been too sleepy to eat
+last night, but now he made amends. The steak, the muffins, the coffee,
+were all beyond praise, and when he came to the buckwheat hot cakes,
+sandwiched with butter and drenched with real maple syrup, his
+satisfied soul rose up and called Hop Lee blessed. When he had
+finished, Sam capped the climax by shoving toward him his case of
+Havanas.
+
+Ridgway’s eyes glistened. “I haven’t smoked for days,” he explained,
+and after the smoke had begun to rise, he added: “Ask what you will,
+even to the half of my kingdom, it’s yours.”
+
+“Or half of the Consolidated’s,” amended his friend with twinkling
+eyes.
+
+“Even so, Sam,” returned the other equably. “And now, tell me how you
+managed to round us all up safely.”
+
+“You’ve heard, then, that we got the whole party in time?”
+
+“Yes, I’ve been talking with one of your enthusiastic riders that went
+out with you after us. He’s been flimflammed into believing you the
+greatest man in the United States. Tell me how you do it.”
+
+“Nick’s a good boy, but I reckon he didn’t tell you quite all that.”
+
+“Didn’t he? You should have heard him reel off your praises by the
+yard. I got the whole story of how you headed the relief-party after
+you had reached the ranch more dead than alive.”
+
+“Then, if you’ve got it, I don’t need to tell you. I WAS a bit worried
+about the old man. He was pretty far gone when we reached him, but he
+pulled through all right. He’s still sleeping like a top.”
+
+“Is he?” His guest’s hard gaze came round to meet his. “And the lady?
+Do you know how she stood it?”
+
+“My sister says she was pretty badly played out, but all she needs is
+rest. Nell put her in her own bed, and she, too, has been doing nothing
+but sleep.”
+
+Ridgway smoked out his cigar in silence then tossed it into the
+fireplace as he rose briskly.
+
+“I want to talk to Mesa over the phone, Sam.”
+
+“Can’t do it. The wires are down. This storm played the deuce with
+them.”
+
+“The devil! I’ll have to get through myself then.”
+
+“Forget business for a day or two, Waring, and take it easy up here,”
+counseled his host.
+
+“Can’t do it. I have to make arrangements to welcome Simon Harley to
+Mesa. The truth is, Sam, that there are several things that won’t wait.
+I’ve got to frame them up my way. Can you get me through to the
+railroad in time to catch the Limited?”
+
+“I think so. The road has been traveled for two or three days. If you
+really must go. I hate to have you streak off like this.”
+
+“I’d like to stay, Sam, but I can’t. For one thing, there’s that
+senatorial fight coming on. Now that Harley’s on the ground in person,
+I’ll have to look after my fences pretty close. He’s a good fighter,
+and he’ll be out to win.”
+
+“After what you’ve done for him. Don’t you think that will make a
+difference, Waring?”
+
+His friend laughed without mirth. “What have I done for him? I left him
+in the snow to die, and while a good many thousand other people would
+bless me for it, probably he has a different point of view.”
+
+“I was thinking of what you did for his wife.”
+
+“You’ve said it exactly. I did it for her, not for him. I’ll accept
+nothing from Harley on that account. He is outside of the friendship
+between her and me, and he can’t jimmy his way in.”
+
+Yesler shrugged his shoulders. “All right. I’ll order a rig hitched for
+you and drive you over myself. I want to talk over this senatorial
+fight anyhow. The way things look now it’s going to be the rottenest
+session of the legislature we’ve ever had. Sometimes I’m sick of being
+mixed up in the thing, but I got myself elected to help straighten out
+things, and I’m certainly going to try.”
+
+“That’s right, Sam. With a few good fighters like you we can win out.
+Anything to beat the Consolidated.”
+
+“Anything to keep our politics decent,” corrected the other. “I’ve got
+nothing against the Consolidated, but I won’t lie down and let it or
+any other private concern hog-tie this State—not if I can help it,
+anyhow.”
+
+Behind wary eyes Ridgway studied him. He was wondering how far this man
+would go as his tool. Sam Yesler held a unique position in the State.
+His influence was commanding among the sturdy old-time population
+represented by the non-mining interests of the smaller towns and open
+plains. He must be won at all hazards to lend it in the impending fight
+against Harley. The mine-owner knew that no thought of personal gain
+would move him. He must be made to feel that it was for the good of the
+State that the Consolidated be routed. Ridgway resolved to make him see
+it that way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+BACK FROM ARCADIA
+
+
+The president of the Mesa Ore-producing Company stepped from the
+parlor-car of the Limited at the hour when all wise people are taking
+life easy after a good dinner. He did not, however, drive to his club,
+but took a cab straight for his rooms, where he had telegraphed Eaton
+to meet him with the general superintendent of all his properties and
+his private secretary, Smythe. For nearly a week his finger had been
+off the pulse of the situation, and he wanted to get in touch again as
+soon as possible. For in a struggle as tense as the one between him and
+the trust, a hundred vital things might have happened in that time. He
+might be coming back to catastrophe and ruin, brought about while he
+had been a prisoner to love in that snow-bound cabin.
+
+Prisoner to love he had been and still was, but the business men who
+met him at his rooms, fellow adventurers in the forlorn hope he had
+hitherto led with such signal success, could have read nothing of this
+in the marble, chiseled face of their sagacious general, so indomitable
+of attack and insatiate of success. His steel-hard eyes gave no hint of
+the Arcadia they had inhabited so eagerly a short twenty-four hours
+before. The intoxicating madness he had known was chained deep within
+him. Once more he had a grip on himself; was sheathed in a cannonproof
+plate armor of selfishness. No more magic nights of starshine,
+breathing fire and dew; no more lifted moments of exaltation stinging
+him to a pulsating wonder at life’s wild delight. He was again the
+inexorable driver of men, with no pity for their weaknesses any more
+than for his own.
+
+The men whom he found waiting for him at his rooms were all young
+Westerners picked out by him because he thought them courageous,
+unscrupulous and loyal. Like him, they were privateers in the seas of
+commerce, and sailed under no flag except the one of insurrection he
+had floated. But all of them, though they were associated with him and
+hoped to ride to fortune on the wave that carried him there, recognized
+themselves as subordinates in the enterprises he undertook. They were
+merely heads of departments, and they took orders like trusted clerks
+with whom the owner sometimes unbends and advises.
+
+Now he heard their reports, asked an occasional searching question, and
+swiftly gave decisions of far-reaching import. It was past midnight
+before he had finished with them, and instead of retiring for the sleep
+he might have been expected to need, he spent the rest of the night
+inspecting the actual workings of the properties he had not seen for
+six days. Hour after hour he passed examining the developments,
+sometimes in the breasts of the workings and again consulting with
+engineers and foremen in charge. Light was breaking in the sky before
+he stepped from the cage of the Jack Pot and boarded a street-car for
+his rooms. Cornishmen and Hungarians and Americans, going with their
+dinner-buckets to work, met him and received each a nod or a word of
+greeting from this splendidly built young Hermes in miners’ slops, who
+was to many of them, in their fancy, a deliverer from the slavery which
+the Consolidated was ready to force upon them.
+
+Once at his rooms, Ridgway took a cold bath, dressed carefully,
+breakfasted, and was ready to plunge into the mass of work which had
+accumulated during his absence at the mining camp of Alpine and the
+subsequent period while he was snowbound. These his keen, practical
+mind grasped and disposed of in crisp sentences. To his private
+secretary he rapped out order sharply and decisively.
+
+“Phone Ballard and Dalton I want to see them at once. Tell Murphy I
+won’t talk with him. What I said before I left was final. Write
+Cadwallader we can’t do business on the terms he proposes, but add that
+I’m willing to continue his Mary Kinney lease. Dictate a letter to
+Riley’s lawyer, telling him I can’t afford to put a premium on
+incompetence and negligence; that if his client was injured in the Jack
+Pot explosion, he has nobody but himself to blame for it. Otherwise, of
+course, I should be glad to pension him. Let me see the letter before
+you send it. I don’t want anything said that will offend the union.
+Have two tons of good coal sent up to Riley’s house, and notify his
+grocer that all bills for the next three months may be charged to me.
+And, Smythe, ask Mr. Eaton to step this way.”
+
+Stephen Eaton, an alert, clear-eyed young fellow who served as fidus
+Achates to Ridgway, and was the secretary and treasurer of the Mesa
+Ore-producing Company, took the seat Smythe had vacated. He was
+good-looking, after a boyish, undistinguished fashion, but one disposed
+to be critical might have voted the chin not quite definite enough. He
+had been a clerk of the Consolidated, working for one hundred dollars a
+month, when Ridgway picked him out and set his feet in the way of
+fortune. He had done this out of personal liking, and, in return, the
+subordinate was frankly devoted to his chief.
+
+“Steve, my opinion is that Alpine is a false alarm. Unless I guess
+wrong, it is merely a surface proposition and low-grade at that.”
+
+“Miller says—”
+
+“Yes, I know what Miller says. He’s wrong. I don’t care if he is the
+biggest copper expert in the country.”
+
+“Then you won’t invest?”
+
+“I have invested—bought the whole outfit, lock, stock and barrel.”
+
+“But why? What do you want with it if the property is no good?” asked
+Eaton in surprise.
+
+Ridgway laughed shortly. “I don’t want it, but the Consolidated does.
+Two of their experts were up at Alpine last week, and both of them
+reported favorably. I’ve let it leak out to their lawyer, O’Malley,
+that Miller thought well of it; in fact, I arranged to let one of their
+spies steal a copy of his report to us.”
+
+“But when they know you have bought it?”
+
+“They won’t know till too late. I bought through a dummy. It seemed a
+pity not to let then have the property since they wanted it so badly,
+so this morning he sold out for me to the Consolidated at a profit of a
+hundred and fifty thousand.”
+
+Eaton grinned appreciatively. It was in startling finesse of this sort
+his chief excelled, and Stephen was always ready with applause.
+
+“I notice that Hobart slipped out of town last night. That is where he
+must have been going. He’ll be sick when he learns how you did him.”
+
+Ridgway permitted himself an answering smile. “I suppose it will
+irritate him a trifle, but that can’t be helped. I needed that money to
+get clear on that last payment for the Sherman Bell.”
+
+“Yes, I was worried about that. Notes have been piling up against us
+that must be met. There’s the Ransom note, too. It’s for a hundred
+thousand.”
+
+“He’ll extend it,” said the chief confidently.
+
+“He told me he would have to have his money when it came due. I’ve
+noticed he has been pretty close to Mott lately. I expect he has an
+arrangement with the Consolidated to push us.”
+
+“I’m watching him, Steve. Don’t worry about that. He did arrange to
+sell the note to Mott, but I stopped that little game.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“For a year I’ve had all the evidence of that big government timber
+steal of his in a safety-deposit vault. Before he sold, I had a few
+words with him. He changed his mind and decided he preferred to hold
+the notes. More, he is willing to let us have another hundred thousand
+if we have to have it.”
+
+Eaton’s delight bubbled out of him in boyish laughter. “You’re a
+wonder, Waring. There’s nobody like you. Can’t any of them touch
+you—not Harley himself, by Jove.”
+
+“We’ll have a chance to find that out soon, Steve.”
+
+“Yes, they say he’s coming out in person to run the fight against you.
+I hope not.”
+
+“It isn’t a matter of hoping any longer. He’s here,” calmly announced
+his leader.
+
+“Here! On the ground?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“But—he can’t be here without us knowing it.”
+
+“I’m telling you that I do know it.”
+
+“Have you seen him yourself?” demanded the treasurer incredulously.
+
+“Seen him, talked with him, cursed him and cuffed him,” announced
+Ridgway with a reminiscent gleam in his eye.
+
+“Er—what’s that you say?” gasped the astounded Eaton.
+
+“Merely that I have already met Simon Harley.”
+
+“But you said—”
+
+“—that I had cursed and cuffed him. That’s all right. I have.”
+
+The president of the Mesa Ore-producing Company leaned back with his
+thumbs in the armholes of his fancy waistcoat and smiled debonairly at
+his associate’s perplexed amazement.
+
+“Did you say—CUFFED him?”
+
+“That’s what I meant to say. I roughed him around quite a
+bit—manhandled him in general. But all FOR HIS GOOD, you know.”
+
+“For his good?” Eaton’s dazed brain tried to conceive the situation of
+a billionaire being mauled for his good, and gave it up in despair. If
+Steve Eaton worshipped anything, it was wealth. He was a born
+sycophant, and it was partly because his naive unstinted admiration had
+contributed to satisfy his chief’s vanity that the latter had made of
+him a confidant. Now he sat dumb before the lese-majeste of laying
+forcible hands upon the richest man in the world.
+
+“But, of course, you’re only joking,” he finally decided.
+
+“You haven’t been back twelve hours. Where COULD you have seen him?”
+
+“Nevertheless I have met him and been properly introduced by his wife.”
+
+“His wife?”
+
+“Yes, I picked her out of a snow-drift.”
+
+“Is this a riddle?”
+
+“If it is, I don’t know the answer, Steve. But it is a true one,
+anyhow, not made to order merely to astonish you.”
+
+“True that you picked Simon Harley’s wife out of a snow-drift and
+kicked him around?”
+
+“I didn’t say kicked, did I?” inquired the other, judicially. “But I
+rather think I did knee him some.”
+
+“Of course, I read all about his marriage two weeks ago to Miss Aline
+Hope. Did he bring her out here with him for the honeymoon?”
+
+“If he did, I euchred him out of it. She spent it with me alone in a
+miner’s cabin,” the other cried, malevolence riding triumph on his
+face.
+
+“Whenever you’re ready to explain,” suggested Eaton helplessly. “You’ve
+piled up too many miracles for me even to begin guessing them.”
+
+“You know I was snow-bound, but you did not know my only companion was
+this Aline Hope you speak of. I found her in the blizzard, and took her
+to an empty cabin near. She and her husband were motoring from
+Avalanche to Mesa, and the machine had broken down. Harley had gone for
+help and left her there alone when the blizzard came up. Three days
+later Sam Yesler and the old man broke trail through from the C B Ranch
+and rescued us.”
+
+It was so strange a story that it came home to Eaton piecemeal.
+
+“Three days—alone with Harley’s wife—and he rescued you himself.”
+
+“He didn’t rescue me any. I could have broken through any time I wanted
+to leave her. On the way back his strength gave out, and that was when
+I roughed him. I tried to bullyrag him into keeping on, but it was no
+go. I left him there, and Sam went back after him with a relief-party.”
+
+“You left him! With his wife?”
+
+“No!” cried Ridgway. “Do I look like a man to desert a woman on a
+snow-trail? I took her with me.”
+
+“Oh!” There was a significant silence before Eaton asked the question
+in his mind. “I’ve seen her pictures in the papers. Does she look like
+them?”
+
+His chief knew what was behind the question, and he knew, too, that
+Eaton might be taken to represent public opinion. The world would cast
+an eye of review over his varied and discreditable record with women.
+It would imagine the story of those three days of enforced confinement
+together, and it would look to the woman in the case for an answer to
+its suspicions. That she was young, lovely, and yet had sold herself to
+an old man for his millions, would go far in itself to condemn her; and
+he was aware that there were many who would accept her very childish
+innocence as the sophistication of an artist.
+
+Waring Ridgway put his arms akimbo on the table and leaned across with
+his steady eyes fastened on his friend.
+
+“Steve, I’m going to answer that question. I haven’t seen any pictures
+of her in the papers, but if they show a face as pure and true as the
+face of God himself then they are like her. You know me. I’ve got no
+apologies or explanations to make for the life I’ve led. That’s my
+business. But you’re my friend, and I tell you I would rather be hacked
+in pieces by Apaches than soil that child’s white soul by a single
+unclean breath. There mustn’t be any talk. Do you understand? Keep the
+story out of the newspapers. Don’t let any of our people gossip about
+it. I have told you because I want you to know the truth. If any one
+should speak lightly about this thing stop him at once. This is the one
+point on which Simon Harley and I will pull together. Any man who joins
+that child’s name with mine loosely will have to leave this camp—and
+suddenly.”
+
+“It won’t be the men—it will be the women that will talk.”
+
+“Then garble the story. Change that three days to three hours, Steve.
+Anything to stop their foul-clacking tongues!”
+
+“Oh, well! I dare say the story won’t get out at all, but if it does
+I’ll see the gossips get the right version. I suppose Sam Yesler will
+back it up.”
+
+“Of course. He’s a white man. And I don’t need to tell you that I’ll be
+a whole lot obliged to you, Stevie.”
+
+“That’s all right. Sometimes I’m a white man, too, Waring,” laughed
+Steve. Ridgway circled the table and put a hand on the younger man’s
+shoulder affectionately. Steve Eaton was the one of all his associates
+for whom he had the closest personal feeling.
+
+“I don’t need to be told that, old pal,” he said quietly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+THE HONORABLE THOMAS B. PELTON
+
+
+It was next morning that Steve came into Ridgway’s offices with a copy
+of the Rocky Mountain Herald in his hands. As soon as the president of
+the Mesa Ore-producing Company was through talking with Dalton, the
+superintendent of the Taurus, about the best means of getting to the
+cage a quantity of ore he was looting from the Consolidated property
+adjoining, the treasurer plumped out with his news.
+
+“Seen to-day’s paper, Waring? It smokes out Pelton to a finish. They’ve
+moled out some facts we can’t get away from.”
+
+Ridgway glanced rapidly over the paper. “We’ll have to drop Pelton and
+find another candidate for the Senate. Sorry, but it can’t be helped.
+They’ve got his record down too fine. That affidavit from Quinton puts
+an end to his chances.”
+
+“He’ll kick like a bay steer.”
+
+“His own fault for not covering his tracks better. This exposure
+doesn’t help us any at best. If we still tried to carry Pelton, we
+should last about as long as a snowball in hell.”
+
+“Shall I send for him?”
+
+“No. He’ll be here as quick as he can cover the ground. Have him shown
+in as soon as he comes. And Steve—did Harley arrive on the eight-thirty
+this morning?”
+
+“Yes. He is putting up at the Mesa House. He reserved an entire floor
+by wire, so that he has bed-rooms, dining-rooms, parlors,
+reception-halls and private offices all together. The place is policed
+thoroughly, and nobody can get up without an order.”
+
+“I haven’t been thinking of going up and shooting him, even though it
+would be a blessing to the country,” laughed his chief.
+
+“No, but it is possible somebody else might. This town is full of
+ignorant foreigners who would hardly think twice of it. If he had asked
+my advice, it would have been to stay away from Mesa.”
+
+“He wouldn’t have taken it,” returned Ridgway carelessly. “Whatever
+else is true about him, Simon Harley isn’t a coward. He would have told
+you that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the permission of
+the distorted God he worships, and he would have come on the next
+train.”
+
+“Well, it isn’t my funeral,” contributed Steve airily.
+
+“All the same I’m going to pass his police patrols and pay a visit to
+the third floor of the Mesa House.”
+
+“You are going to compromise with him?” cried Eaton swiftly.
+
+“Compromise nothing, I’m going to pay a formal social call on Mrs.
+Harley, and respectfully hope that she has suffered no ill effects from
+her exposure to the cold.”
+
+Eaton made no comment, unless to whistle gently were one.
+
+“You think it isn’t wise?”
+
+“Well, is it?” asked Steve.
+
+“I think so. We’ll scotch the lying tongue of rumor by a strict
+observance of the conventions. Madam Grundy is padlocked when we reduce
+the situation to the absurdity of the common place.”
+
+“Perhaps you are right, if it doesn’t become too common commonplace.”
+
+“I think we may trust Simon Harley to see to that,” answered his chief
+with a grim smile “Obviously our social relations aren’t likely to be
+very intimate. Now it’s ‘Just before the battle mother,’ but once the
+big guns begin to boor we’ll neither of us be in the mood for functions
+social.”
+
+“You’ve established a sort of claim on him. It wouldn’t surprise me if
+he would meet you halfway in settling the trouble between you,” said
+Eaton thoughtfully.
+
+“I expect he would,” agreed Ridgway indifferently as he lit a cigar.
+
+“Well, then?”
+
+“The trouble is that I won’t meet him halfway. I can’t afford to be
+reasonable, Steve. Just suppose for an instant that I had been
+reasonable five years ago when this fight began. They would have bought
+me out for a miserable pittance of a hundred and fifty thousand or so.
+That would have been a reasonable figure then. You might put it now at
+five or six millions, and that would be about right. I don’t want their
+money. I want power, and I’d rather fight for it than not. Besides, I
+mean to make what I have already wrung from them a lever for getting
+more. I’m going to show Harley that he has met a man at last he can’t
+either freeze out or bully out. I’m going to let him and his bunch know
+I’m on earth and here to stay; that I can beat them at their own game
+to a finish.”
+
+“Did it ever occur to you, Waring, that it might pay to make this a
+limited round contest? You’ve won on points up to date by a mile, but
+in a finish fight endurance counts. Money is the same as endurance
+here, and that’s where they are long.”
+
+Eaton made this suggestion diffidently, for though he was a stockholder
+and official of the Mesa Ore-producing Company, he was not used to
+offering its head unasked advice. The latter, however, took it without
+a trace of resentment.
+
+“Glad of it, my boy. There’s no credit in beating a cripple.”
+
+To this jaunty retort Eaton had found no answer when Smythe opened the
+door to announce the arrival of the Honorable Thomas B. Pelton, very
+anxious for an immediate interview with Mr. Ridgway.
+
+“Show him in,” nodded the president, adding in an aside: “You better
+stay, Steve.”
+
+Pelton was a rotund oracular individual in silk hat and a Prince Albert
+coat of broadcloth. He regarded himself solemnly as a statesman because
+he had served two inconspicuous terms in the House at Washington. He
+was fond of proclaiming himself a Southern gentleman, part of which
+statement was unnecessary and part untrue. Like many from his section,
+he had a decided penchant for politics.
+
+“Have you seen the infamous libel in that scurrilous sheet of the
+gutters the Herald?” he demanded immediately of Ridgway.
+
+“Which libel? They don’t usually stop at one, colonel.”
+
+“The one, seh, which slanders my honorable name; which has the
+scoundrelly audacity to charge me with introducing the mining extension
+bill for venal reasons, seh.”
+
+“Oh! Yes, I’ve seen that. Rather an unfortunate story to come out just
+now.”
+
+“I shall force a retraction, seh, or I shall demand the satisfaction
+due a Southern gentleman.
+
+“Yes, I would, colonel,” replied Ridgway, secretly amused at the vain
+threats of this bag of wind which had been punctured.
+
+“It’s a vile calumny, an audacious and villainous lie.”
+
+“What part of it? I’ve just glanced over it, but the part I read seems
+to be true. That’s the trouble with it. If it were a lie you could
+explode it.”
+
+“I shall deny it over my signature.”
+
+“Of course. The trouble will be to get people to believe your denial
+with Quinton’s affidavit staring them in the face. It seems they have
+got hold of a letter, too, that you wrote. Deny it, of course, then lie
+low and give the public time to forget it.”
+
+“Do you mean that I should withdraw from the senatorial race?”
+
+“That’s entirely as you please, colonel, but I’m afraid you’ll find
+your support will slip away from you.”
+
+“Do you mean that YOU won’t support me, seh?”
+
+Ridgway locked his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair.
+“We’ve got to face facts, colonel. In the light of this exposure you
+can’t be elected.”
+
+“But I tell you, by Gad, seh, that I mean to deny it.”
+
+“Certainly. I should in your place,” agreed the mine-owner coolly. “The
+question is, how many people are going to believe you?”
+
+Tiny sweat-beads stood on the forehead of the Arkansan. His manner was
+becoming more and more threatening. “You pledged me your support. Are
+you going to throw me down, seh?”
+
+“You have thrown yourself down, Pelton. Is it my fault you bungled the
+thing and left evidence against you? Am I to blame because you wrote
+incriminating letters?”
+
+“Whatever I did was done for you,” retorted the cornered man
+desperately.
+
+“I beg your pardon. It was done for what was in it for you. The
+arrangement between us was purely a business one.”
+
+The coolness of his even voice maddened the harassed Pelton.
+
+“So I’m to get burnt drawing your chestnuts out of the fire, am I?
+You’re going to stand back and let my career be sacrificed, are you? By
+Gad, seh, I’ll show you whether I’ll be your catspaw,” screamed the
+congressman.
+
+“Use your common sense, Pelton, and don’t shriek like a fish-wife,”
+ordered Ridgway sharply. “No sane man floats a leaky ship. Go to
+drydock and patch up your reputation, and in a few years you’ll come
+out as good as new.”
+
+All his unprincipled life Pelton had compromised with honor to gain the
+coveted goal he now saw slipping from him. A kind of madness of despair
+surged up in him. He took a step threateningly toward the seated man,
+his hand slipping back under his coat-tails toward his hip pocket.
+Acridly his high voice rang out.
+
+“As a Southern gentleman, seh, I refuse to tolerate the imputations you
+cast upon me. I demand an apology here and now, seh.”
+
+Ridgway was on his feet and across the room like a flash.
+
+“Don’t try to bully ME, you false alarm. Call yourself a Southern
+gentleman! You’re a shallow scurvy impostor. No more like the real
+article than a buzzard is like an eagle. Take your hand from under that
+coat or I’ll break every bone in your flabby body.”
+
+Flabby was the word, morally no less than physically. Pelton quailed
+under that gaze which bored into him like a gimlet. The ebbing color in
+his face showed he could summon no reserve of courage sufficient to
+meet it. Slowly his empty hand came forth.
+
+“Don’t get excited, Mr. Ridgway. You have mistaken my purpose, seh. I
+had no intention of drawing,” he stammered with a pitiable attempt at
+dignity.
+
+“Liar,” retorted his merciless foe, crowding him toward the door.
+
+“I don’t care to have anything more to do with you. Our relations are
+at an end, seh,” quavered Pelton as he vanished into the outer once and
+beat a hasty retreat to the elevator.
+
+Ridgway returned to his chair, laughing ruefully. “I couldn’t help it,
+Steve. He would have it. I suppose I’ve made one more enemy.”
+
+“A nasty one, too. He’ll stick at nothing to get even.”
+
+“We’ll draw his fangs while there is still time. Get a good story in
+the Sun to the effect that I quarreled with him as soon as I discovered
+his connection with this mining extension bill graft. Have it in this
+afternoon’s edition, Steve. Better get Brayton to write it.”
+
+Steve nodded. “That’s a good idea. We may make capital out of it after
+all. I’ll have an editorial in, too. ‘We love him for the enemies he
+has made.’ How would that do for a heading?”
+
+“Good. And now we’ll have to look around for a candidate to put against
+Mott. I’m hanged if I know where we’ll find one.”
+
+Eaton had an inspiration.
+
+“I do?”
+
+“One that will run well, popular enough to catch the public fancy?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Who, then?”
+
+“Waring Ridgway.”
+
+The owner of the name stared at his lieutenant in astonishment, but
+slowly the fascination o the idea sank in.
+
+“By Jove! Why not?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+AN EVENING CALL
+
+
+“Says you’re to come right up, Mr. Ridgway,” the bell-hop reported, and
+after he had pocketed his tip, went sliding off across the polished
+floor to answer another call.
+
+The president of the Mesa Ore-producing Company turned with a
+good-humored smile to the chief clerk.
+
+“You overwork your boys, Johnson. I wasn’t through with that one. I’ll
+have to ask you to send another up to show me the Harley suite.”
+
+They passed muster under the eye of the chief detective, and, after the
+bell-boy had rung, were admitted to the private parlor where Simon
+Harley lay stretched on a lounge with his wife beside him. She had been
+reading, evidently aloud and when her visitor was announced rose with
+her finger still keeping the place in the closed book.
+
+The gaze she turned on him was of surprise, almost of alarm, so that
+the man on the threshold knew he was not expected.
+
+“You received my card?” he asked quickly.
+
+“No. Did you send one?” Then, with a little gesture of half-laughing
+irritation: “It must have gone to Mr. Harvey again. He is Mr. Harley’s
+private secretary, and ever since we arrived it has been a comedy of
+errors. The hotel force refuses to differentiate.”
+
+“I must ask you to accept my regrets for an unintentional intrusion,
+Mrs. Harley. When I was told to come up, I could not guess that my card
+had gone amiss.”
+
+The great financier had got to his feet and now came forward with
+extended hand.
+
+“Nevertheless we are glad to see you, Mr. Ridgway, and to get the
+opportunity to express our thanks for all that you have done for us.”
+
+The cool fingers of the younger man touched his lightly before they met
+those of his wife.
+
+“Yes, we are very glad, indeed, to see you, Mr. Ridgway,” she added to
+her husband’s welcome.
+
+“I could not feel quite easy in my mind without hearing from your own
+lips that you are none the worse for the adventures you have suffered,”
+their visitor explained after they had found seats.
+
+“Thanks to you, my wife is quite herself again, Mr. Ridgway,” Harley
+announced from the davenport. “Thanks also to God, who so mercifully
+shelters us beneath the shadow of His wing.”
+
+But her caller preferred to force from Aline’s own lips this affidavit
+of health. Even his audacity could not ignore his host entirely, but it
+gave him the least consideration possible. To the question which still
+rested in his eyes the girl-wife answered shyly.
+
+“Indeed, I am perfectly well. I have done nothing but sleep to-day and
+yesterday. Miss Yesler was very good to me. I do not know how I can
+repay the great kindness of so many friends,” she said with a swift
+descent of fluttering lashes to the soft cheeks upon which a faint
+color began to glow.
+
+“Perhaps they find payment for the service in doing it for you,” he
+suggested.
+
+“Yet, I shall take care not to forget it,” Harley said pointedly.
+
+“Indeed!” Ridgway put it with polite insolence, the hostility in his
+face scarcely veiled.
+
+“It has pleased Providence to multiply my portion so abundantly that I
+can reward those well who serve me.”
+
+“At how much do you estimate Mrs. Harley’s life?” his rival asked with
+quiet impudence.
+
+In the course of the past two days Aline had made the discovery that
+her husband and her rescuer were at swords drawn in a business way.
+This had greatly distressed her, and in her innocence she had resolved
+to bring them together. How could her inexperience know that she might
+as well have tried to induce the lion and the lamb to lie down together
+peaceably? Now she tried timidly to drift the conversation from the
+awkwardness into which Harley’s suggestion of a reward and his
+opponent’s curt retort had blundered it.
+
+“I hope you did not find upon your return that your business was
+disarranged so much as you feared it might be by your absence.”
+
+“I found my affairs in very good condition,” Ridgway smiled. “But I am
+glad to be back in time to welcome to Mesa you—and Mr. Harley.”
+
+“It seems so strange a place,” the girl ventured, with a hesitation
+that showed her anxiety not to offend his local pride. “You see I never
+before was in a place where there was no grass and nothing green in
+sight. And to-night, when I looked out of the window and saw streams of
+red-hot fire running down hills, I thought of Paradise Lost and Dante.
+I suppose it doesn’t seem at all uncanny to you?”
+
+“At night sometimes I still get that feeling, but I have to cultivate
+it a bit,” he confessed. “My sober second thought insists that those
+molten rivers are merely business, refuse disgorged as lava from the
+great smelters.”
+
+“I looked for the sun to-day through the pall of sulphur smoke that
+hangs so heavy over the town, but instead I saw a London gas-lamp
+hanging in the heavens. Is it always so bad?”
+
+“Not when the drift of the wind is right. In fact, a day like this is
+quite unusual.”
+
+“I’m glad of that. I feel more cheerful in the sunshine. I know that’s
+a bit of the child still left in me. Mr. Harley takes all days alike.”
+
+The Wall Street operator was in slippers and house-jacket. His wife,
+too, was dressed comfortably in some soft clinging stuff. Their visitor
+saw that they had disposed themselves for a quiet uninterrupted evening
+by the fireside. The domesticity of it all stirred the envy in him. He
+did not want her to be contented and at peace with his enemy. Something
+deeper than his vanity cried out in protest against it.
+
+She was still making talk against the gloom of the sulphur fog which
+seemed to have crept into the spirit of the room.
+
+“We were reading before you came in, Mr. Ridgway. I suppose you read a
+good deal. Mr. Harley likes to have me read aloud to him when he is
+tired.”
+
+An impulse came upon Ridgway to hear her, some such impulse as makes a
+man bite on sore tooth even though he knows he must pay later for it.
+
+“Will you not go on with your reading? I should like to hear it. I
+really should.”
+
+She was a little taken aback, but she looked inquiringly at her
+husband, who bowed silently.
+
+“I was just beginning the fifty-ninth psalm. We have been reading the
+book through. Mr. Harley finds great comfort in it,” she explained.
+
+Her eyes fell to the printed page and her clear, sweet voice took up
+the ancient tale of vengeance.
+
+“Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God: defend me from them that rise
+up against me. Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me
+from bloody men.
+
+“For, lo, they lie in wait for my soul: the mighty are gathered against
+me; not for my transgression, nor for my sin, O Lord. They run and
+prepare themselves without my fault: awake to help me, and behold.
+
+“Thou, therefore, O Lord God of Hosts, the God of Israel, awake to
+visit all the heathen: be not merciful to any wicked transgressors.
+Selah.”
+
+Ridgway glanced across in surprise at the strong old man lying on the
+lounge. His hands were locked in front of him, and his gaze rested
+peacefully on the fair face of the child reading. His foe’s mind swept
+up the insatiable cruel years that lay behind this man, and he marveled
+that with such a past he could still hold fast to that simple faith of
+David. He wondered whether this ruthless spoiler went back to the Old
+Testament for the justification of his life, or whether his credo had
+given the impulse to his career. One thing he no longer doubted: Simon
+Harley believed his Bible implicitly and literally, and not only the
+New Testament.
+
+“For the sin of their mouth and the words of their lips even be taken
+in their pride: and for cursing and lying which they speak.
+
+“Consume them in wrath, consume them, that they may not be: and let
+them know that God ruleth in Jacob unto the ends of the earth.”
+
+The fresh young girlish voice died away into silence. Harley,
+apparently deep in meditation, gazed at the ceiling. His guest felt a
+surge of derision at this man who thought he had a compact with God to
+rule the world for his benefit.
+
+“I am sure Mr. Harley must enjoy the Psalms a great deal,” he said
+ironically, but it was in simple faith the young wife answered eagerly:
+
+“He does. He finds so much in them that is applicable to life.”
+
+“I can see how he might,” agreed the young man.
+
+“Few people take their religion so closely into their every-day lives
+as he does,” she replied in a low voice, seeing that her husband was
+lost in thought.
+
+“I am sure you are right.”
+
+“He is very greatly misunderstood, Mr. Ridgway. I am sure if people
+knew how good he is— But how can they know when the newspapers are so
+full of falsehoods about him? And the magazines are as bad, he says. It
+seems to be the fashion to rake up bitter things to say about prominent
+business men. You must have noticed it.”
+
+“Yes. I believe I have noticed that,” he answered with a grim little
+laugh.
+
+“Don’t you think it could be explained to these writers? They can’t
+WANT to distort the truth. It must be they don’t know.”
+
+“You must not take the muckrakers too seriously. They make a living
+roasting us. A good deal of what they say is true in a way. Personally,
+I don’t object to it much. It’s a part of the penalty of being
+successful. That’s how I look at it.”
+
+“Do they say bad things about you, too?” she asked in open-eyed
+surprise.
+
+“Occasionally,” he smiled. “When they think I’m important enough.”
+
+“I don’t see how they can,” he heard her murmur to herself.
+
+“Oh, most of what they say is true.”
+
+“Then I know it can’t be very bad,” she made haste to answer.
+
+“You had better read it and see.”
+
+“I don’t understand business at all,” she said
+
+“But—sometimes it almost frightens me. Business isn’t really like war,
+is it?”
+
+“A good deal like it. But that need not frighten you. All life is a
+battle—sometimes, at least. Success implies fighting.”
+
+“And does that in turn imply tragedy—for the loser?”
+
+“Not if one is a good loser. We lose and make another start.”
+
+“But if success is a battle, it must be gained at the expense of
+another.”
+
+“Sometimes. But you must look at it in a big way.” The secretary of the
+trust magnate had come in and was in low-toned conversation with him.
+The visitor led her to the nearest window and drew back the curtains so
+that they looked down on the lusty life of the turbid young city, at
+the lights in the distant smelters and mills, at the great hill
+opposite, with its slagdumps, gallows-frames and shaft-houses black
+against the dim light, which had yielded its millions and millions of
+tons of ore for the use of mankind. “All this had to be fought for. It
+didn’t grow of itself. And because men fought for it, the place is what
+it is. Sixty thousand people live here, fed by the results of the
+battle. The highest wages in the world are paid the miners here. They
+live in rough comfort and plenty, whereas in the countries they came
+from they were underpaid and underfed. Is that not good?”
+
+“Yes,” she admitted.
+
+“Life for you and for me must be different, thank God. You are in the
+world to make for the happiness of those you meet. That is good. But
+unless I am to run away from my work, what I do must make some unhappy.
+I can’t help that if I am to do big things. When you hear people
+talking of the harm I do, you will remember what I have told you
+to-night, and you will think that a man and his work cannot be judged
+by isolated fragments.”
+
+“Yes,” she breathed softly, for she knew that this man was saying
+good-by to her and was making his apologia.
+
+“And you will remember that no matter how bitter the fight may grow
+between me and Mr. Harley, it has nothing to do with you. We shall
+still be friends, though we may never meet again.”
+
+“I shall remember that, too,” he heard her murmur.
+
+“You have been hoping that Mr. Harley and I would be friends. That is
+impossible. He came out here to crush me. For years his subordinates
+have tried to do this and failed. I am the only man alive that has ever
+resisted him successfully. I don’t underestimate his power, which is
+greater than any czar or emperor that ever lived, but I don’t think he
+will succeed. I shall win because I understand the forces against me.
+He will lose because he scorns those against him.”
+
+“I am sorry. Oh, I am so sorry,” she wailed, gently as a breath of
+summer wind. For she saw now that the cleavage between them was too
+wide for a girl’s efforts to bridge.
+
+“That I am going to win?” he smiled gravely.
+
+“That you must be enemies; that he came here to ruin you, since you say
+he did.”
+
+“You need not be too hard on him for that. By his code I am a
+freebooter and a highwayman. Business offers legitimate ways of
+robbery, and I transgress them. His ways are not my ways, and mine are
+not his, but it is only fair to say that his are the accepted ones.”
+
+“I don’t understand it at all. You are both good men. I know you are.
+Surely you need not be enemies.”
+
+But she knew she could hope for no reassurance from the man beside her.
+
+Presently she led him back across the big room to the fireplace near
+where her husband lay. His secretary had gone, and he was lying resting
+on the lounge. He opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Has Mr. Ridgway
+been pointing out to you the places of interest?” he asked quietly.
+
+“Yes, dear.” The last word came hesitantly after the slightest of
+pauses. “He says he must be going now.”
+
+The head of the greatest trust on earth got to his feet and smiled
+benignantly as he shook hands with the departing guest. “I shall hope
+to see you very soon and have a talk regarding business, Mr. Ridgway,”
+he said.
+
+“Whenever you like, Mr. Harley.” To the girl he said merely, “Good
+night,” and was gone.
+
+The old man put an arm affectionately across his young wife’s shoulder.
+
+“Shall we read another psalm, my dear? Or are you tired?”
+
+She repressed the little shiver that ran through her before she
+answered wearily. “I am a little tired. If you don’t mind I would like
+to retire, please.”
+
+He saw her as far as the door of her apartments and left her with her
+maid after he had kissed the cold cheek she dutifully turned toward
+him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+HARLEY MAKES A PROPOSITION
+
+
+Apparently the head of the great trust intended to lose no time in
+having that business talk with Ridgway, which he had graciously
+promised the latter. Eaton and his chief were busy over some
+applications for leases when Smythe came into the room with a letter.
+
+“Messenger-boy brought it; said it was important,” he explained.
+
+Ridgway ripped open the envelope, read through the letter swiftly, and
+tossed it to Eaton. His eyes had grown hard and narrow.
+
+“Write to Mr. Hobart that I am sorry I haven’t time to call on Mr.
+Harley at the Consolidated offices, as he suggests. Add that I expect
+to be in my offices all morning, and shall be glad to make an
+appointment to talk with Mr. Harley here, if he thinks he has any
+business with me that needs a personal interview.”
+
+Smythe’s leathery face had as much expression as a blank wall, but
+Eaton gasped. The unparalleled audacity of flinging the billionaire’s
+overture back in his face left him for the moment speechless. He knew
+that Ridgway had tempted Providence a hundred times without coming to
+disaster, but surely this was going too far. Any reasonable compromise
+with the great trust builder would be cause for felicitation. He had
+confidence in his chief to any point in reason, but he could not blind
+himself to the fact that the wonderful successes he had gained were
+provisional rather than final. He likened them to Stonewall Jackson’s
+Shenandoah raid, very successful in irritating, disorganizing and
+startling the enemy, but with no serious bearing on the final
+inevitable result. In the end Harley would crush his foes if he set in
+motion the whole machinery of his limitless resources. That was Eaton’s
+private opinion, and he was very much of the feeling that this was an
+opportune time to get in out of the rain.
+
+“Don’t you think we had better consider that answer before we send it,
+Waring?” he suggested in a low voice.
+
+His chief nodded a dismissal to the secretary before answering.
+
+“I have considered it.”
+
+“But—surely it isn’t wise to reject his advances before we know what
+they are.”
+
+“I haven’t rejected them. I’ve simply explained that we are doing
+business on equal terms. Even if I meant to compromise, it would pay me
+to let him know he doesn’t own me.”
+
+“He may decide not to offer his proposition.”
+
+“It wouldn’t worry me if he did.”
+
+Eaton knew he must speak now if his protest were to be of any avail.
+“It would worry me a good deal. He has shown an inclination to be
+friendly. This answer is like a slap in the face.”
+
+“Is it?”
+
+“Doesn’t it look like that to you?”
+
+Ridgway leaned back in his chair and looked thoughtfully at his friend.
+“Want to sell out, Steve?”
+
+“Why—what do you mean?” asked the surprised treasurer.
+
+“If you do, I’ll pay anything in reason for your stock.” He got up and
+began to pace the floor with long deliberate strides. “I’m a born
+gambler, Steve. It clears my head to take big chances. Give me a good
+fight on my hands with the chances against me, and I’m happy. You’ve
+got to take the world by the throat and shake success out of it if
+you’re going to score heavily. That’s how Harley made good years ago.
+Read the story of his life. See the chances he took. He throttled
+combinations a dozen times as strong as his. Some people say he was an
+accident. Don’t you believe it. Accidents like him don’t happen. He won
+because he was the biggest, brainiest, most daring and unscrupulous
+operator in the field. That’s why I’m going to win—if I do win.”
+
+“Yes, if you win.”
+
+“Well, that’s the chance I take,” flung back the other as he swung
+buoyantly across the room. “But YOU don’t need to take it. If you want,
+you can get out now at the top market price. I feel it in my bones I’m
+going to win; but if you don’t feel it, you’d be a fool to take
+chances.”
+
+Eaton’s mercurial temperament responded with a glow.
+
+“No, sir. I’ll sit tight. I’m no quitter.”
+
+“Good for you, Steve. I knew it. I’ll tell you now that I would have
+hated like hell to see you leave me. You’re the only man I can rely on
+down to the ground, twenty-four hours of every day.”
+
+The answer was sent, and Eaton’s astonishment at his chief’s temerity
+changed to amazement when the great Harley, pocketing his pride, asked
+for an appointment, and appeared at the offices of the Mesa
+Ore-producing Company at the time set. That Ridgway, who was busy with
+one of his superintendents, should actually keep the most powerful man
+in the country waiting in an outer office while he finished his
+business with Dalton seemed to him insolence florescent.
+
+“Whom the gods would destroy,” he murmured to himself as the only
+possible explanation, for the reaction of his enthusiasm was on him.
+
+Nor did his chief’s conference with Dalton show any leaning toward
+compromise. Ridgway had sent for his engineer to outline a program in
+regard to some ore-veins in the Sherman Bell, that had for months been
+in litigation between the two big interests at Mesa. Neither party to
+the suit had waited for the legal decision, but each of them had put a
+large force at work stoping out the ore. Occasional conflicts had
+occurred when the men of the opposing factions came in touch, as they
+frequently did, since crews were at work below and above each other at
+every level. But none of these as yet had been serious.
+
+“Dalton, I was down last night to see that lease of Heyburn’s on the
+twelfth level of the Taurus. The Consolidated will tap our workings
+about noon to-day, just below us. I want you to turn on them the
+air-drill pipe as soon as they break through. Have a lot of loose rock
+there mixed with a barrel of lime. Let loose the air pressure full on
+the pile, and give it to their men straight. Follow them up to the end
+of their own tunnel when they retreat, and hold it against them. Get
+control of the levels above and below, too. Throw as many men as you
+can into their workings, and gut them till there is no ore left.”
+
+Dalton had the fighting edge. “You’ll stand by me, no matter what
+happens?”
+
+“Nothing will happen. They’re not expecting trouble. But if anything
+does, I’ll see you through. Eaton is your witness that I ordered it.”
+
+“Then it’s as good as done, Mr. Ridgway,” said Dalton, turning away.
+
+“There may be bloodshed,” suggested Eaton dubiously, in a low voice.
+
+Ridgway’s laugh had a touch of affectionate contempt. “Don’t cross
+bridges till you get to them, Steve. Haven’t you discovered, man, that
+the bold course is always the safe one? It’s the quitter that loses out
+every time. The strong man gets there; the weak one falls down. It’s as
+invariable as the law of gravity.” He got up and stretched his broad
+shoulders in a deep breath. “Now for Mr. Harley. Send him in, Eaton.”
+
+That morning Simon Harley had done two things for many years foreign to
+his experience: He had gone to meet another man instead of making the
+man come to him, and he had waited the other man’s pleasure in an outer
+office. That he had done so implied a strong motive.
+
+Ridgway waved Harley to a chair without rising to meet him. The eyes of
+the two men fastened, wary and unwavering. They might have been jungle
+beasts of prey crouching for the attack, so tense was their attention.
+The man from Broadway was the first to speak.
+
+“I have called, Mr. Ridgway, to arrange, if possible, a compromise. I
+need hardly say this is not my usual method, but the circumstances are
+extremely unusual. I rest under so great a personal obligation to you
+that I am willing to overlook a certain amount of youthful
+presumption.” His teeth glittered behind a lip smile, intended to give
+the right accent to the paternal reproof. “My personal obligation—”
+
+“What obligation? I left you to die in the snow.’,
+
+“You forget what you did for Mrs. Harley.”
+
+“You may eliminate that,” retorted the younger man curtly. “You are
+under no obligations whatever to me.”
+
+“That is very generous of you, Mr. Ridgway, but—”
+
+Ridgway met his eyes directly, cutting his sentence as with a knife.
+“‘Generous’ is the last word to use. It is not a question of generosity
+at all. What I mean is that the thing I did was done with no reference
+whatever to you. It is between me and her alone. I refuse to consider
+it as a service to you, as having anything at all to do with you. I
+told you that before. I tell you again.”
+
+Harley’s spirit winced. This bold claim to a bond with his wife that
+excluded him, the scornful thrust of his enemy—he was already beginning
+to consider him in that light rather than as a victim—had touched the
+one point of human weakness in this money-making Juggernaut. He saw
+himself for the moment without illusions, an old man and an unlovable
+one, without near kith or kin. He was bitterly aware that the child he
+had married had been sold to him by her guardian, under fear of
+imminent ruin, before her ignorance of the world had given her
+experience to judge for herself. The money and the hidden hunger of
+sentiment he wasted on her brought him only timid thanks and wan
+obedience. But for this man, with his hateful, confident youth, he had
+seen the warm smile touch her lips and the delicate color rose her
+cheeks. Nay, he had seen more her arms around his neck and her, warm
+breath on his cheek. They had lived romance, these two, in the days
+they had been alone together. They had shared danger and the joys of
+that Bohemia of youth from which he was forever excluded. It was his
+resolve to wipe out by financial favors—he could ruin the fellow later
+if need be—any claims of Ridgway upon her gratitude or her foolish
+imagination. He did not want the man’s appeal upon her to carry the
+similitude of martyrdom as well as heroism.
+
+“Yet, the fact remains that it was a service”—his thin lips smiled. “I
+must be the best judge of that, I think. I want to be perfectly frank,
+Mr. Ridgway. The Consolidated is an auxiliary enterprise so far as I am
+concerned, but I have always made it a rule to look after details when
+it became necessary. I came to Montana to crush you. I have always
+regarded you as a menace to our legitimate interests, and I had quite
+determined to make an end of it. You are a good fighter, and you’ve
+been on the ground in person, which counts for a great deal. But you
+must know that if I give myself to it in earnest, you are a ruined
+man.”
+
+The Westerner laughed hardily. “I hear you say it.”
+
+“But you don’t believe,” added the other quietly. “Many men have heard
+and not believed. They have KNOWN when it was too late.
+
+“If you don’t mind, I’ll buy my experience instead of borrowing it,”
+Ridgway flung back flippantly.
+
+“One moment, Mr. Ridgway. I have told you my purpose in coming to
+Montana. That purpose no longer exists. Circumstances have completely
+altered my intentions. The finger of God is in it. He has not brought
+us together thus strangely, except to serve some purpose of His own. I
+think I see that purpose. ‘The stone which the builders refused is
+become the headstone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing; it is
+marvelous in our eyes,’” he quoted unctiously. “I am convinced that it
+is a waste of good material to crush you; therefore I desire to effect
+a consolidation with you, buy all the other copper interests of any
+importance in the country, and put you at the head of the resulting
+combination.”
+
+In spite of himself, Ridgway’s face betrayed him. It was a magnificent
+opportunity, the thing he had dreamed of as the culmination of a
+lifetime of fighting. Nobody knew better than he on how precarious a
+footing he stood, on how slight a rock his fortunes might be wrecked.
+Here was his chance to enter that charmed, impregnable inner circle of
+finance that in effect ruled the nation. That Harley’s suave
+friendliness would bear watching he did not doubt for a moment, but,
+once inside, so his vital youth told him proudly, he would see to it
+that the billionaire did not betray him. A week ago he could have asked
+nothing better than this chance to bloat himself into a some-day
+colossus. But now the thing stuck in his gorge. He understood the
+implied obligation. Payment for his service to Aline Harley was to be
+given, and the ledger balanced. Well, why not? Had he not spent the
+night in a chaotic agony of renunciation? But to renounce voluntarily
+was one thing, to be bought off another.
+
+He looked up and met Harley’s thin smile, the smile that on Wall Street
+was a synonym for rapacity and heartlessness, in the memory of which
+men had committed murder and suicide. On the instant there jumped
+between him and his ambition the face that had worked magic on him.
+What a God’s pity that such a lamb should be cast to this ravenous
+wolf! He felt again her arms creeping round his neck, the divine trust
+of her lovely eyes. He had saved her when this man who called himself
+her husband had left her to perish in the storm. He had made her happy,
+as she had never been in all her starved life. Had she not promised
+never to forget, and was there not a deeper promise in her wistful eyes
+that the years could not wipe out? She was his by every right of
+natural law. By God! he would not sell his freedom of choice to this
+white haired robber!
+
+“I seldom make mistakes in my judgment of men, Mr. Ridgway,” the oily
+voice ran on. “No small share of such success as it has been given me
+to attain has been due to this instinct for putting my finger on the
+right man. I am assured that in you I find one competent for the great
+work lying before you. The opportunity is waiting; I furnish it, and
+you the untiring energy of youth to make the most of the chance.” His
+wolfish smile bared the tusks for a moment. “I find myself not so young
+as I was. The great work I have started is well under way. I must trust
+its completion to younger and stronger hands than mine. I intend to
+rest, to devote myself to my home, more directly to such philanthropic
+and educational work as God has committed to my hands.”
+
+The Westerner gave him look for look, his eyes burning to get over the
+impasse of the expressionless mask no man had ever penetrated. He began
+to see why nobody had ever understood Harley. He knew there would be no
+rest for that consuming energy this side of the grave. Yet the man
+talked as if he believed his own glib lies.
+
+“Consolidated is the watchword of the age; it means elimination of
+ruinous competition, and consequent harmony and reduced expense in
+management. Mr. Ridgway, may I count you with us? Together we should go
+far. Do you say peace or war?”
+
+The younger man rose, leaning forward with his strong, sinewy hands
+gripping the table. His face was pale with the repression of a rage
+that had been growing intense. “I say war, and without quarter. I don’t
+believe you can beat me. I defy you to the test. And if you should—even
+then I had rather go down fighting you than win at your side.”
+
+Simon Harley had counted acceptance a foregone conclusion, but he never
+winked a lash at the ringing challenge of his opponent. He met his
+defiance with an eye cold and steady as jade.
+
+“As you please, Mr. Ridgway. I wash my hands of your ruin, and when you
+are nothing but a broken gambler, you will remember that I offered you
+the greatest chance that ever came to a man of your age. You are one of
+those men, I see, that would rather be first in hell than second in
+heaven. So be it.” He rose and buttoned his overcoat.
+
+“Say, rather, that I choose to go to hell my own master and not as the
+slave of Simon Harley,” retorted the Westerner bitterly.
+
+Ridgway’s eyes blazed, but those of the New Yorker were cool and fishy.
+
+“There is no occasion for dramatics,” he said, the cruel, passionless
+smile at his thin lips. “I make you a business proposition and you
+decline it. That is all. I wish you good day.”
+
+The other strode past him and flung the door open. He had never before
+known such a passion of hatred as raged within him. Throughout his life
+Simon Harley had left in his wake wreckage and despair. He was the
+best-hated man of his time, execrated by the working classes, despised
+by the country at large, and distrusted by his fellow exploiters. Yet,
+as a business opponent, Ridgway had always taken him impersonally, had
+counted him for a condition rather than an individual. But with the new
+influence that had come into his life, reason could not reckon, and
+when it was dominant with him, Harley stood embodied as the wolf ready
+to devour his ewe lamb.
+
+For he couldn’t get away from her. Wherever he went he carried with him
+the picture of her sweet, shy smile, her sudden winsome moments, the
+deep light in her violet eyes; and in the background the sinister bared
+fangs of the wild beast dogging her patiently, and yet lovingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+VIRGINIA INTERVENES
+
+
+James K. Mott, local chief attorney for the Consolidated, was
+struggling with a white tie before the glass and crumpling it
+atrociously.
+
+“This dress-suit habit is the most pernicious I know. It’s sapping the
+liberties of the American people,” he grunted at last in humorous
+despair.
+
+“Let me, dear.”
+
+His wife tied it with neatness and dispatch, and returned to the
+inspection of how her skirt hung.
+
+“Mr. Harley asked me to thank you for calling on his wife. He says she
+gets lonesome during the day while he is away so much. I was wondering
+if you couldn’t do something for her so that she could meet some of the
+ladies of Mesa. A luncheon, or something of that sort, you know. Have
+you seen my hat-brush anywhere?”
+
+“It’s on that drawer beside your hat-box. She told me she would rather
+not. I suggested it. But I’ll tell you what I could do: take Virginia
+Balfour round to see her. She’s lively and good company, and knows some
+of the people Mrs. Harley knows.”
+
+“That’s a good idea. I want Harley to know that we appreciate his
+suggestions, and are ready to do our part. He has shown a disposition
+to consult me on a good many things that ought to lie in Hobart’s
+sphere rather than mine. Something’s going to drop. Now, I like Hobart,
+but I want to show myself in a receptive mood for advancement when his
+head falls, as it certainly will soon.”
+
+
+Virginia responded eagerly to Mrs. Mott’s suggestion that they call
+together on Mrs. Harley at the hotel.
+
+“My dear, you have saved my life. I’ve been dying of curiosity, and I
+haven’t been able to find vestige of an excuse to hang my call on. I
+couldn’t ask Mr. Ridgway to introduce me, could I?”
+
+“No, I don’t see that you could,” smiled Mrs. Mott, a motherly little
+woman with pleasant brown eyes. “I suppose Mr. Ridgway isn’t exactly on
+calling terms with Mr. Harley’s wife, even if he did save her life.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Ridgway isn’t the man to let a little thing like a war a
+outrance stand in the way of his social duties, especially when those
+duties happen to be inclinations, too. I understand he DID call the
+evening of their arrival here.”
+
+“He didn’t!” screamed Mrs. Mott, who happened to possess a voice of the
+normal national register. “And what did Mr. Harley say?”
+
+“Ah, that’s what one would like to know. My informant deponeth not
+beyond the fact unadorned. One may guess there must have been
+undercurrents of embarrassment almost as pronounced as if the President
+were to invite his Ananias Club to a pink tea. I can imagine Mr. Harley
+saying: ‘Try this cake, Mr. Ridgway; it isn’t poisoned;’ and Mr.
+Ridgway answering: ‘Thanks! After you, my dear Gaston.’”
+
+Miss Balfour’s anxiety to meet the young woman her fiance had rescued
+from the blizzard was not unnatural. Her curiosity was tinged with
+frank envy, though jealousy did not enter into it at all. Virginia had
+come West explicitly to take the country as she found it, and she had
+found it, unfortunately, no more hazardous than little old New York,
+though certainly a good deal more diverting to a young woman with
+democratic proclivities that still survived the energetic weeding her
+training had subjected them to.
+
+She did not quite know what she had expected to find in Mesa. Certainly
+she knew that Indians were no longer on the map, and cowboys were
+kicking up their last dust before vanishing, but she had supposed that
+they had left compensations in their wake. On the principle that
+adventures are to the adventurous, her life should have been a whirl of
+hairbreadth escapes.
+
+But what happened? She took all sorts of chances without anything
+coming of it. Her pirate fiance was the nearest approach to an
+adventure she had flushed, and this pink-and-white chit of a married
+schoolgirl had borrowed him for the most splendid bit of excitement
+that would happen in a hundred years. She had been spinning around the
+country in motor-cars for months without the sign of a blizzard, but
+the chit had hit one the first time. It wasn’t fair. That was her
+blizzard by rights. In spirit, at least, she had “spoken for it,” as
+she and her brother used to say when they were children of some coveted
+treasure not yet available. Virginia was quite sure that if she had
+seen Waring Ridgway at the inspired moment when he was plowing through
+the drifts with Mrs. Harley in his arms—only, of course, it would have
+been she instead of Mrs. Harley, and he would not have been carrying
+her so long as she could stand and take it—she would have fallen in
+love with him on the spot. And those two days in the cabin on
+half-ration they would have put an end forever to her doubts and to
+that vision of Lyndon Hobart that persisted in her mind. What luck
+glace’ some people did have!
+
+But Virginia discovered the chit to be rather a different personality
+than she had supposed. In truth, she lost her heart to her at once. She
+could have stood out against Aline’s mere good looks and been the
+stiffer for them. She was no MAN, to be moved by the dark hair’s dusky
+glory, the charm of soft girlish lines, the effect of shy
+unsophistication that might be merely the highest art of social
+experience. But back of the sweet, trembling mouth that seemed to be
+asking to be kissed, of the pathetic appeal for friendliness from the
+big, deep violet eyes, was a quality of soul not to be counterfeited.
+Miss Balfour had furbished up the distant hauteur of the society manner
+she had at times used effectively, but she found herself instead taking
+the beautiful, forlorn little creature in her arms.
+
+“Oh, my dear; my dear, how glad I am that dreadful blizzard did not
+hurt you!”
+
+Aline clung to this gracious young queen as if she had known her a
+lifetime. “You are so good to me everybody is. You know how Mr. Ridgway
+saved me. If it had not been for him I should have died. I didn’t
+care—I wanted to die in peace, I think—but he wouldn’t let me.”
+
+“I should think not.”
+
+“If you only knew him—perhaps you do.”
+
+“A little,” confessed Virginia, with a flash of merry eyes at Mrs.
+Mott.
+
+“He is the bravest man—and the strongest.”
+
+“Yes. He is both,” agreed his betrothed, with pride.
+
+“His tenderness, his unselfishness, his consideration for others—did
+you ever know anybody like him for these things?”
+
+“Never,” agreed Virginia, with the mental reservations that usually
+accompanied her skeptical smile. She was getting at her fiance from a
+novel point of view.
+
+“And so modest, with all his strength and courage.’,
+
+“It’s almost a fault in him,” she murmured.
+
+“The woman that marries him will be blessed among women.”
+
+“I count it a great privilege,” said Miss Balfour absently, but she
+pulled up with a hurried addendum: “To have known him.”
+
+“Indeed, yes. If one met more men like him this would be a better
+world.”
+
+“It would certainly be a different world.”
+
+It was a relief to Aline to talk, to put into words the external
+skeleton facts of the surging current that had engulfed her existence
+since she had turned a corner upon this unexpected consciousness of
+life running strong and deep. Harley was not a confidant she could have
+chosen under the most favorable circumstances, and her instinct told
+her that in this matter he was particularly impossible. But to Virginia
+Balfour—Mrs. Mott had to leave early to preside over the Mesa Woman’s
+Club, and her friend allowed herself to be persuaded to stay longer—she
+did not find it at all hard to talk. Indeed, she murmured into the
+sympathetic ear of this astute young searcher of hearts more than her
+words alone said, with the result that Virginia guessed what she
+herself had not yet quite found out, though her heart was hovering
+tremblingly on the brink of discovery.
+
+But Virginia’s sympathy for the trouble fate had in store for this
+helpless innocent consisted with an alert appreciation of its obvious
+relation to herself. What she meant to discover was the attitude toward
+the situation of one neither particularly innocent nor helpless. Was
+he, too, about to be “caught in the coil of a God’s romances,” or was
+he merely playing on the vibrating strings of an untaught heart?
+
+It was in part to satisfy this craving for knowledge that she wrote
+Ridgway a note as soon as she reached home. It said:
+
+MY DEAR RECREANT LAGGARD: If you are not too busy playing Sir Lancelot
+to fair dames in distress, or splintering lances with the doughty
+husbands of these same ladies, I pray you deign to allow your servant
+to feast her eyes upon her lord’s face. Hopefully and gratefully yours,
+VIRGINIA.
+
+
+P. S.—Have you forgotten, sir, that I have not seen you since that
+terrible blizzard and your dreadful imprisonment in Fort Salvation?
+
+
+P. P. S.—I have seen somebody else, though. She’s a dear, and full of
+your praises. I hardly blame you.
+
+
+V.
+
+
+She thought that ought to bring him soon, and it did.
+
+“I’ve been busy night and day,” he apologized when they met.
+
+Virginia gave him a broadside demurely.
+
+“I suppose your social duties do take up a good deal of your time.”
+
+“My social duties? Oh, I see!” He laughed appreciation of her hit.
+Evidently through her visit she knew a good deal more than he had
+expected. Since he had nothing to hide from her except his feelings,
+this did not displease him. “My duties in that line have been confined
+to one formal call.”
+
+She sympathized with him elaborately. “Calls of that sort do bore men
+so. I’ll not forget the first time you called on me.”
+
+“Nor I,” he came back gallantly.
+
+“I marveled how you came through alive, but I learned then that a man
+can’t be bored to death.”
+
+“I came again nevertheless,” he smiled. “And again—and again.”
+
+“I am still wondering why.”
+
+“‘Oh, wad some power the giffie gite us
+To see ourselves as others see us!’”
+
+
+he quoted with a bow.
+
+“Is that a compliment?” she asked dubiously.
+
+“I have never heard it used so before. Anyhow, it is a little hackneyed
+for anybody so original as you.”
+
+“It was the best I could do offhand.”
+
+She changed the subject abruptly. “Has the new campaign of the war
+begun yet?”
+
+“Well, we’re maneuvering for position.”
+
+“You’ve seen him. How does he impress you?”
+
+“The same as he does others. A hard, ruthless fighter. Unless all signs
+fail, he is an implacable foe.”
+
+“But you are not afraid?”
+
+He smiled. “Do I look frightened?”
+
+“No, you remind me of something a burglar once told me—”
+
+“A what?”
+
+“A burglar—a reformed burglar!” She gave him a saucy flash of her dark
+eyes. “Do you think I don’t know any lawbreakers except those I have
+met in this State? I came across this one in a mission where I used to
+think I was doing good. He said it was not the remuneration of the
+profession that had attracted him, but the excitement. It was
+dreadfully frowned down upon and underpaid. He could earn more at his
+old trade of a locksmith, but it seemed to him that every impediment to
+success was a challenge to him. Poor man, he relapsed again, and they
+put him in Sing Sing. I was so interested in him, too.”
+
+“You’ve had some queer friends in your time,” he laughed, but without a
+trace of disapproval.
+
+“I have some queer ones yet,” she thrust back.
+
+“Let’s not talk of them,” he cried, in pretended alarm.
+
+Her inextinguishable gaiety brought back the smile he liked. “We’ll
+talk of SOME ONE else—some one of interest to us both.”
+
+“I am always ready to talk of Miss Virginia Balfour,” he said,
+misunderstanding promptly.
+
+She smiled her disdain of his obtuseness in an elaborately long survey
+of him.
+
+“Well?” he wanted to know.
+
+“That’s how you look—very well, indeed. I believe the storm was greatly
+exaggerated,” she remarked.
+
+“Isn’t that rather a good definition for a blizzard—a greatly
+exaggerated storm?”
+
+“You don’t look the worse for wear—not the wreck I expected to behold.”
+
+“Ah, you should have seen me before I saw you.”
+
+“Thank you. I have no doubt you find the sight of my dear face as
+refreshing as your favorite cocktail. I suppose that is why it has
+taken you three days after your return to reach me and then by special
+request.”
+
+“A pleasure delayed is twice a pleasure anticipation and realization.”
+
+Miss Balfour made a different application of his text, her eyes trained
+on him with apparent indifference. “I’ve been enjoying a delayed
+pleasure myself. I went to see her this afternoon.”
+
+He did not ask whom, but his eyes brightened.
+
+“She’s worth a good deal of seeing, don’t you think?”
+
+“Oh, I’m in love with her, but it doesn’t follow you ought to be.”
+
+“Am I?”—he smiled.
+
+“You are either in love or else you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
+
+“An interesting thing about you is your point of view. Now, anybody
+else would tell me I ought to be ashamed if I am in love.”
+
+“I’m not worried about your morals,” she scoffed. “It’s that poor child
+I’m thinking of.”
+
+“I think of her a good deal, too.”
+
+“Ah! and does she think of you a good deal That’s what we must guard
+against.”
+
+“Is it?”
+
+“Yes. You see I’m her confidante.” She told it him with sparkling eyes,
+for the piquancy of it amused her. Not every engaged young woman can
+hear her lover’s praises sung by the woman whose life he has saved with
+the proper amount of romance.
+
+“Really?”
+
+She nodded, laughing at him. “I didn’t get a chance to tell her about
+me.”
+
+“I suppose not.”
+
+“I think I’ll tell her about you, though—just what a ruthless barbarian
+you are.”
+
+His eyes gleamed “I wish you would. I’d like to find out whether she
+would believe you. I have tried to tell her myself, but the honest
+truth is, I funk it.”
+
+“You haven’t any right to let her know you are interested in her.” She
+interrupted him before he could speak. “Don’t trifle with her, Waring.
+She’s not like other girls.”
+
+He met her look gravely. “I wouldn’t trifle with her for any reason.”
+
+Her quick rejoinder overlapped his sentence. “Then you love her!”
+
+“Is that an alternative?”
+
+“With you—yes.”
+
+“Faith, my lady, you’re frank!”
+
+“I’m not mealy-mouthed. You don’t think yourself scrupulous, do you?”
+
+“I’m afraid I am not.”
+
+“I don’t mind so much your being in love with HER, though it’s not
+flattering to my vanity, but—” She stopped, letting him make the
+inference.
+
+“Do you think that likely?” he asked, the color flushing his face.
+
+He wondered how much Aline had told this confidante. Certain specific
+things he knew she had not revealed, but had she let her guess the
+situation between them?
+
+She compromised with her conscience. “I don’t know. She is romantic—and
+Simon Harley isn’t a very fertile field for romance, I suppose.”
+
+“You would imply?”
+
+“Oh, you have points, and nobody knows them better than Waring
+Ridgway,” she told him jauntily. “But you needn’t play that role to the
+address of Aline Harley. Try ME. I’m immune to romance. Besides, I’m
+engaged to you,” she added, laughing at the inconsequence the fact
+seemed to have for both of them.
+
+“I’m afraid I can’t help the situation, for if I’ve been playing a
+part, it has been an unconscious one.”
+
+“That’s the worst of it. When you star as Waring Ridgway you are most
+dangerous. What I want is total abstinence.”
+
+“You’d rather I didn’t see her at all?”
+
+Virginia dimpled, a gleam of reminiscent laughter in her eyes. “When I
+was in Denver last month a Mrs. Smythe—it was Smith before her husband
+struck it rich last year—sent out cards for a bridge afternoon. A Mrs.
+Mahoney had just come to the metropolis from the wilds of Cripple
+Creek. Her husband had struck a gold-mine, too, and Mr. Smythe was
+under obligations to him. Anyhow, she was a stranger, and Mrs. Smythe
+took her in. It was Mrs. Mahoney’s introduction to bridge, and she did
+not know she was playing for keeps. When the afternoon was over, Mrs.
+Smythe hovered about her with the sweetest sympathy. ‘So sorry you had
+such a horrid run of cards, dear. Better luck next time.’ It took Mrs.
+Mahoney some time to understand that her social afternoon had cost one
+hundred and twenty dollars, but next day her husband sent a check for
+one hundred and twenty-two dollars to Mrs. Smythe. The extra two
+dollars were for the refreshments, he naively explained, adding that
+since his wife was so poor a gambler as hardly to be able to keep
+professionals interested, he would not feel offended if Mrs. Smythe
+omitted her in future from her social functions.”
+
+Ridgway took it with a smile. “Simon Harley brought his one hundred and
+twenty-two dollars in person.”
+
+“He didn’t! When?”
+
+“This morning. He proposed benevolent assimilation as a solution of our
+troubles.”
+
+“Just how?”
+
+“He offered to consolidate all the copper interests of the country and
+put me at the head of the resulting combine.”
+
+“If you wouldn’t play bridge with Mrs. Harley?”
+
+“Exactly.”
+
+“And you?”
+
+“Declined to pledge myself.”
+
+She clapped her hands softly. “Well done, Waring Ridgway! There are
+times when you are magnificent, when I could put you on a pedestal, you
+great big, unafraid man. But you mustn’t play with her, just the same.”
+
+“Why mustn’t I?”
+
+“For her sake.”
+
+He frowned past her into space, his tight-shut jaw standing out
+saliently. “You’re right, Virginia. I’ve been thinking so myself. I’ll
+keep off the grass,” he said, at last.
+
+“You’re a good fellow,” slipped out impulsively.
+
+“Well, I know where there’s another,” he said. “I ought to think myself
+a lucky dog.”
+
+Virginia lifted quizzical eyebrows. “Ought to! That tastes of duty.
+Don’t let it come to that. We’ll take it off if you like.” She touched
+the solitaire he had given her.
+
+“Ah, but I don’t like”—he smiled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+ALINE MAKES A DISCOVERY
+
+
+Aline pulled her horse to a walk. “You know Mr. Ridgway pretty well,
+don’t you?”
+
+Miss Balfour gently flicked her divided skirt with a riding-whip,
+considering whether she might be said to know him well. “Yes, I think I
+do,” she ventured.
+
+“Mrs. Mott says you and he are great friends, that you seem very fond
+of each other.”
+
+“Goodness me! I hope I don’t seem fond of him. I don’t think ‘fond’ is
+exactly the word, anyway, though we are good friends.” Quickly, keenly,
+her covert glance swept Aline; then, withdrawing her eyes, she flung
+her little bomb. “I suppose we may be said to appreciate each other. At
+any rate, we are engaged.”
+
+Mrs. Harley’s pony came to an abrupt halt. “I thought I had dropped my
+whip,” she explained, in a low voice not quite true.
+
+Virginia, though she executed an elaborate survey of the scenery, could
+not help noticing that the color had washed from her friend’s face. “I
+love this Western country—its big sweep of plains, of low, rolling
+hills, with a background of mountains. One can see how it gets into a
+man’s blood so that the East seems insipid ever afterward,” discoursed
+Miss Balfour.
+
+A question trembled on Aline’s blanched lips.
+
+“Say it,” permitted Virginia.
+
+“Do you mean that you are engaged to him—that you are going to marry
+Mr. Ridgway—without caring for him?”
+
+“I don’t mean that at all. I like him immensely.”
+
+“But—do you love him?” It was almost a cry—these low words wrung from
+the tortured heart.
+
+“No fair,” warned her friend smilingly.
+
+Aline rode in silence, her stricken face full of trouble. How could
+she, from her glass house, throw stones at a loveless marriage? But
+this was different from her own case! Nobody was worthy to marry her
+hero without giving the best a woman had to give. If she were a girl—a
+sudden tide of color swept her face; a wild, delirious tingle of joy
+flooded her veins—oh, if she were a girl, what a wealth of love could
+she give him! Clarity of vision had come to her in a blinding flash.
+Untutored of life, the knowledge of its meaning had struck home of the
+suddenest. She knew her heart now that it was too late; knew that she
+could never be indifferent to what concerned Waring Ridgway.
+
+Aline caught at the courage behind her childishness, and accomplished
+her congratulations “You will be happy, I am sure. He is good.”
+
+“Goodness does not impress me as his most outstanding quality,” smiled
+Miss Balfour.
+
+“No, one never feels it emphasized. He is too free of selfishness to
+make much of his goodness. But one can’t help feeling it in everything
+he does and says.”
+
+“Does Mr. Harley agree with you? Does he feel it?”
+
+“I don’t think Mr. Harley understands him. I can’t help thinking that
+he is prejudiced.” She was becoming mistress of her voice and color
+again.
+
+“And you are not?”
+
+“Perhaps I am. In my thought of him he would still be good, even if he
+had done all the bad things his enemies accuse him of.”
+
+Virginia gave her up. This idealized interpretation of her betrothed
+was not the one she had, but for Aline it might be the true one. At
+least, she could not disparage him very consistently under the
+circumstances.
+
+“Isn’t there a philosophy current that we find in people what we look
+for in them? Perhaps that is why you and Mr. Harley read in Mr. Ridgway
+men so diverse as you do. It is not impossible you are both right and
+both wrong. Heaven knows, I suppose. At least, we poor mortals fog
+around enough when we sit in judgment.” And Virginia shrugged the
+matter from her careless shoulders.
+
+But Aline seemed to have a difficulty in getting away from the subject.
+“And you—what do you read?” she asked timidly.
+
+“Sometimes one thing and sometimes another. To-day I see him as a
+living refutation of all the copy-book rules to success. He shatters
+the maxims with a touch-and-go manner that is fascinating in its
+immorality. A gambler, a plunger, an adventurer, he wins when a
+careful, honest business man would fail to a certainty.”
+
+Aline was amazed. “You misjudge him. I am sure you do. But if you think
+this of him why—”
+
+“Why do I marry him? I have asked myself that a hundred times, my dear.
+I wish I knew. I have told you what I see in him to-day; but
+tomorrow—why, to-morrow I shall see him an altogether different man. He
+will be perhaps a radiating center of altruism, devoted to his friends,
+a level-headed protector of the working classes, a patron of the arts
+in his own clearminded, unlettered way. But whatever point of view one
+gets at him, he spares one dullness. Will you explain to me, my dear,
+why picturesque rascality is so much more likable than humdrum virtue?”
+
+Mrs. Harley’s eyes blazed. “And you can talk this way of the man you
+are going to marry, a man—” She broke off, her voice choked.
+
+Miss Balfour was cool as a custard. “I can, my dear, and without the
+least disloyalty. In point of fact, he asked me to tell you the kind of
+man I think him. I’m trying to oblige him, you see.”
+
+“He asked you—to tell me this about him?” Aline pulled in her pony in
+order to read with her astonished eyes the amused ones of her
+companion.
+
+“Yes. He was afraid you were making too much of his saving you. He
+thinks he won’t do to set on a pedestal.”
+
+“Then I think all the more of him for his modesty.”
+
+“Don’t invest too heavily on his modesty, my dear. He wouldn’t be the
+man he is if he owned much of that commodity.”
+
+“The man he is?”
+
+“Yes, the man born to win, the man certain of himself no matter what
+the odds against him. He knows he is a man of destiny; knows quite well
+that there is something big about him that dwarfs other men. I know it,
+too. Wherefore I seize my opportunity. It would be a sin to let a man
+like that get away from one. I could never forgive myself,” she
+concluded airily.
+
+“Don’t you see any human, lovable things in him?” Aline’s voice was an
+accusation.
+
+“He is the staunchest friend conceivable. No trouble is too great for
+him to take for one he likes, and where once he gives his trust he does
+not take it back. Oh, for all his force, he is intensely human! Take
+his vanity, my dear. It soars to heaven.”
+
+“If I cared for him I couldn’t dissect his qualities as you do.”
+
+“That’s because you are a triumph of the survival of nature and impulse
+over civilization, in spite of its attempts to sap your freshness. For
+me, I fear I’m a sophisticated daughter of a critical generation. If I
+weren’t, I should not hold my judgment so safely in my own keeping, but
+would surrender it and my heart.”
+
+“There is something about the way you look at him that shocks me. One
+ought not to let oneself believe all that seems easy to believe.”
+
+“That is your faith, but mine is a different one. You see, I’m a
+Unitarian,” returned Virginia blithely.
+
+“He will make you love him if you marry him,” sighed Aline, coming back
+to her obsession.
+
+Virginia nodded eagerly. “In my secret heart that is what I am hoping
+for, my dear.”
+
+“Unless there is another man,” added Aline, as if alone with her
+thoughts.
+
+Virginia was irritably aware of a flood of color beating into her
+cheeks. “There isn’t any other man,” she said impatiently.
+
+Yet she thought of Lyndon Hobart. Curiously enough, whenever she
+conceived herself as marrying Ridgway, the reflex of her brain carried
+to her a picture of Hobart, clean-handed, fine of instinct, with the
+inherited inflections of voice and unconscious pride of caste that come
+from breeding and not from cultivation. If he were not born to
+greatness, like his rival, at least he satisfied her critical judgment
+of what a gentleman should be; and she was quite sure that the
+potential capacity lay in her to care a good deal more for him than for
+anybody else she had met. Since it was not on the cards, as Miss
+Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry primarily for
+reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in her sophisticated hours.
+
+But in the hours when she was a mere girl when she was not so
+confidently the heir of all the feminine wisdom of the ages, her
+annoyance took another form. She had told Lyndon Hobart of her
+engagement because it was the honest thing to do; because she supposed
+she ought to discourage any hopes he might be entertaining. But it did
+not follow that he need have let these hopes be extinguished so
+summarily. She could have wished his scrupulous regard for the proper
+thing had not had the effect of taking him so completely out of her
+external life, while leaving him more insistently than ever the subject
+of her inner contemplation.
+
+Virginia’s conscience was of the twentieth century and American, though
+she was a good deal more honest with herself than most of her sex in
+the same social circle. Also she was straightforward with her neighbors
+so far as she could reasonably be. But she was not a Puritan in the
+least, though she held herself to a more rigid account than she did her
+friends. She judged her betrothed as little as she could, but this was
+not to be entirely avoided, since she expected her life to become
+merged so largely in his. There were hours when she felt she must
+escape the blighting influence of his lawlessness. There were others
+when it seemed to her magnificent.
+
+Except for the occasional jangle of a bit or the ring of a horse’s shoe
+on a stone, there was silence which lasted many minutes. Each was busy
+with her thoughts, and the narrowness of the trail, which here made
+them go in single file, served as an excuse against talk.
+
+“Perhaps we had better turn back,” suggested Virginia, after the path
+had descended to a gulch and merged itself in a wagon-road. “We shall
+have no more than time to get home and dress for dinner.”
+
+Aline turned her pony townward, and they rode at a walk side by side.
+
+“Do you know much about the difficulty between Mr. Harley and Mr.
+Ridgway? I mean about the mines—the Sherman Bell, I think they called
+it?”
+
+“I know something about the trouble in a general way. Both the
+Consolidated and Mr. Ridgway’s company claim certain veins. That is
+true of several mines, I have been told.”
+
+“I don’t know anything about business. Mr. Harley does not tell me
+anything about his. To day I was sitting in the open window, and two
+men stopped beneath it. They thought there would be trouble in this
+mine—that men would be hurt. I could not make it all out, but that was
+part of it. I sent for Mr. Harley and made him tell me what he knew. It
+would be dreadful if anything like that happened.”
+
+“Don’t worry your head about it, my dear. Things are always threatening
+and never happening. It seems to be a part of the game of business to
+bluff, as they call it.”
+
+“I wish it weren’t,” sighed the girl-wife.
+
+Virginia observed that she looked both sad and weary. She had started
+on her ride like a prisoner released from his dungeon, happy in the
+sunshine, the swift motion, the sting of the wind in her face. There
+had been a sparkle in her eye and a ring of gaiety in her laugh. Into
+her cheeks a faint color had glowed, so that the contrast of their
+clear pallor with the vivid scarlet of the little lips had been less
+pronounced than usual. But now she was listless and distraite, the
+girlish abandon all stricken out of her. It needed no clairvoyant to
+see that her heart was heavy and that she was longing for the moment
+when she could be alone with her pain.
+
+Her friend had learned what she wanted to know, and the knowledge of it
+troubled her. She would have given a good deal to have been able to
+lift this sorrow from the girl riding beside her. For she was aware
+that Aline Harley might as well have reached for the moon as that
+toward which her untutored heart yearned. She had come to life late and
+traveled in it but a little way. Yet the tragedy of it was about to
+engulf her. No lifeboat was in sight. She must sink or swim alone.
+Virginia’s unspoiled heart went out to her with a rush of pity and
+sympathy. Almost the very words that Waring Ridgway had used came to
+her lips.
+
+“You poor lamb! You poor, forsaken lamb!”
+
+But she spoke instead with laughter and lightness, seeing nothing of
+the girl’s distress, at least, until after they separated at the door
+of the hotel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+FIRST BLOOD
+
+
+After Ridgway’s cavalier refusal to negotiate a peace treaty, Simon
+Harley and his body-guard walked back to the offices of the
+Consolidated, where they arrived at the same time as the news of the
+enemy’s first blow since the declaration of renewed war.
+
+Hobart was at his desk with his ear to the telephone receiver when the
+great financier came into the inner office of the manager.
+
+“Yes. When? Driven out, you say? Yes—yes. Anybody hurt? Followed our
+men through into our tunnel? No, don’t do anything till you hear from
+me. Send Rhys up at once. Let me know any further developments that
+occur.”
+
+Hobart hung up the receiver and turned on his swivel-chair toward his
+chief. “Another outrage, sir, at the hands of Ridgway. It is in regard
+to those veins in the Copper King that he claims. Dalton, his
+superintendent of the Taurus, drove a tunnel across our lateral lines
+and began working them, though their own judge has not yet rendered a
+decision in their favor. Of course, I put a large force in them at
+once. To-day we tapped their workings at the twelfth level. Our
+foreman, Miles, has just telephoned me that Dalton turned the air
+pressure on our men, blew out their candles, and flung a mixture of
+lime and rocks at them. Several of the men are hurt, though none badly.
+It seems that Dalton has thrown a force into our tunnels and is holding
+the entrances against us at the point where the eleventh, twelfth, and
+thirteenth levels touch the cage. It means that he will work those
+veins, and probably others that are acknowledged to be ours, unless we
+drive them out, which would probably be a difficult matter.”
+
+Harley listened patiently, eyes glittering and clean-shaven lips
+pressed tightly against his teeth. “What do you propose to do?”
+
+“I haven’t decided yet. If we could get any justice from the courts, an
+injunction.”
+
+“Can’t be got from Purcell. Don’t waste time considering it. Fight it
+out yourself. Find his weakest spot, then strike hard and suddenly.”
+Harley’s low metallic voice was crisp and commanding.
+
+“His weakest spot?”
+
+“Exactly. Has he no mines upon which we can retaliate?”
+
+“There is the Taurus. It lies against the Copper King end to end. He
+drove a tunnel into some of our workings last winter. That would give a
+passageway to send our men through, if we decide to do so. Then there
+is his New York. Its workings connect with those of the Jim Hill.”
+
+“Good! Send as many men through as is necessary to capture and hold
+both mines. Get control of the entire workings of them both, and begin
+taking ore out at once. Station armed guards at every point where it is
+necessary, and as many as are necessary. Use ten thousand men, if you
+need that many. But don’t fail. We’ll give Ridgway a dose of his own
+medicine, and teach him that for every pound of our ore he steals we’ll
+take ten.”
+
+“He’ll get an injunction from the courts.”
+
+“Let him get forty. I’ll show him that his robber courts will not save
+him. Anyhow, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
+
+Hobart, almost swept from his moorings by the fiery energy of his
+chief, braced himself to withstand the current.
+
+“I shall have to think about that. We can’t fight lawlessness with
+lawlessness except for selfpreservation.”
+
+“Think! You do nothing but think, Mr. Hobart. You are here to act,”
+came the scornful retort; “And what is this but self-preservation.”
+
+“I am willing to recapture our workings in the Copper King. I’ll lead
+the attack in person, sir. But as to a retaliatory attack—the facts
+will not justify a capture of his property because he has seized ours.”
+
+“Wrong, sir. This is no time for half-way measures. I have resolved to
+crush this freebooter; since he has purchased your venal courts, then
+by the only means left us—force.”
+
+Hobart rose from his seat, very pale and erect. His eyes met those of
+the great man unflinchingly. “You realize that this may mean murder,
+Mr. Harley? That a clash cannot possibly be avoided if you pursue this
+course?”
+
+“I realize that it is self-preservation,” came the cold retort. “There
+is no law here, none, at least, that gives us justice. We are back to
+savagery, dragged back by the madness of this ruffian. It is his
+choice, not mine. Let him abide by it.”
+
+“Your intention to follow this course is irrevocable?”
+
+“Absolutely.”
+
+“In that case, I must regretfully offer my resignation as manager of
+the Consolidated.”
+
+“It is accepted, Mr. Hobart. I can’t have men working under me that are
+not loyal, body and soul, to the hand that feeds them. No man can serve
+two masters, Mr. Hobart.”
+
+“That is why I resign, Mr. Harley. You give me the devil’s work to do.
+I have done enough of it. By Heaven, I will be a free man hereafter.”
+The disgust and dissatisfaction that had been pent within him for many
+a month broke forth hot from the lips of this self-repressed man. “It
+is all wrong on both sides. Two wrongs do not make a right. The system
+of espionage we employ over everybody both on his side and ours, the
+tyrannical use we make of our power, the corruption we foster in
+politics, our secret bargains with railroads, our evasions of law as to
+taxes, and in every other way that suits us: it is all wrong—all wrong.
+I’ll be a party to it no longer. You see to what it leads—murder and
+anarchy. I’ll be a poor man if I must, but I’ll be a free and honest
+one at least.”
+
+“You are talking wickedly and wildly, Mr. Hobart. You are criticizing
+God when you criticize the business conditions he has put into the
+world. I did not know that you were a socialist, but what you have just
+said explains your course,” the old man reproved sadly and
+sanctimonious.
+
+“I am not a socialist, Mr. Harley, but you and your methods have made
+thousands upon thousands of them in this country during the past ten
+years.”
+
+“We shall not discuss that, Mr. Hobart, nor, indeed, is any discussion
+necessary. Frankly, I am greatly disappointed in you. I have for some
+time been dissatisfied with your management, but I did not, of course,
+know you held these anarchistic views. I want, however, to be perfectly
+just. You are a very good business man indeed, careful and thorough.
+That you have not a bold enough grasp of mind for the place you hold is
+due, perhaps, to these dangerous ideas that have unsettled you. Your
+salary will be continued for six months. Is that satisfactory?”
+
+“No, sir. I could not be willing to accept it longer than to-day. And
+when you say bold enough, why not be plain and say unscrupulous
+enough?” amended the younger man.
+
+“As you like. I don’t juggle with words. The point is, you don’t
+succeed. This adventurer, Ridgway, scores continually against you. He
+has beaten you clear down the line from start to finish. Is that not
+true?”
+
+“Because he does not hesitate to stoop to anything, because—”
+
+“Precisely. You have given the very reason why he must be fought in the
+same spirit. Business ethics would be as futile against him as chivalry
+in dealing with a jungle-tiger.”
+
+“You would then have had me stoop to any petty meanness to win, no
+matter how contemptible?”
+
+The New Yorker waved him aside with a patient, benignant gesture. “I
+don’t care for excuses. I ask of my subordinates success. You do not
+get it for me. I must find a man who can.”
+
+Hobart bowed with fine dignity. The touch of disdain in his slight
+smile marked his sense of the difference between them. He was again his
+composed rigid self.
+
+“Can you arrange to allow my resignation to take effect as soon as
+possible? I should prefer to have my connection with the company
+severed before any action is taken against these mines.”
+
+“At once—to-day. Your resignation may be published in the Herald this
+afternoon, and you will then be acquitted of whatever may follow.”
+
+“Thank you.” Hobart hesitated an instant before he said: “There is a
+point that I have already mentioned to you which, with your permission,
+I must again advert to. The temper of the miners has been very bitter
+since you refused to agree to Mr. Ridgway’s proposal for an eight-hour
+day. I would urge upon you to take greater precautions against a
+personal attack. You have many lawless men among your employees. They
+are foreigners for the most part, unused to self-restraint. It is only
+right you should know they execrate your name.”
+
+The great man smiled blandly. “Popularity is nothing to me. I have
+neither sought it nor desired it. Given a great work to do, with the
+Divine help I have done it, irrespective of public clamor. For many
+years I have lived in the midst of alarms, Mr. Hobart. I am not
+foolhardy. What precautions I can reasonably take I do. For the rest,
+my confidence is in an all-wise Providence. It is written that not even
+a sparrow falls without His decree. In that promise I put my trust. If
+I am to be cut off it can only be by His will. ‘The Lord gave, and the
+Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Such, I pray,
+may be the humble and grateful spirit with which I submit myself to His
+will.”
+
+The retiring manager urged the point no further. “If you have decided
+upon my successor and he is on the ground I shall be glad to give the
+afternoon to running over with him the affairs of the office. It would
+be well for him to retain for a time my private secretary and
+stenographer.”
+
+“Mr. Mott will succeed you. He will no doubt be glad to have your
+assistance in helping him fall into the routine of the office, Mr.
+Hobart.”
+
+Harley sent for Mott at once and told him of his promotion. The two men
+were closeted together for hours, while trusted messengers went and
+came incessantly to and from the mines. Hobart knew, of course, that
+plans were in progress to arm such of the Consolidated men as could be
+trusted, and that arrangements were being made to rush the Taurus and
+the New York. Everything was being done as secretly as possible, but
+Hobart’s experience of Ridgway made it obvious to him that this
+excessive activity could not pass without notice. His spies, like those
+of the trust, swarmed everywhere.
+
+It was not till mid-afternoon of the next day that Mott found time to
+join him and run over with him the details of such unfinished business
+as the office had taken up. The retiring manager was courtesy itself,
+nor did he feel any bitterness against his successor. Nevertheless, he
+came to the end of office hours with great relief. The day had been a
+very hard one, and it left him with a longing for solitude and the wide
+silent spaces of the open hills. He struck out in the direction which
+promised him the quickest opportunity to leave the town behind him. A
+good walker, he covered the miles rapidly, and under the physical
+satisfaction of the tramp the brain knots unraveled and smoothed
+themselves out. It was better so—better to live his own life than the
+one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his
+environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not
+selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had
+had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven
+to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, the soul of
+him had begun to wither at the contact of that which he saw about him
+and was so large a part of.
+
+“I am not fit for it. That is the truth. Mott has no imagination, and
+property rights are the most sacred thing on earth to him. He will do
+better at it than I,” he told himself, as he walked forward bareheaded
+into the great sunset glow that filled the saddle between two purple
+hills in front of him.
+
+As he swung round a bend in the road a voice, clear and sweet, came to
+him through the light filtered air.
+
+“Laska!”
+
+A young woman on horseback was before him. Her pony stood across the
+road, and she looked up a trail which ran down into it. The lifted
+poise of the head brought out its fine lines and the distinction with
+which it was set upon the well-molded throat column. Apparently she was
+calling to some companion on the trail who had not yet emerged into
+view.
+
+At sound of his footsteps the rider’s head turned.
+
+“Good afternoon, Mr. Hobart,” she said quietly, as coolly as if her
+heart had not suddenly begun to beat strangely fast.
+
+“Good afternoon, Miss Balfour.”
+
+Each of them was acutely conscious of the barrier between them. Since
+the day when she had told him of her engagement they had not met, even
+casually, and this their first sight of each other was not without
+embarrassment.
+
+“We have been to Lone Pine Cone,” she said rather hurriedly, to bridge
+an impending silence.
+
+He met this obvious statement with another as brilliant.
+
+“I walked out from town. My horse is a little lame.”
+
+But there was something she wanted to say to him, and the time for
+saying it, before the arrival of her companion, was short. She would
+not waste it in commonplaces.
+
+“I don’t usually read the papers very closely, but this morning I read
+both the Herald and the Sun. Did you get my note?”
+
+“Your note? No.”
+
+“I sent it by mail. I wanted you to know that your friends are proud of
+you. We know why you resigned. It is easy to read between the lines.”
+
+“Thank you,” he said simply. “I knew you would know.”
+
+“Even the Sun recognizes that it was because you are too good a man for
+the place.”
+
+“Praise from the Sun has rarely shone my way,” he said, with a touch of
+irony, for that paper was controlled by the Ridgway interest. “In its
+approval I am happy.”
+
+Her impulsive sympathy for this man whom she so greatly liked would not
+accept the rebuff imposed by this reticence. She stripped the gauntlet
+from her hand and offered it in congratulation.
+
+He took it in his, a slight flush in his face.
+
+“I have done nothing worthy of praise. One cannot ask less of a man
+than that he remain independent and honest. I couldn’t do that and stay
+with the Consolidated, or, so it seemed to me. So I resigned. That is
+all there is to it.”
+
+“It is enough. I don’t know another man would have done it, would have
+had the courage to do it after his feet were set so securely in the way
+of success. The trouble with Americans is that they want too much
+success. They want it at too big a price.”
+
+“I’m not likely ever to have too much of it,” he laughed sardonically.
+
+“Success in life and success in living aren’t the same thing. It is
+because you have discovered this that you have sacrificed the less for
+the greater.” She smiled, and added: “I didn’t mean that to sound as
+preachy as it does.”
+
+“I’m afraid you make too much of a small thing. My squeamishness has
+probably made me the laughing-stock of Mesa.”
+
+“If so, that is to the discredit of Mesa,” she insisted stanchly. “But
+I don’t think so. A great many people who couldn’t have done it
+themselves will think more of you for having done it.”
+
+Another pony, which had been slithering down the steep trail in the
+midst of a small rock slide, now brought its rider safely to a halt in
+the road. Virginia introduced them, and Hobart, remembered that he had
+heard Miss Balfour speak of a young woman whom she had met on the way
+out, a Miss Laska Lowe, who was coming to Mesa to teach domestic
+science in the public schools. There was something about the young
+teacher’s looks that he liked, though she was of a very different type
+than Virginia. Not at all pretty in any accepted sense, she yet had a
+charm born of the vital honesty in her. She looked directly at one out
+of sincere gray eyes, wide-awake and fearless. As it happened, her
+friend had been telling her about Hobart, and she was interested in him
+from the first. For she was of that minority which lives not by bread
+alone, and she felt a glow of pride in the man who could do what the
+Sun had given this man credit for editorially.
+
+They talked at haphazard for a few minutes before the young women
+cantered away. As Hobart trudged homeward he knew that in the eyes of
+these two women, at least, he had not been a fool.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+A CONSPIRACY
+
+
+Tucked away in an obscure corner of the same issue of the papers which
+announced the resignation of Lyndon Hobart as manager of the
+Consolidated properties, and the appointment of James K. Mott as his
+temporary successor, were little one-stick paragraphs regarding
+explosions, which had occurred the night before in tunnels of the
+Taurus and the New York. The general public paid little attention to
+these, but those on the inside knew that Ridgway had scored again. His
+spies had carried the news to him of the projected capture of these two
+properties by the enemy. Instead of attempting to defend them by force,
+he had set off charges of giant powder which had brought down the
+tunnel roofs and effectually blocked the entrances from the
+Consolidated mines adjoining.
+
+With the indefatigable patience which characterized him, Harley set
+about having the passages cleared of the rock and timber with which
+they were filled. Before he had succeeded in doing this his enemy
+struck another telling blow. From Judge Purcell he secured an
+injunction against the Consolidated from working its mines, the Diamond
+King, the Mary K, and the Marcus Daly, on the absurd contention that
+the principal ore-vein of the Marcus Daly apexed on the tin, triangle
+wedged in between these three great mines, and called by Ridgway the
+Trust Buster. Though there was not room enough upon this fragment to
+sink a shaft, it was large enough to found this claim of a vein
+widening as it descended until it crossed into the territory of each of
+these properties. Though Harley could ignore court injunctions which
+erected only under-ground territory, he was forced to respect this one,
+since it could not be violated except in the eyes of the whole country.
+The three mines closed down, and several thousand workmen were thrown
+out of employment. These were immediately reemployed by Ridgway and set
+to work both in his own and the Consolidated’s territory.
+
+Within a week a dozen new suits were instituted against the
+Consolidated by its enemy. He harassed it by contempt proceedings, by
+applications for receiverships, and by other ingenious devices, which
+greatly tormented the New York operator. For the first time in his life
+the courts, which Harley had used to much advantage in his battles to
+maintain and extend the trusts he controlled, could not be used even to
+get scant justice.
+
+Meanwhile both leaders were turning their attention to the political
+situation. The legislators were beginning to gather for the coming
+session, and already the city was full of rumors about corruption. For
+both the Consolidated and its enemy were making every effort to secure
+enough votes to win the election of a friendly United States senator.
+The man chosen would have the distribution of the federal patronage of
+the State. This meant the control of the most influential local
+politicians of the party in power at Washington as well as their
+followers, an almost vital factor for success in a State where
+political corruption had so interwoven itself into the business life of
+the community.
+
+The hotel lobbies were filled with politicians gathered from every
+county in the State. Big bronzed cattlemen brushed shoulders with
+budding lawyers from country towns and ward bosses from the larger
+cities. The bars were working overtime, and the steady movement of
+figures in the corridors lasted all day and most of the night. Here and
+there were collected groups, laughing and talking about the old
+frontier days, or commenting in lowered tones on some phase of the
+feverish excitement that was already beginning to be apparent.
+Elevators shot up and down, subtracting and adding to the kaleidoscope
+of human life in the rotundas. Bellboys hurried to and fro with
+messages and cocktails. The ring of the telephone-bell cut occasionally
+into the deep hum of many voices. All was confusion, keen interest,
+expectancy.
+
+For it was known that Simon Harley had sent for $300,000 in cold cash
+to secure the election of his candidate, Roger D. Warner, a lawyer who
+had all his life been close to corporate interests. It was known, too,
+that Waring Ridgway had gathered together every element in the State
+that opposed the domination of the Consolidated, to fight their man to
+a finish. Bets for large sums were offered and taken as to the result,
+heavy odds being given in favor of the big copper trust’s candidate.
+For throughout the State at large the Consolidated influence was very
+great indeed. It owned forest lands and railroads and mines. It
+controlled local transportation largely. Nearly one-half the working
+men in the State were in its employ. Into every town and village the
+ramifications of its political organization extended. The feeling
+against it was very bitter, but this was usually expressed in whispers.
+For it was in a position to ruin almost any business man upon whom it
+fastened a grudge, and to make wealthy any upon whom it chose to cast
+its favors.
+
+Nevertheless, there were some not so sure that the Consolidated would
+succeed in electing its man. Since Ridgway had announced himself as a
+candidate there had been signs of defection on the part of some of
+those expected to vote for Warner. He had skillfully wielded together
+in opposition to the trust all the elements of the State that were
+hostile to it; and already the word was being passed that he had not
+come to the campaign without a barrel of his own.
+
+The balloting for United States senator was not to begin until the
+eighth day of the session, but the opening week was full of a tense and
+suppressed excitement. It was known that agents of both sides were
+moving to and fro among the representatives and State senators,
+offering fabulous prices for their votes and the votes of any others
+they might be able to control. Men who had come to the capital
+confident in their strength and integrity now looked at their neighbors
+furtively and guiltily. Day by day the legislators were being debauched
+to serve the interest of the factions which were fighting for control
+of the State. Night after night secret meetings were being held in
+out-of-the-way places to seduce those who clung desperately to their
+honesty or held out for a bigger price. Bribery was in the air,
+rampant, unashamed. Thousand-dollar bills were as common as ten-dollar
+notes in ordinary times.
+
+Sam Yesler, commenting on the situation to his friend Jack Roper, a
+fellow member of the legislature who had been a cattleman from the time
+he had given up driving a stage thirty years before, shook his head
+dejectedly over his blue points.
+
+“I tell you, Jack, a man has to be bed-rocked in honesty or he’s gone.
+Think of it. A country lawyer comes here who has never seen five
+thousand dollars in a lump sum, and they shove fifteen thousand at him
+for his vote. He is poor, ambitious, struggling along from hand to
+mouth. I reckon we ain’t in a position to judge that poor devil of a
+harassed fellow. Mebbe he’s always been on the square, came here to do
+what was right, we’ll say, but he sees corruption all round him. How
+can he help getting a warped notion of things? He sees his friends and
+his neighbors falling by the wayside. By God, it’s got to the point in
+this legislature that an honest man’s an object of obloquy.”
+
+“That’s right,” agreed Roper. “Easy enough for us to be square. We got
+good ranches back of us and can spend the winter playing poker at the
+Mesa Club if we feel like it. But if we stood where Billy George and
+Garner and Roberts and Munz do, I ain’t so damn sure my virtue would
+stand the strain. Can you reach that salt, Sam?”
+
+“Billy George has got a sick wife, and he’s been wanting to send her
+back to her folks in the East, but he couldn’t afford it. The doctors
+figured she ought to stay a year, and Billy would have to hire a woman
+to take care of his kids. I said to him: ‘Hell, Billy, what’s a friend
+for?’ And I shoves a check at him. He wouldn’t look at it; said he
+didn’t know whether he could ever pay it, and he had not come down to
+charity yet.”
+
+“Billy’s a white man. That’s what makes me sick. Right on top of all
+his bad luck he comes here and sees that everybody is getting a big
+roll. He thinks of that white-faced wife of his dragging herself round
+among the kids and dying by inches for lack of what money can buy her.
+I tell you I don’t blame him. It’s the fellows putting the temptation
+up to him that ought to be strung up.”
+
+“I see that hound Pelton’s mighty active in it. He’s got it in for
+Ridgway since Waring threw him down, and he’s plugging night and day
+for Warner. Stays pretty well tanked up. Hopper tells me he’s been
+making threats to kill Waring on sight.”
+
+“I heard that and told Waring. He laughed and said he hoped he would
+live till Pelton killed him. I like Waring. He’s got the guts, as his
+miners say. But he’s away off on this fight. He’s using money right and
+left just as Harley is.”
+
+Yesler nodded. “The whole town’s corrupted. It takes bribery for
+granted. Men meet on the street and ask what the price of votes is this
+morning. Everybody feels prosperous.”
+
+“I heard that a chambermaid at the Quartzite Hotel found seven thousand
+dollars in big bills pinned to the bottom of a mattress in Garner’s
+room yesterday. He didn’t dare bank it, of course.”
+
+“Poor devil! He’s another man that would like to be honest, but with
+the whole place impregnated with bribery he couldn’t stand the
+pressure. But after this is all over he’ll go home to his wife and his
+neighbors with the canker of this thing at his heart until he dies. I
+tell you, Jack, I’m for stopping it if we can.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“There’s one way. I’ve been approached indirectly by Pelton, to deliver
+our vote to the Consolidated. Suppose we arrange to do it, get
+evidence, and make a public exposure.”
+
+They were alone in a private dining-room of a restaurant, but Yesler’s
+voice had fallen almost to a whisper. With his steady gray eyes he
+looked across at the man who had ridden the range with him fifteen
+years ago when he had not had a sou to bless himself with.
+
+Roper tugged at his long drooping mustache and gazed at his friend.
+“It’s a large order, Sam, a devilish large order. Do you reckon we
+could deliver?”
+
+“I think so. There are six of us that will stand pat at any cost. If we
+play our cards right and keep mum the surprise of it is bound to shake
+votes loose when we spring the bomb. The whole point is whether we can
+take advantage of that surprise to elect a decent man. I don’t say it
+can be done, but there’s a chance of it.”
+
+The old stage-driver laughed softly. “We’ll be damned good and plenty
+by both sides.”
+
+“Of course. It won’t be a pleasant thing to do, but then it isn’t
+exactly pleasant to sit quiet and let these factions use the State as a
+pawn in their game of grab.”
+
+“I’m with you, Sam. Go to it, my boy, and I’ll back you to the limit.”
+
+“We had better not talk it over here. Come to my room after dinner and
+bring Landor and James with you. I’ll have Reedy and Keller there. I’ll
+mention casually that it’s a big game of poker, and I’ll have cards and
+drinks sent up. You want to remember we can’t be too careful. If it
+leaks out we lose.”
+
+“I’m a clam, Sam. Do you want I should speak of it to Landor and
+James?”
+
+“Better wait till we get together.”
+
+“What about Ward? He’s always been with us.”
+
+“He talks too much. We can take him in at the last minute if we like.”
+
+“That would be better. I ain’t so sure about Reedy, either. He’s
+straight as a string, of course; not a crooked hair in his head. But
+when he gets to drinking he’s likely to let things out.”
+
+“You’re right. We’ll leave him out, too, until the last minute. There’s
+another thing I’ve thought of. Ridgway can’t win. At least I don’t see
+how he can control more than twenty five votes. Suppose at the very
+last moment we make a deal with him and with the Democrats to pool our
+votes on some square man. With Waring it’s anything to beat the
+Consolidated. He’ll jump at the chance if he’s sure he is out of the
+running himself. Those of the Democrats that Harley can’t buy will be
+glad to beat his man. I don’t say it can be done, Jack. All I say is
+that it is worth a trial.”
+
+“You bet.”
+
+They met that night in Yesler’s rooms round a card-table. The hands
+were dealt for form’s sake, since there were spies everywhere, and it
+was necessary to ring for cigars and refreshments occasionally to avoid
+suspicion. They were all cattlemen, large or small, big outdoors
+sunburned men, who rode the range in the spring and fall with their
+punchers and asked no odds of any man.
+
+Until long past midnight they talked the details over, and when they
+separated in the small hours it was with a well-defined plan to save
+the State from its impending disgrace if the thing could be done.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+LASKA OPENS A DOOR
+
+
+The first ballots for a United States senator taken by the legislature
+in joint session failed to disclose the alignment of some of the
+doubtful members. The Democratic minority of twenty-eight votes were
+cast for Springer, the senator whose place would be taken by whoever
+should win in the contest now on. Warner received forty-four, Ridgway
+twenty-six, eight went to Pascom, a former governor whom the cattlemen
+were supporting, and the remaining three were scattered. Each day one
+ballot was taken, and for a week there was a slight sifting down of the
+complimentary votes until at the end of it the count stood:
+
+Warner    45
+Ridgway   28
+Springer  28
+Pascom     8
+
+
+Warner still lacked ten votes of an election, but It was pretty
+thoroughly understood that several of the Democratic minority were
+waiting only long enough for a colorable excuse to switch to him. All
+kinds of rumors were in the air as to how many of these there were. The
+Consolidated leaders boldly claimed that they had only to give the word
+to force the election of their candidate on any ballot. Yesler did not
+believe this claim could be justified, since Pelton and Harley were
+already negotiating with him for the delivery of the votes belonging to
+the cattlemen’s contingent.
+
+He had held off for some time with hints that it would take a lot of
+money to swing the votes of such men as Roper and Landor, but he had
+finally come to an agreement that the eight votes should be given to
+Warner for a consideration of $300,000. This was to be paid to Yesler
+in the presence of the other seven members on the night before the
+election, and was to be held in escrow by him and Roper until the pact
+was fulfilled, the money to be kept in a safety deposit vault with a
+key in possession of each of the two.
+
+On the third day of the session, before the voting had begun, Stephen
+Eaton, who was a State senator from Mesa, moved that a committee be
+appointed to investigate the rumors of bribery that were so common. The
+motion caught the Consolidated leaders napping, for this was the last
+man they had expected to propose such a course, and it went through
+with little opposition, as a similar motion did in the House at the
+same time. The lieutenant-governor and the speaker of the House were
+both opposed to Warner, and the joint committee had on it the names of
+no Consolidated men. The idea of such a committee had originated with
+Ridgway, and had been merely a bluff to show that he at least was
+willing that the world should know the whole story of the election. Nor
+had this committee held even formal meetings before word reached Eaton
+through Yesler that if it would appoint a conference in some very
+private place, evidence would be submitted implicating agents of the
+Warner forces in attempts at bribery.
+
+It was close to eleven o’clock when Sam Yesler stepped quietly from a
+side door of his hotel and slipped into the street. He understood
+perfectly that in following the course he did, he was taking his life
+in his hands. The exposure of the bribery traffic would blast forever
+the reputations of many men who had hitherto held a high place in the
+community, and he knew the temper of some of them well enough to be
+aware that an explosion was probable. Spies had been dogging him ever
+since the legislature convened. Within an hour one of them would be
+flying to Pelton with the news that he was at a meeting of the
+committee, and all the thugs of the other side would be turned loose on
+his heels. As he walked briskly through the streets toward the place
+appointed, his hand lay on the hilt of a revolver in the outside pocket
+of his overcoat. He was a man who would neither seek trouble nor let it
+overwhelm him. If his life were attempted, he meant to defend it to the
+last.
+
+He followed side streets purposely, and his footsteps echoed along the
+deserted road. He knew he was being dogged, for once, when he glanced
+back, he caught sight of a skulking figure edging along close to a
+wall. The sight of the spy stirred his blood. Grimly he laughed to
+himself. They might murder him for what he was doing, but not in time
+to save the exposure which would be brought to light on the morrow.
+
+The committee met at a road-house near the outskirts of the city, but
+only long enough to hear Yesler’s facts and to appoint another meeting
+for three hours later at the offices of Eaton. For the committee had
+come here for secrecy, and they knew that it would be only a short time
+before Pelton’s heelers would be down upon them in force. It was agreed
+they should divide and slip quietly back to town, wait until everything
+was quiet and convene again. Meanwhile Eaton would make arrangements to
+see that his offices would be sufficiently guarded for protection
+against any attack.
+
+Yesler walked back to town and was within a couple of blocks of his
+hotel when he glimpsed two figures crouching against the fence of the
+alley. He stopped in his tracks, watched them intently an instant, and
+was startled by a whistle from the rear. He knew at once his retreat,
+too, was cut off, and without hesitation vaulted the fence in front of
+a big gray stone house he was passing. A revolver flashed from the
+alley, and he laughed with a strange kind of delight. His thought was
+to escape round the house, but trellis work barred the way, and he
+could not open the gate.
+
+“Trapped, by Jove,” he told himself coolly as a bullet struck the
+trellis close to his head.
+
+He turned back, ran up the steps of the porch and found momentary
+safety in the darkness of its heavy vines. But this he knew could not
+last. Running figures were converging toward him at a focal point. He
+could hear oaths and cries. Some one was throwing aimless shots from a
+revolver at the porch.
+
+He heard a window go up in the second story and a woman’s frightened
+voice ask. “What is it? Who is there?”
+
+“Let me in. I’m ambushed by thugs,” he called back.
+
+“There he is—in the doorway,” a voice cried out of the night, and it
+was followed by a spatter of bullets about him.
+
+He fired at a man leaping the fence. The fellow tumbled back with a
+kind of scream.
+
+“God! I’m hit.”
+
+He could hear steps coming down the stairway and fingers fumbling at
+the key of the door. His attackers were gathering for a rush, and he
+wondered whether the rescue was to be too late. They came together, the
+opening door and the forward pour of huddled figures. He stepped back
+into the hall.
+
+There was a raucous curse, a shot, and Yesler had slammed the door
+shut. He was alone in the darkness with his rescuer.
+
+“We must get out of here. They’re firing through the door,” he said,
+and “Yes” came faintly back to him from across the hall.
+
+“Do you know where the switch is?” he asked, wondering whether she was
+going to be such an idiot as to faint at this inopportune moment.
+
+His answer came in a flood of light, and showed him a young woman
+crouched on the hall-rack a dozen feet from the switch. She was very
+white, and there was a little stain of crimson on the white lace of her
+sleeve.
+
+A voice from the landing above demanded quickly, “Who are you, sir?”
+and after he had looked up’, cried in surprise, “Mr. Yesler.”
+
+“Miss Balfour,” he replied. “I’ll explain later. I’m afraid the lady
+has been hit by a bullet.”
+
+He was already beside his rescuer. She looked at him with a trace of a
+tired smile and said:
+
+“In my arm.”
+
+After which she fainted. He picked up the young woman, carried her to
+the stairs, and mounted them.
+
+“This way,” said Virginia, leading him into a bedroom, the door of
+which was open.
+
+He observed with surprise that she, too, was dressed in evening
+clothes, and rightly surmised that they had just come back from some
+social function.
+
+“Is it serious?” asked Virginia, when he had laid his burden on the
+bed.
+
+She was already clipping with a pair of scissors the sleeve from round
+the wound.
+
+“It ought not to be,” he said after he had examined it. “The bullet has
+scorched along the fleshy part of the forearm. We must telephone for a
+doctor at once.”
+
+She did so, then found water and cotton for bandages, and helped him
+make a temporary dressing. The patient recovered consciousness under
+the touch of the cold water, and asked: what was the matter.
+
+“You have been hurt a little, but not badly I think. Don’t you
+remember? You came down and opened the door to let me in.”
+
+“They were shooting at you. What for?” she wanted to know.
+
+He smiled. “Don’t worry about that. It’s all over with. I’m sorry you
+were hurt in saving me,” said Yesler gently.
+
+“Did I save you?” The gray eyes showed a gleam of pleasure.
+
+“You certainly did.”
+
+“This is Mr. Yesler, Laska. Mr. Yesler—Miss Lowe. I think you have
+never met.”
+
+“Never before to-night,” he said, pinning the bandage in place round
+the plump arm. “There. That’s all just now, ma’am. Did I hurt you very
+much?”
+
+The young woman felt oddly exhilarated. “Not much. I’ll forgive you if
+you’ll tell me all about the affair. Why did they want to hurt you?”
+
+His big heart felt very tender toward this girl who had been wounded
+for him, but he showed it only by a smiling deference.
+
+“You’re right persistent, ma’am. You hadn’t ought to be bothering your
+head about any such thing, but if you feel that way I’ll be glad to
+tell you.”
+
+He did. While they sat there and waited for the coming of the doctor,
+he told her the whole story of his attempt to stop the corruption that
+was eating like a canker at the life of the State. He was a plain man,
+not in the least eloquent, and he told his story without any sense that
+he had played any unusual part. In fact, he was ashamed that he had
+been forced to assume a role which necessitated a kind of treachery to
+those who thought they had bought him.
+
+Laska Lowe’s eyes shone with the delight his tale inspired in her. She
+lived largely in the land of ideals, and this fight against wrong moved
+her mightily. She could feel for him none of the shame which he felt
+for himself at being mixed up in so bad a business. He was playing a
+man’s part, had chosen it at risk of his life. That was enough. In
+every fiber of her, she was glad that good fortune had given her the
+chance to bear a part of the battle. In her inmost heart she was even
+glad that to the day of her death she must bear the scar that would
+remind her she had suffered in so good a cause.
+
+Virginia, for once obliterating herself, perceived how greatly taken
+they were with each other. At bottom, nearly every woman is a
+match-maker. This one was no exception. She liked both this man and
+this woman, and her fancy had already begun to follow her hopes. Never
+before had Laska appeared to show much interest in any of the opposite
+sex with whom her friend had seen her. Now she was all enthusiasm, had
+forgotten completely the pain of her wound in the spirit’s glow.
+
+“She loved me for the danger I had pass’d,
+And I loved her that she did pity them.
+This only is the witchcraft I have us’d.’”
+
+
+Virginia quoted softly to herself, her eyes on the young woman so
+finely unconscious of the emotion that thrilled her.
+
+Not until the clock in the hall below struck two did Yesler remember
+his appointment in the Ridgway Building. The doctor had come and was
+about to go. He suggested that if Yesler felt it would be safe for him
+to go, they might walk across to the hotel together.
+
+“And leave us alone.” Laska could have bitten her tongue after the
+words were out.
+
+Virginia explained. “The Leighs are out of the city to-night, and it
+happens that even the servants are gone. I asked Miss Lowe to stay with
+me all night, but, of course, she feels feverish and nervous after this
+excitement. Couldn’t you send a man to watch the rest of the night out
+in the house?”
+
+“Why don’t you stay, Mr. Yesler?” the doctor suggested. “You could
+sleep here, no doubt.”
+
+“You might have your meeting here. It is neutral ground. I can phone to
+Mr. Ridgway,” proposed Virginia in a low voice to Yesler.
+
+“Doesn’t that seem to imply that I’m afraid to leave?” laughed Yesler.
+
+“It implies that we are afraid to have you. Laska would worry both on
+your account and our own. I think you owe it to her to stay.”
+
+“Oh, if that’s the way it strikes you,” he agreed. “Fact is, I don’t
+quite like to leave you anyhow. We’ll take Leigh’s study. I don’t think
+we shall disturb you at all.”
+
+“I’m sure you won’t—and before you go, you’ll let us know what you have
+decided to do.”
+
+“We shall not be through before morning. You’ll be asleep by then,” he
+made answer.
+
+“No, I couldn’t sleep till I know all about it.”
+
+“Nor I,” agreed Laska. “I want to know all about everything.”
+
+“My dear young lady, you are to take the sleeping-powders and get a
+good rest,” the doctor demurred. “All about everything is too large an
+order for your good just now.”
+
+Virginia nodded in a businesslike way. “Yes, you’re to go to sleep,
+Laska, and when you waken I’ll tell you all about it.”
+
+“That would be better,” smiled Yesler, and Virginia thought it
+significant that her friend made no further protest.
+
+Gray streaks began to show in the sky before Yesler tapped on the door
+of Virginia’s room. She had discarded the rather elaborate evening gown
+he had last seen her in, and was wearing some soft fabric which hung
+from the shoulders in straight lines, and defined the figure while
+lending the effect of a loose and flowing drapery.
+
+“How is your patient?” he asked.
+
+“She has dropped into a good sleep,” the girl whispered. “I am sure we
+don’t need to worry about her at all.”
+
+“Nevertheless, it’s a luxury I’m going to permit myself for a day or
+two,” he smiled. “I don’t have my life saved by a young lady very
+often.”
+
+“I’m sure you will enjoy worrying about her,” she laughed.
+
+He got back at her promptly. “There’s somebody down-stairs worrying
+about you. He wants to know if there is anything he can do for you, and
+suggests inviting himself for breakfast in order to make sure.”
+
+“Mr. Ridgway?”
+
+“How did you guess it first crack? Mr. Ridgway it is.”
+
+She considered a moment. “Yes, tell him to stay. Molly will be back in
+time to make breakfast, and I want to talk to him. Now tell me what you
+did.”
+
+“We did Mr. Warner. At least I hope so,” he chuckled.
+
+“I’m so glad. And who is to be senator? Is it Waring?”
+
+“No. It wouldn’t have been possible to elect him even if we had wanted
+to.”
+
+“And you didn’t want to,” she flashed.
+
+“No, we didn’t,” he admitted frankly. “We couldn’t afford to have it
+generally understood that this was merely a partisan fight on the
+Consolidated, and that we were pulling Waring’s chestnuts out of the
+fire for him.”
+
+He did not add, though he might have, that Ridgway was tarred with the
+same brush as the enemy in this matter.
+
+“Then who is it to be?”
+
+“That’s a secret. I can’t tell even you that. But we have agreed on a
+man. Waring is to withdraw and throw his influence for him. The
+Democratic minority will swing in line for him, and we’ll do the rest.
+That’s the plan. It may not go through, however.”
+
+“I don’t see who it can be that you all unite on. Of course, it isn’t
+Mr. Pelton?”
+
+“I should hope not.”
+
+“Or Mr. Samuel Yesler?”
+
+“You’ve used up all the guesses allowed you. If you want to know, why
+don’t you attend the joint session to-day? It ought to be highly
+interesting.”
+
+“I shall,” she announced promptly. “And I’ll bring Laska with me.”
+
+“She won’t be able to come.”
+
+“I think she will. It’s only a scratch.”
+
+“I don’t like to think how much worse it might have been.”
+
+“Then don’t think of it. Tell Waring I’ll be down presently.”
+
+He went down-stairs again, and Miss Balfour returned to the room.
+
+“Was that Mr. Yesler?” quietly asked a voice from the bed.
+
+“Yes, dear. He has gone back to the hotel. He asked about you, of
+course.”
+
+“He is very kind.”
+
+“It was thoughtful, since you only saved his life,” admitted the
+ironical Miss Balfour.
+
+“Wasn’t it fortunate that we were up?”
+
+“Very fortunate for him that you were.”
+
+Virginia crossed the room to the bed and kissed her friend with some
+subtle significance too elusive for words. Laska appeared, however to
+appreciate it. At least, she blushed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+AN EXPLOSION IN THE TAURUS
+
+
+The change of the relationship between Ridgway and his betrothed,
+brought about by the advent of a third person into his life, showed
+itself in the manner of their greeting. She had always been chary of
+lovers’ demonstrations, but until his return from Alpine he had been
+wont to exact his privilege in spite of her reluctance. Now he was
+content with the hand she offered him.
+
+“You’ve had a strenuous night of it,” he said, after a glance at the
+rather wan face she offered the new day.
+
+“Yes, we have—and for that matter, I suppose you have, too.”
+
+Man of iron that he was, he looked fresh as morning dew. With his usual
+lack of self-consciousness, he had appropriated Leigh’s private bath,
+and was glowing from contact with ice-cold water and a crash towel.
+
+“We’ve been making history,” he agreed. “How’s your friend?”
+
+“She has no fever at all. It was only a scratch. She will be down to
+breakfast in a minute.”
+
+“Good. She must be a thoroughbred to come running down into the bullets
+for a stranger she has never seen.”
+
+“She is. You’ll like Laska.”
+
+“I’m glad she saved Sam from being made a colander. I can’t help liking
+him, though he doesn’t approve of me very much.”
+
+“I suppose not.”
+
+“He is friendly, too.” Ridgway laughed as he recalled their battle over
+who should be the nominee. “But his conscience rules him. It’s a free
+and liberal conscience, generally speaking—nothing Puritan about it,
+but a distinctive product of the West. Yet, he would not have me for
+senator at any price.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Didn’t think I was fit to represent the people; said if I went in, it
+would be to use the office for my personal profit.”
+
+“Wasn’t he right?”
+
+“More or less. If I were elected, I would build up my machine, of
+course, but I would see the people got a show, too.”
+
+She nodded agreement. “I don’t think you would make a bad senator.”
+
+“I would be a live wire, anyhow. Sam had other objections to me. He
+thought I had been using too much money in this campaign.”
+
+“And have you?” she asked, curious to see how he would defend himself.
+
+“Yes. I had to if I were going to stand any chance. It wasn’t from
+choice. I didn’t really want to be senator. I can’t afford to give the
+time to it, but I couldn’t afford to let Harley name the man either. I
+was between the devil and the deep sea.”
+
+“Then, really, Mr. Yesler came to your rescue.”
+
+“That’s about it, though he didn’t intend it that way.”
+
+“And who is to be the senator?”
+
+He gave her a cynical smile. “Warner.”
+
+“But I thought—why, surely he—” The surprise of his cool announcement
+took her breath away.
+
+“No, he isn’t the man our combination decided on, but the trouble is
+that our combination is going to fall through. Sam’s an optimist, but
+you’ll see I’m right. There are too many conflicting elements of us in
+one boat. We can’t lose three votes and win, and it’s a safe bet we
+lose them. The Consolidated must know by this time what we have been
+about all night. They’re busy now sapping at our weak links. Our only
+chance is to win on the first vote, and I am very sure we won’t be able
+to do it.”
+
+“Oh, I hope you are not right.” A young woman was standing in the
+doorway, her arm in a sling. She had come in time to hear his prophesy,
+and in the disappointment of it had forgotten that he was a stranger.
+
+Virginia remedied this, and they went in to breakfast. Laska was full
+of interest, and poured out eager questions at Ridgway. It was not for
+several minutes that Virginia recollected to ask again who was the man
+they had decided upon.
+
+Her betrothed found some inner source of pleasure that brought out a
+sardonic smile. “He’s a slap in the face at both Harley and me.”
+
+“I can’t think who—is he honest?”
+
+“As the day.”
+
+“And capable?”
+
+“Oh, yes. He’s competent enough.”
+
+“Presentable?”
+
+“Yes. He’ll do the State credit, or rather he would if he were going to
+be elected.”
+
+“Then I give it up.”
+
+He was leaning forward to tell, when the sharp buzz of the electric
+door-bell, continued and sustained, diverted the attention of all of
+them.
+
+Ridgway put down his napkin. “Probably some one to see me.”
+
+He had risen to his feet when the maid opened the door of the
+dining-room.
+
+“A gentleman to see Mr. Ridgway. He says it is very important.”
+
+From the dining-room they could hear the murmur of quick voices, and
+soon Ridgway returned. He was a transformed man. His eyes were hard as
+diamonds, and there was the bulldog look of the fighter about his mouth
+and chin.
+
+“What is it, Waring?” cried Virginia.
+
+“Trouble in the mines. An hour ago Harley’s men rushed the Taurus and
+the New York, and drove my men out. One of my shift-foremen and two of
+his drillers were killed by an explosion set off by Mike Donleavy, a
+foreman in the Copper King.”
+
+“Did they mean to kill them?” asked the girl whitely.
+
+“I suppose not. But they took the chance. It’s murder just the same—by
+Jove, it’s a club with which to beat the legislators into line.”
+
+He stopped, his brain busy solving the problem as to how he might best
+turn this development to his own advantage. Part of his equipment was
+his ability to decide swiftly and surely issues as they came to him.
+Now he strode to the telephone and began massing his forces.
+
+“Main 234—Yes—Yes—This the Sun?—Give me Brayton—Hello, Brayton. Get out
+a special edition at once charging Harley with murder. Run the word as
+a red headline clear across the page. Show that Vance Edwards and the
+other boys were killed while on duty by an attack ordered by Harley.
+Point out that this is the logical result of his course. Don’t mince
+words. Give it him right from the shoulder. Rush it, and be sure a copy
+of the paper is on the desk of every legislator before the session
+opens this morning. Have a reliable man there to see that every man
+gets one. Scatter the paper broadcast among the miners, too. This is
+important.”
+
+He hung up the receiver, took it down again, and called up Eaton.
+
+“Hello! This you, Steve? Send for Trelawney and Straus right away. Get
+them to call a mass meeting of the unions for ten o’clock at the
+courthouse square. Have dodgers printed and distributed announcing it.
+Shut down all our mines so that the men can come. I want Straus and
+Trelawney and two or three of the other prominent labor leaders to
+denounce Harley and lay the responsibility for this thing right at his
+door. I’ll be up there and outline what they had better say.”
+
+He turned briskly round to the young women, his eyes shining with a
+hard bright light. “I’m sorry, but I have got to cut out breakfast this
+morning. Business is piling up on me too fast. If you’ll excuse me,
+I’ll go now.”
+
+“What are you going to do?” asked Virginia.
+
+“I haven’t time to tell you now. Just watch my smoke,” he laughed
+without mirth.
+
+No sooner did the news of the tragedy reach Simon Harley than he knew
+the mistake of his subordinates would be a costly one. The foreman,
+Donleavy, who had directed the attack on the Taurus, had to be brought
+from the shafthouse under the protection of a score of Pinkerton
+detectives to safeguard him from the swift vengeance of the miners, who
+needed but a word to fling themselves against the cordon of police.
+Harley himself kept his apartments, the hotel being heavily patrolled
+by guards on the lookout for suspicious characters. The current of
+public opinion, never in his favor, now ran swiftly against him, and
+threats were made openly by the infuriated miners to kill him on sight.
+
+The members of the unions came to the massmeeting reading the story of
+the tragedy as the Sun colored the affair. They stayed sullenly to
+listen to red-hot speeches against the leader of the trust, and
+gradually the wrath which was simmering in them began to boil. Ridgway,
+always with a keen sense of the psychological moment, descended the
+court-house steps just as this fury was at its height. There were
+instant cries for a speech from him so persistent that he yielded,
+though apparently with reluctance. His fine presence and strong deep
+voice soon gave him the ears of all that dense throng. He was far out
+of the ordinary as a public speaker, and within a few minutes he had
+his audience with him. He deprecated any violence; spoke strongly for
+letting the law take its course; and dropped a suggestion that they
+send a committee to the State-house to urge that Harley’s candidate be
+defeated for the senatorship.
+
+Like wild-fire this hint spread. Here was something tangible they could
+do that was still within the law. Harley had set his mind on electing
+Warner. They would go up there in a body and defeat his plans. Marshals
+and leaders of companies were appointed. They fell into ranks by fours,
+nearly ten thousand of them all told. The big clock in the court-house
+was striking twelve when they began their march to the Statehouse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+THE ELECTION
+
+
+At the very moment that the tramp of twenty thousand feet turned toward
+the State-house, the report of the bribery investigating committee was
+being read to the legislature met in joint session. The committee
+reported that it had examined seven witnesses, Yesler, Roper, Landor,
+James, Reedy, Kellor, and Ward, and that each of then had testified
+that former Congressman Pelton or others had approached him on behalf
+of Warner; that an agreement had been made by which the eight votes
+being cast for Bascom would be give to Warner in consideration of
+$300,000 in cash, to be held in escrow by Yesler, and that the
+committee now had the said package, supposed to contain the bills for
+that amount, in its possession, and was prepared to turn it over to the
+legislature for examination.
+
+Except for the clerk’s voice, as he read the report, a dead silence lay
+tensely over the crowded hall. Men dared not look at their neighbors,
+scarce dared breathe, for the terror that hung heavy on their hearts.
+Scores were there who expected their guilt to be blazoned forth for all
+the world to read. They waited whitely as the monotonous voice of the
+clerk went from paragraph to paragraph, and when at last he sat down,
+having named only the bribers and not the receivers of bribes, a long
+deep sigh of relief swept the house. Fear still racked them, but for
+the moment they were safe. Furtively their glances began to go from one
+to another of their neighbors and ask for how long safety would endure.
+
+One could have heard the rustle of a leaf as the chairman of the
+committee stepped forward and laid on the desk of the presiding officer
+the incriminating parcel. It seemed an age while the chief clerk opened
+it, counted the bills, and announced that one hundred thousand dollars
+was the sum contained within.
+
+Stephen Eaton then rose in his seat and presented quietly his
+resolution, that since the evidence submitted was sufficient to convict
+of bribery, the judge of the district court of the County of Mesa be
+requested to call a special session of the grand jury to investigate
+the report. It was not until Sam Yesler rose to speak upon that report
+that the pent-up storm broke loose.
+
+He stood there in the careless garb of the cattleman, a strong
+clean-cut figure as one would see in a day’s ride, facing with
+unflinching steel-blue eyes the tempest of human passion he had evoked.
+The babel of voices rose and fell and rose again before he could find a
+chance to make himself heard. In the gallery two quietly dressed young,
+women, one of them with her arm in a sling, leaned forward breathlessly
+and waited. Laska’s eyes glowed with deep fire. She was living her hour
+of hours, and the man who stood with such quiet courage the focus of
+that roar of rage was the hero of it.
+
+“You call me Judas, and I ask you what Christ I have betrayed. You call
+me traitor, but traitor to what? Like you, I am under oath to receive
+no compensation for my services here other than that allowed by law. To
+that oath I have been true. Have you?
+
+“For many weeks we have been living in a carnival of bribery, in a
+debauched hysteria of money-madness. The souls of men have been sifted
+as by fire. We have all been part and parcel of a man-hunt, an eager,
+furious, persistent hunt that has relaxed neither night nor day. The
+lure of gold has been before us every waking hour, and has pursued us
+into our dreams. The temptation has been ever-present. To some it has
+been irresistible, to some maddening, to others, thank God! it has but
+proved their strength. Our hopes, our fears, our loves, our hates:
+these seducers of honor have pandered to them all. Our debts and our
+business, our families and our friendships, have all been used to hound
+us. To-day I put the stigma for this shame where it belongs—upon Simon
+Harley, head of the Consolidated and a score of other trusts, and upon
+Waring Ridgway, head of the Mesa Ore-producing Company. These are the
+debauchers of our commonwealth’s fair name, and you, alas! the
+traffickers who hope to live upon its virtue. I call upon you to-day to
+pass this resolution and to elect a man to the United States senate who
+shall owe no allegiance to any power except the people, or to receive
+forever the brand of public condemnation. Are you free men? Or do you
+wear the collar of the Consolidated, the yoke of Waring Ridgway? The
+vote which you will cast to-day is an answer that shall go flying to
+the farthest corner of your world, an answer you can never hope to
+change so long as you live.”
+
+He sat down in a dead silence. Again men drew counsel from their fears.
+The resolution passed unanimously, for none dared vote against it lest
+he brand himself as bought and sold.
+
+It was in this moment, while the hearts of the guilty were like water,
+that there came from the lawn outside the roar of a multitude of
+voices. Swiftly the word passed that ten thousand miners had come to
+see that Warner was not elected. That they were in a dangerous frame of
+mind, all knew. It was a passionate undisciplined mob and to thwart
+them would have been to invite a riot.
+
+Under these circumstances the joint assembly proceeded to ballot for a
+senator. The first name called was that of Adams. He was an old
+cattleman and a Democrat.
+
+“Before voting, I want to resign my plate a few moments to Mr. Landor,
+of Kit Carson County,” he said.
+
+Landor was recognized, a big broad-shouldered plainsman with a leathery
+face as honest as the sun. He was known and liked by everybody, even by
+those opposed to him.
+
+“I’m going to make a speech,” he announced with the broad smile that
+showed a flash of white teeth. “I reckon it’ll be the first I ever made
+here, and I promise it will be the last, boys. But I won’t keep you
+long, either. You all know how things have been going; how men have
+been moving in and out and buying men here like as if they were cattle
+on the hoof. You’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it. But we didn’t have the
+nerve to say it should stop. One man did. He’s the biggest man in this
+big State to-day, and it ain’t been five minutes since I heard you
+hollar your lungs out cursing him. You know who I mean—Sam Yesler.”
+
+He waited till the renewed storm of cheers and hisses had died away.
+
+“It don’t do him any harm for you to hollar at him, boys—not a mite. I
+want to say to you that he’s a man. He saw our old friends falling by
+the wayside and some of you poor weaklings selling yourselves for
+dollars. Because he is an honest, game man, he set out to straighten
+things up. I want to tell you that my hat’s off to Sam Yesler.
+
+“But that ain’t what I rose for. I’m going to name for the United
+States senate a clean man, one who doesn’t wear either the Harley or
+the Ridgway brand. He’s as straight as a string, not a crooked hair in
+his head, and every manjack of you knows it. I’m going to name a
+man”—he stopped an instant to smile genially around upon the circle of
+uplifted faces—“who isn’t any friend of either one faction or another,
+a man who has just had independence enough to quit a big job because it
+wasn’t on the square. That man’s name is Lyndon Hobart. If you want to
+do yourselves proud, gentlemen, you’ll certainly elect him.”
+
+If it was a sensation he had wanted to create, he had it. The Warner
+forces were taken with dumb surprise. But many of them were already
+swiftly thinking it would be the best way out of a bad business. He
+would be conservative, as fair to the Consolidated as to the enemy.
+More, just now his election would appeal to the angry mob howling
+outside the building, for they could ask nothing more than the election
+of the man who had resigned rather than order the attack on the Taurus,
+which had resulted in the death of some of their number.
+
+Hoyle, of the Democrats, seconded the nomination, as also did Eaton, in
+a speech wherein he defended the course of Ridgway and withdrew his
+name.
+
+Within a few minutes of the time that Eaton sat down, the roll had been
+called and Hobart elected by a vote of seventy-three to twenty-four,
+the others refusing to cast a ballot.
+
+The two young women, sitting together in the front row of the gallery,
+were glowing with triumphant happiness. Virginia was still clapping her
+hands when a voice behind her suggested that the circumstances did not
+warrant her being so happy over the result. She turned, to see Waring
+Ridgway smiling down at her.
+
+“But I can’t help being pleased. Wasn’t Mr. Yesler magnificent?”
+
+“Sam was all right, though he might have eased up a bit when he pitched
+into me.”
+
+“He had to do that to be fair. Everybody knows you and he are friends.
+I think it was fine of him not to let that make any difference in his
+telling the truth.”
+
+“Oh, I knew it would please you,” her betrothed laughed. “What do you
+say to going out to lunch with me? I’ll get Sam, too, if I can.”
+
+The young women consulted eyes and agreed very readily. Both of them
+enjoyed being so near to the heart of things.
+
+“If Mr. Yesler will lunch with the debaucher of the commonwealth, we
+shall be very happy to join the party,” said Virginia demurely.
+
+Ridgway led them down to the floor of the House. Through the dense
+throng they made their way slowly toward him, Ridgway clearing a path
+with his broad shoulders.
+
+Suddenly they heard him call sharply, “Look out, Sam.”
+
+The explosion of a revolver followed sharply his words. Ridgway dived
+through the press, tossing men to right and left of him as a steamyacht
+does the waves. Through the open lane he left in his wake, the young
+women caught the meaning of the turmoil: the crumpled figure was Yesler
+swaying into the arms of his friend, Roper, the furious drink-flushed
+face of Pelton and the menace of the weapon poised for a second shot,
+the swift impact of Waring’s body, and the blow which sent the next
+bullet crashing into the chandelier overhead. All this they glimpsed
+momentarily before the press closed in on the tragic scene and cut off
+their view.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS
+
+
+While Harley had been in no way responsible for Pelton’s murderous
+attack upon Yesler, public opinion held him to account. The Pinkertons
+who had, up till this time, been employed at the mines, were now moved
+to the hotel to be ready for an emergency. A special train was held in
+readiness to take the New Yorker out of the State in the event that the
+stockman should die. Meanwhile, the harassing attacks of Ridgway
+continued. Through another judge than Purcell, the absurd injunction
+against working the Diamond King, the Mary K, and the Marcus Daly had
+been dissolved, but even this advantage had been neutralized by the
+necessity of giving back to the enemy the Taurus and the New York, of
+which he had just possessed himself. All his life he had kept a
+wheather-eye upon the impulsive and fickle public. There were times
+when its feeling could be abused with impunity, and other times when
+this must be respected. Reluctantly, Harley gave the word for the
+withdrawal of his men from the territory gained. Ridgway pushed his
+advantage home and secured an injunction, not only against the working,
+but against the inspection of the Copper King and the Jim Hill. The
+result of the Consolidated move had been in effect to turn over,
+temporarily, its two rich mines to be looted by the pirate, and to make
+him very much stronger than before with his allies, the unions. By his
+own imprudence, Harley had made a bad situation worse, and delivered
+himself, with his hands tied, into the power of the enemy.
+
+In the days of turmoil that followed, Waring Ridgway’s telling blows
+scored once and again. The morning after the explosion, he started a
+relief fund in his paper, the Sun, for the families of the dead miners,
+contributing two thousand dollars himself. He also insisted that the
+Consolidated pay damages to the bereaved families to the extent of
+twenty thousand dollars for each man killed. The town rang with his
+praises. Mesa had always been proud of his success; had liked the
+democratic spirit of him that led him to mix on apparently equal terms
+with his working men, and had backed him in his opposition to the trust
+because his plucky and unscrupulous fight had been, in a measure, its
+fight. But now it idolized him. He was the buffer between it and the
+trust, fighting the battles of labor against the great octopus of
+Broadway, and beating it to a standstill. He was the Moses destined to
+lead the working man out of the Egypt of his discontent. Had he not
+maintained the standard of wages and forced the Consolidated to do the
+same? Had he not declared an eight-hour day, and was not the trust
+almost ready to do this also, forced by the impetus his example had
+given the unions? So Ridgway’s agents whispered, and the union leaders,
+whom he had bought, took up the burden of their tale and preached it
+both in private talk and in their speeches.
+
+In an attempt to stem the rising tide of denunciation that was
+spreading from Mesa to the country at large, Harley announced an eight
+hour day and an immense banquet to all the Consolidated employees in
+celebration of the occasion. Ten thousand men sat down to the long
+tables, but when one of the speakers injudiciously mentioned the name
+of Ridgway, there was steady cheering for ten minutes. It was quite
+plain that the miners gave him the credit for having forced the
+Consolidated to the eight-hour day.
+
+The verdict of the coroner’s jury was that Vance Edwards and the other
+deceased miners had come to their death at the hands of the foreman,
+Michael Donleavy, at the instigation of Simon Harley. True bills were
+at once drawn up by the prosecuting attorney of Mesa County, an
+official elected by Ridgway, charging Harley and Donleavy with
+conspiracy, resulting in the murder of Vance Edwards. The billionaire
+furnished bail for himself and foreman, treating the indictments merely
+as part of the attacks of the enemy.
+
+The tragedy in the Taurus brought to the surface a bitterness that had
+hitherto not been apparent in the contest between the rival copper
+interests. The lines of division became more sharply drawn, and every
+business man in Mesa was forced to declare himself on one side or the
+other. Harley scattered detectives broadcast and imported five hundred
+Pinkertons to meet any emergency that might arise. The spies of the
+Consolidated were everywhere, gathering evidence against the Mesa
+Ore-producing Company, its conduct of the senatorial campaign, its
+judges, and its supporters Criminal indictments flew back and forth
+thick as snowflakes in a Christmas storm.
+
+It began to be noticed that an occasional foreman, superintendent, or
+mining engineer was slipping from the employ of Ridgway to that of the
+trust, carrying secrets and evidence that would be invaluable later in
+the courts. Everywhere the money of the Consolidated, scattered
+lavishly where it would do the most good, attempted to sap the loyalty
+of the followers of the other candidates. Even Eaton was approached
+with the offer of a bribe.
+
+But Ridgway’s potent personality had built up an esprit de corps not
+easily to be broken. The adventurers gathered to his side were, for the
+most part, bound to him by ties personal in their nature. They were
+financial fillibusters, pledged to stand or fall together, with an
+interest in their predatory leader’s success that was not entirely
+measurable in dollars and cents. Nor was that leader the man to allow
+the organization he had builded with such care to become disintegrated
+while he slept. His alert eye and cheery smile were everywhere,
+instilling confidence in such as faltered, and dread in those
+contemplating defection.
+
+He harassed his rival with an audacity that was almost devilish in its
+unexpected ingenuity. For the first time in his life Simon Harley, the
+town back on the defensive by a combination of circumstances engineered
+by a master brain, knew what it was to be checkmated. He had not the
+least doubt of ultimate victory, but the tentative success of the
+brazen young adventurer, were gall and wormwood to his soul. He had
+made money his god, had always believed it would buy anything worth
+while except life, but this Western buccaneer had taught him it could
+not purchase the love of a woman nor the immediate defeat of a man so
+well armed as Waring Ridgway. In truth, though Harley stuck at nothing,
+his success in accomplishing the destruction of this thorn in his side
+was no more appreciable than had been that of Hobart. The Westerner
+held his own and more, the while he robbed the great trust of its ore
+under cover of the courts.
+
+In the flush of success, Ridgway, through his lieutenant, Eaton, came
+to Judge Purcell asking that a receiver be appointed for the
+Consolidated Supply Company, a subsidiary branch of the trust, on the
+ground that its affairs were not being properly administered. The
+Supply Company had paid dividends ranging from fifteen to twenty-five
+per cent for many years, but Ridgway exercised his right as a
+stockholder to ask for a receivership. In point of fact, he owned, in
+the name of Eaton, only one-tenth of one per cent of the stock, but it
+was enough to serve. For Purcell was a bigoted old Missourian, as
+courageous and obstinate as perfect health and ignorance could make
+him. He was quite innocent of any legal knowledge, his own rule of law
+being to hit a Consolidated head whenever he saw one. Lawyers might
+argue themselves black in the face without affecting his serenity or
+his justice.
+
+Purcell granted the application, as well as a restraining order against
+the payment of dividends until further notice, and appointed Eaton
+receiver over the protests of the Consolidated lawyers.
+
+Ridgway and Eaton left the court-room together, jubilant over their
+success. They dined at a restaurant, and spent the evening at the
+ore-producing company’s offices, discussing ways and means. When they
+had finished, his chief followed Eaton to the doors, an arm thrown
+affectionately round his shoulder.
+
+“Steve, we’re going to make a big killing. I was never so sure of
+anything in my life as that we shall beat Simon Harley at his own game.
+We’re bound to win. We’ve got to win.”
+
+“I wish I were as sure as you.”
+
+“It’s hard pounding does it, my boy. We’ll drive him out of the Montana
+copper-fields yet. We’ll show him there is one little corner of the U.
+S. where Simon Harley’s orders don’t go as the last word.”
+
+“He has a hundred dollars to your one.”
+
+“And I have youth and mining experience and the inside track, as well
+as stancher friends than he ever dreamed of,” laughed Ridgway, clapping
+the other on the back. “Well, good night, Steve. Pleasant dreams, old
+man.”
+
+The boyish secretary shook hands warmly. “You’re a MAN, chief. If
+anybody can pull us through it will be you.”
+
+Triumphant confidence rang in the other’s answering laugh. “You bet I
+can, Steve.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+ONE MILLION DOLLARS
+
+
+Eaton, standing on the street curb at the corner of the Ridgway
+Building, lit a cigar while he hesitated between his rooms and the
+club. He decided for the latter, and was just turning up the hill, when
+a hand covered his mouth and an arm was flung around his neck in a
+stranglehold. He felt himself lifted like a child, and presently
+discovered that he was being whirled along the street in a closed
+carriage.
+
+“You needn’t be alarmed, Mr. Eaton. We’re not going to injure you in
+the least,” a low voice explained in his ear. “If you’ll give me your
+word not to cry out, I’ll release your throat.”
+
+Eaton nodded a promise, and, when he could find his voice, demanded:
+“Where are you taking me?”
+
+“You’ll see in a minute, sir. It’s all right.”
+
+The carriage turned into an alley and stopped. Eaton was led to a
+ladder that hung suspended from the fire-escape, and was bidden to
+mount. He did so, following his guide to the second story, and being in
+turn followed by the other man. He was taken along a corridor and into
+the first of a suite of rooms opening into it. He knew he was in the
+Mesa House, and suspected at once that he was in the apartments of
+Simon Harley.
+
+His suspicion ripened to conviction when his captors led him through
+two more rooms, into one fitted as an office. The billionaire sat at a
+desk, busy over some legal papers he was reading, but he rose at once
+and came forward with hand extended to meet Eaton. The young man took
+his hand mechanically.
+
+“Glad to have the pleasure of talking with, you, Mr. Eaton. You must
+accept my apologies for my methods of securing a meeting. They are
+rather primitive, but since you declined to call and see me, I can hold
+only you to blame.” An acid smile touched his lips for a moment, though
+his eyes were expressionless as a wall. “Mr. Eaton, I have brought you
+here in this way to have a confidential talk with you, in order that it
+might not in any way reflect upon you in case we do not come to an
+arrangement satisfactory to both of us. Your friends cannot justly
+blame you for this conference, since you could not avoid it. Mr. Eaton,
+take a chair.”
+
+The wills of the two men flashed into each other’s eyes like rapiers.
+The weaker man knew what was before him and braced himself to meet it.
+He would not sit down. He would not discuss anything. So he told
+himself once and again to hold himself steady against the impulse to
+give way to those imperious eyes behind which was the impassive,
+compelling will.
+
+“Sit down, Mr. Eaton.”
+
+“I’ll stand, Mr. Harley.”
+
+“SIT DOWN.”
+
+The cold jade eyes were not to be denied. Eaton’s gaze fell sullenly,
+and he slid into a chair.
+
+“I’ll discuss no business except in the presence of Mr. Ridgway,” he
+said doggedly, falling back to his second line of defenses.
+
+“To the contrary, my business is with you and not with Mr. Ridgway.”
+
+“I know of no business you can have with me.”
+
+“Wherefore I have brought you here to acquaint you with it.”
+
+The young man lifted his head reluctantly and waited. If he had been
+willing to confess it to himself, he feared greatly this ruthless
+spoiler who had built up the greatest fortune in the world from
+thousands of wrecked lives. He felt himself choking, just as if those
+skeleton fingers had been at his throat, but he promised himself never
+to yield.
+
+The fathomless, dominant gaze caught and held his eyes. “Mr. Eaton, I
+came here to crush Ridgway. I am going to stay here till I do. I’m
+going to wipe him from the map of Montana—ruin him so utterly that he
+can never recover. It has been my painful duty to do this with a
+hundred men as strong and as confident as he is. After undertaking such
+an enterprise, I have never faltered and never relented. The men I have
+ruined were ruined beyond hope of recovery. None of them have ever
+struggled to their feet again. I intend to make Waring Ridgway a
+pauper.”
+
+Stephen Eaton could have conceived nothing more merciless than this
+man’s callous pronouncement, than the calm certainty of his
+unemphasized words. He started to reply, but Harley took the words out
+of his mouth.
+
+“Don’t make a mistake. Don’t tie to the paltry successes he has gained.
+I have not really begun to fight yet.”
+
+The young man had nothing to say. His heart was water. He accepted
+Harley’s words as true, for he had told himself the same thing a
+hundred times. Why had Ridgway rejected the overtures of this colossus
+of finance? It had been the sheerest folly born of madness to suppose
+that anybody could stand against him.
+
+“For Ridgway, the die is cast,” the iron voice went on. “He is doomed
+beyond hope. But there is still a chance for you. What do you consider
+your interest in the Mesa Ore-producing Company worth, Mr. Eaton?”
+
+The sudden question caught Eaton with the force of a surprise. “About
+three hundred thousand dollars,” he heard himself say; and it seemed to
+him that his voice was speaking the words without his volition.
+
+“I’m going to buy you out for twice that sum. Furthermore, I’m going to
+take care of your future—going to see that you have a chance to rise.”
+
+The waverer’s will was in flux, but the loyalty in him still protested.
+“I can’t desert my chief, Mr. Harley.”
+
+“Do you call it desertion to leave a raging madman in a sinking boat
+after you have urged him to seek the safety of another ship?”
+
+“He made me what I am.”
+
+“And I will make you ten times what you are. With Ridgway you have no
+chance to be anything but a subordinate. He is the Mesa Ore-producing
+Company, and you are merely a cipher. I offer your individuality a
+chance. I believe in you, and know you to be a strong man.” No ironic
+smile touched Harley’s face at this statement. “You need a chance, and
+I offer it to you. For your own sake take it.”
+
+Every grievance Eaton had ever felt against his chief came trooping to
+his mind. He was domineering. He did ride rough-shod over his allies’
+opinions and follow the course he had himself mapped out. All the glory
+of the victory he absorbed as his due. In the popular opinion, Eaton
+was as a farthing-candle to a great electric search-light in comparison
+with Ridgway.
+
+“He trusts me,” the tempted man urged weakly. He was slipping, and he
+knew it, even while he assured himself he would never betray his chief.
+
+“He would sell you out to-morrow if it paid him. And what is he but a
+robber? Every dollar of his holdings is stolen from me. I ask only
+restitution of you—and I propose to buy at twice, nay at three times,
+the value of your stolen property. You owe that freebooter no loyalty.”
+
+“I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”
+
+“You shall do it.” Harley dominated him as bullying schoolmaster does a
+cringing boy under the lash.
+
+“I can’t do it,” the young man repeated, all his weak will flung into
+the denial.
+
+“Would you choose ruin?”
+
+“Perhaps. I don’t know,” he faltered miserable.
+
+“It’s merely a business proposition, young man. The stock you have to
+sell is valuable to-day. Reject my offer, and a month from now it will
+be quoted on the market at half its present figure, and go begging at
+that. It will be absolutely worthless before I finish. You are not
+selling out Ridgway. He is a ruined man, anyway. But you—I am going to
+save you in spite of yourself. I am going to shake you from that
+robber’s clutches.”
+
+Eaton got to his feet, pallid and limp as a rag. “Don’t tempt me,” he
+cried hoarsely. “I tell you I can’t do it, sir.”
+
+Harley’s cold eye did not release him for an instant. “One million
+dollars and an assured future, or—absolute, utter ruin, complete and
+final.”
+
+“He would murder me—and he ought to,” groaned the writhing victim.
+
+“No fear of that. I’ll put you where he can’t reach you. Just sign your
+name to this paper, Mr. Eaton.”
+
+“I didn’t agree. I didn’t say I would.”
+
+“Sign here. Or, wait one moment, till I get witnesses.” Harley touched
+a bell, and his secretary appeared in the doorway. “Ask Mr. Mott and
+young Jarvis to step this way.”
+
+Harley held out the pen toward Eaton, looking steadily at him. In a
+strong man the human eye is a sword among weapons. Eaton quailed. The
+fingers of the unhappy wretch went out mechanically for the pen. He was
+sweating terror and remorse, but the essential weakness of the man
+could not stand out unbacked against the masterful force of this man’s
+imperious will. He wrote his name in the places directed, and flung
+down the pen like a child in a rage.
+
+“Now get me out of Montana before Ridgway knows,” he cried brokenly.
+
+“You may leave to-morrow night, Mr. Eaton. You’ll only have to appear
+in court once personally. We’ll arrange it quietly for to-morrow
+afternoon. Ridgway won’t know until it is done and you are gone.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+A LITTLE LUNCH AT APHONSE’S
+
+
+It chanced that Ridgway, through the swinging door of a department
+store, caught a glimpse of Miss Balfour as he was striding along the
+street. He bethought him that it was the hour of luncheon, and that she
+was no end better company than the revamped noon edition of the morning
+paper. Wherefore he wheeled into the store and interrupted her
+inspection of gloves.
+
+“I know the bulliest little French restaurant tucked away in a side
+street just three blocks from here. The happiness disseminated in this
+world by that chef’s salads will some day carry him past St. Peter with
+no questions asked.”
+
+“You believe in salvation by works?” she parried, while she considered
+his invitation.
+
+“So will you after a trial of Alphonse’s salad.”
+
+“Am I to understand that I am being invited to a theological discussion
+of a heavenly salad concocted by Father Alphonse?”
+
+“That is about the specifications.”
+
+“Then I accept. For a week my conscience has condemned me for excess of
+frivolity. You offer me a chance to expiate without discomfort. That is
+my idea of heaven. I have always believed it a place where one pastures
+in rich meadows of pleasure, with penalties and consciences all
+excluded from its domains.”
+
+“You should start a church,” he laughed. “It would have a great
+following—especially if you could operate your heaven this side of the
+Styx.”
+
+She found his restaurant all he had claimed, and more. The little
+corner of old Paris set her eyes shining. The fittings were Parisian to
+the least detail. Even the waiter spoke no English.
+
+“But I don’t see how they make it pay. How did he happen to come here?
+Are there enough people that appreciate this kind of thing in Mesa to
+support it?”
+
+He smiled at her enthusiasm. “Hardly. The place has a scarce dozen of
+regular patrons. Hobart comes here a good deal. So does Eaton. But it
+doesn’t pay financially. You see, I know because I happen to own it. I
+used to eat at Alphonse’s restaurant in Paris. So I sent for him. It
+doesn’t follow that one has to be less a slave to the artificial
+comforts of a supercivilized world because one lives at Mesa.”
+
+“I see it doesn’t. You are certainly a wonderful man.”
+
+“Name anything you like. I’ll warrant Alphonse can make good if it is
+not outside of his national cuisine,” he boasted.
+
+She did not try his capacity to the limit, but the oysters, the salad,
+the chicken soup were delicious, with the ultimate perfection that
+comes only out of Gaul.
+
+They made a delightfully gay and intimate hour of it, and were still
+lingering over their demi-tasse when Yesler’s name was mentioned.
+
+“Isn’t it splendid that he’s doing so well?” cried the girl with
+enthusiasm. “The doctor says that if the bullet had gone a fraction of
+an inch lower, he would have died. Most men would have died anyhow,
+they say. It was his clean outdoor life and magnificent constitution
+that saved him.”
+
+“That’s what pulled him through,” he nodded. “It would have done his
+heart good to see how many friends he had. His recovery was a
+continuous performance ovation. It would have been a poorer world for a
+lot of people if Sam Yesler had crossed the divide.”
+
+“Yes. It would have been a very much poorer one for several I know.”
+
+He glanced shrewdly at her. “I’ve learned to look for a particular
+application when you wear that particularly sapient air of mystery.”
+
+Her laugh admitted his hit. “Well, I was thinking of Laska. I begin to
+think HER fair prince has come.”
+
+“Meaning Yesler?”
+
+“Yes. She hasn’t found it out herself yet. She only knows she is
+tremendously interested.”
+
+“He’s a prince all right, though he isn’t quite a fairy. The woman that
+gets him will be lucky.
+
+“The man that gets Laska will be more than lucky,” she protested
+loyally.
+
+“I dare say,” he agreed carelessly. “But, then, good women are not so
+rare as good men. There are still enough of them left to save the
+world. But when it comes to men like Sam—well, it would take a Diogenes
+to find another.”
+
+“I don’t see how even Mr. Pelton, angry as he was, dared shoot him.”
+
+“He had been drinking hard for a week. That will explain anything when
+you add it to his temperament. I never liked the fellow.”
+
+“I suppose that is why you saved his life when the miners took him and
+were going to lynch him?”
+
+“I would not have lifted a hand for him. That’s the bald truth. But I
+couldn’t let the boys spoil the moral effect of their victory by so
+gross a mistake. It would have been playing right into Harley’s hands.”
+
+“Can a man get over being drunk in five minutes? I never saw anybody
+more sober than Mr. Pelton when the mob were crying for vengeance and
+you were fighting them back.”
+
+“A great shock will sober a man. Pelton is an errant coward, and he had
+pretty good reason to think he had come to the end of the passage. The
+boys weren’t playing. They meant business.”
+
+“They would not have listened to another man in the world except you,”
+she told him proudly.
+
+“It was really Sam they listened to—when he sent out the message asking
+them to let the law have its way.”
+
+“No, I think it was the way you handled the message. You’re a wizard at
+a speech, you know.”
+
+“Thanks.”
+
+He glanced up, for Alphonse was waiting at his elbow.
+
+“You’re wanted on the telephone, monsieur.”
+
+“You can’t get away from business even for an hour, can you?” she
+rallied. “My heaven wouldn’t suit you at all, unless I smuggled in a
+trust for you to fight.”
+
+“I expect it is Eaton,” he explained. “Steve phoned down to the office
+that he isn’t feeling well to-day. I asked him to have me called up
+here. If he isn’t better, I’m going to drop round and see him.”
+
+But when she caught sight of his face as he returned she knew it was
+serious.
+
+“What’s the matter? Is it Mr. Eaton? Is he very ill?” she cried.
+
+His face was set like broken ice refrozen. “Yes, it’s Eaton. They
+say—but it can’t be true!”
+
+She had never seen him so moved. “What is it, Waring?”
+
+“The boy has sold me out. He is at the courthouse now, undoing my
+work—the Judas!”
+
+The angry blood swept imperiously into her cheeks. “Don’t waste any
+more time with me, Waring. Go—go and save yourself from the traitor.
+Perhaps it is not too late yet.”
+
+He flung her a grateful look. “You’re true blue, Virginia. Come! I’ll
+leave you at the store as we pass.”
+
+The defection of Eaton bit his chief to the quick. The force of the
+blow itself was heavy—how heavy he could not tell till he could take
+stock of the situation. He could see that he would be thrown out of
+court in the matter of the Consolidated Supply Company receivership,
+since Eaton’s stock would now be in the hands of the enemy. But what
+was of more importance was the fact that Eaton’s interest in the Mesa
+Ore-producing Company now belonged to Harley, who could work any amount
+of mischief with it as a lever for litigation.
+
+The effect, too, of the man’s desertion upon the morale of the M. O. P.
+forces must be considered and counteracted, if possible. He fancied he
+could see his subordinates looking shiftyeyed at each other and
+wondering who would slip away next.
+
+If it had been anybody but Steve! He would as soon have distrusted his
+right hand as Steve Eaton. Why, he had made the man, had picked him out
+when he was a mere clerk, and tied him to himself by a hundred favors.
+Up on the Snake River he had saved Steve’s life once when he was
+drowning. The boy had always been as close to him as a brother. That
+Steve should turn traitor was not conceivable. He knew all his intimate
+plans, stood second to himself in the company. Oh, it was a numbing
+blow! Ridgway’s sense of personal loss and outrage almost obliterated
+for the moment his appreciation of the business loss.
+
+The motion to revoke the receivership of the Supply Company was being
+argued when Ridgway entered the court-room. Within a few minutes the
+news had spread like wild-fire that Eaton was lined up with the
+Consolidated, and already the paltry dozen of loafers in the court-room
+had swelled into hundreds, all of them eager for any sensation that
+might develop.
+
+Ridgway’s broad shoulders flung aside the crowd and opened a way to the
+vacant chair waiting for him. One of his lawyers had the floor and was
+flaying Eaton with a vitriolic tongue, the while men craned forward all
+over the room to get a glimpse of the traitor’s face.
+
+Eaton sat beside Mott, dry-lipped and pallid, his set eyes staring
+vacantly into space. Once or twice he flung a furtive glance about him.
+His stripped and naked soul was enduring a foretaste of the Judgment
+Day. The whip of scorn with which the lawyer lashed him cut into his
+shrinking sensibilities, and left him a welter of raw and livid wales.
+Good God! why had he not known it would be like this? He was paying for
+his treachery and usury, and it was being burnt into him that as the
+years passed he must continue to pay in self-contempt and the distrust
+of his fellows.
+
+The case had come to a hearing before Judge Hughes, who was not one of
+Ridgway’s creatures. That on its merits it would be decided in favor of
+the Consolidated was a foregone conclusion. It was after the judge had
+rendered the expected decision that the dramatic moment of the day came
+to gratify the seasoned court frequenters.
+
+Eaton, trying to slip as quietly as possible from the room, came face
+to face with his former chief. For an interminable instant the man he
+had betrayed, blocking the way squarely, held the trembling wretch in
+the blaze of his scorn. Ridgway’s contemptuous eyes sifted to the
+ingrate’s soul until it shriveled. Then he stood disdainfully to one
+side so that the man might not touch him as he passed.
+
+Some one in the back of the room broke the tense silence and hissed:
+“The damned Judas!” Instantly echoes of “Judas! Judas!” filled the
+room, and pursued Eaton to his cab. It would be many years before he
+could recall without scalding shame that moment when the finger of
+public scorn was pointed at him in execration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+HARLEY SCORES
+
+
+What Harley had sought in the subornation of Eaton had been as much the
+moral effect of his defection as the tangible results themselves. If he
+could shake the confidence of the city and State in the freebooter’s
+victorious star, he would have done a good day’s work. He wanted the
+impression to spread that Ridgway’s success had passed its meridian.
+
+Nor did he fail of his purpose by more than a hair’s breadth. The talk
+of the street saw the beginning of the end. The common voice ran: “It’s
+‘God help Ridgway’ now. He’s down and out.”
+
+But Waring Ridgway was never more dangerous than in apparent defeat. If
+he were hit hard by Eaton’s treachery, no sign of it was apparent in
+the jaunty insouciance of his manner. Those having business with him
+expected to find him depressed and worried, but instead met a man the
+embodiment of vigorous and confident activity. If the subject were
+broached, he was ready to laugh with them at Eaton’s folly in deserting
+at the hour when victory was assured.
+
+It was fortunate for Ridgway that the county elections came on early in
+the spring and gave him a chance to show that his power was still
+intact. He arranged to meet at once the political malcontents of the
+State who were banded together against the growing influence of the
+Consolidated. He had a few days before called together representative
+men from all parts of the State to discuss a program of action against
+the enemy, and Ridgway gave a dinner for them at the Quartzite, the
+evening of Eaton’s defection.
+
+He was at the critical moment when any obvious irresolution would have
+been fatal. His allies were ready to concede his defeat if he would let
+them. But he radiated such an assured atmosphere of power, such an
+unconquerable current of vigor, that they could not escape his own
+conviction of unassailability. He was at his genial, indomitable best,
+the magnetic charm of fellowship putting into eclipse the selfishness
+of the man. He had been known to boast of his political exploits, of
+how he had been the Warwick that had made and unmade governors and
+United States senators; but the fraternal “we” to-night replaced his
+usual first person singular.
+
+The business interests of the Consolidated were supreme all over the
+State. That corporation owned forests and mills and railroads and
+mines. It ran sheep and cattle-ranches as well as stores and
+manufactories. Most of the newspapers in the State were dominated by
+it. Of a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, it controlled
+more than half directly by the simple means of filling dinner-pails.
+That so powerful a corporation, greedy for power and wealth, should
+create a strong but scattered hostility in the course of its growth,
+became inevitable. This enmity Ridgway proposed to consolidate into a
+political organization, with opposition to the trust as its cohesive
+principle, that should hold the balance of power in the State.
+
+When he rose to explain his object in calling them together, Ridgway’s
+clear, strong presentment of the situation, backed by his splendid bulk
+and powerful personality, always bold and dramatic, shocked dormant
+antagonisms to activity as a live current does sluggish inertia. For he
+had eminently the gift of moving speech. The issue was a simple one, he
+pointed out. Reduced to ultimates, the question was whether the State
+should control the Consolidated or the Consolidated the State. With
+simple, telling force he faced the insidious growth of the big copper
+company, showing how every independent in the State was fighting for
+his business life against its encroachments, and was bound to lose
+unless the opposition was a united one. Let the independents obtain and
+keep control of the State politically and the trust might be curbed;
+not otherwise. In eternal vigilance and in union lay safety.
+
+He sat down in silence more impressive than any applause. But after the
+silence came a deluge of cheers, the thunder of them sweeping up and
+down the long table like a summer storm across a lake.
+
+Presently the flood-gates of talk were unloosed, and the conservatives
+began to be heard. Opposition was futile because it was too late, they
+claimed. A young Irishman, primed for the occasion, jumped to his feet
+with an impassioned harangue that pedestaled Ridgway as the Washington
+of the West. He showed how one man, in coalition with the labor-unions,
+had succeeded in carrying the State against the big copper company; how
+he had elected senators and governors, and legislators and judges. If
+one man could so cripple the octopus, what could the best blood of the
+State, standing together, not accomplish? He flung Patrick Henry and
+Robert Emmet and Daniel Webster at their devoted heads, demanding
+liberty or death with the bridled eloquence of his race.
+
+But Ridgway was not such a tyro at the game of politics as to depend
+upon speeches for results. His fine hand had been working quietly for
+months to bring the malcontents into one camp, shaping every passion to
+which men are heir to serve his purpose. As he looked down the table he
+could read in the faces before him hatred, revenge, envy, fear, hope,
+avarice, recklessness, and even love, as the motives which he must fuse
+to one common end. His vanity stood on tiptoe at his superb skill in
+playing on men’s wills. He knew he could mold these men to work his
+desire, and the sequel showed he was right.
+
+When the votes were counted at the end of the bitter campaign that
+followed, Simon Harley’s candidates went down to disastrous defeat all
+over the State, though he had spent money with a lavish hand. In Mesa
+County, Ridgway had elected every one of his judges and retired to
+private life those he could not influence.
+
+Harley’s grim lips tightened when the news reached him. “Very well,” he
+said to Mott “We’ll see if these patriots can’t be reached through
+their stomachs better than their brains. Order every mill and mine and
+smelter of the Consolidated closed to-night. Our employees have voted
+for this man Ridgway. Let him feed them or let them starve.”
+
+“But the cost to you—won’t it be enormous?” asked Mott, startled at his
+chief’s drastic decision.
+
+Harley bared his fangs with a wolfish smile. “We’ll make the public
+pay. Our store-houses are full of copper. Prices will jump when the
+supply is reduced fifty per cent. We’ll sell at an advance, and clean
+up a few millions out of the shut-down. Meanwhile we’ll starve this
+patriotic State into submission.”
+
+It came to pass even as Harley had predicted. With the Consolidated
+mines closed, copper, jumped up—up—up. The trust could sit still and
+coin money without turning a hand, while its employees suffered in the
+long, bitter Northern winter. All the troubles usually pursuant on a
+long strike began to fall upon the families of the miners.
+
+When a delegation from the miners’ union came to discuss the situation
+with Harley he met them blandly, with many platitudes of sympathy. He
+regretted—he regretted exceedingly—the necessity that had been forced
+upon him of closing the mines. He had delayed doing so in the hope that
+the situation might be relieved. But it had grown worse, until he had
+been forced to close. No, he was afraid he could not promise to reopen
+this winter, unless something were done to ameliorate conditions in the
+court. Work would begin at once, however, if the legislators would pass
+a bill making it optional with any party to a suit to have the case
+transferred to another judge in case he believed the bias of the
+presiding judge would be prejudicial to an impartial hearing.
+
+Ridgway was flung at once upon the defensive. His allies, the working
+men, demanded of him that his legislature pass the bill wanted by
+Harley, in order that work might recommence. He evaded their demands by
+proposing to arbitrate his difficulties with the Consolidated, by
+offering to pay into the union treasury hall a million dollars to help
+carry its members through the winter. He argued to the committee that
+Harley was bluffing, that within a few weeks the mines and smelters
+would again be running at their full capacity; but when the pressure on
+the legislators he had elected became so great that he feared they
+would be swept from their allegiance to him, he was forced to yield to
+the clamor.
+
+It was a great victory for Harley. Nobody recognized how great a one
+more accurately than Waring Ridgway. The leader of the octopus had
+dogged him over the shoulders of the people, had destroyed at a single
+blow one of his two principal sources of power. He could no longer rely
+on the courts to support him, regardless of justice.
+
+Very well. If he could not play with cogged dice, he was gambler enough
+to take the honest chances of the game without flinching. No despair
+rang in his voice. The look in his eye was still warm and confident.
+Mesa questioned him with glimpses friendly but critical. They found no
+fear in his bearing, no hint of doubt in his indomitable assurance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+“NOT GUILTY”—“GUILTY”
+
+
+Ridgway’s answer to the latest move of Simon Harley was to put him on
+trial for his life to answer the charge of having plotted and
+instigated the death of Vance Edwards. Not without reason, the defense
+had asked for a change of venue, alleging the impossibility of securing
+a fair trial at Mesa. The courts had granted the request and removed
+the case to Avalanche.
+
+On the second day of the trial Aline sat beside her husband, a dainty
+little figure of fear, shrinking from the observation focused upon her
+from all sides. The sight of her forlorn sensitiveness so touched
+Ridgway’s heart that he telegraphed Virginia Balfour to come and help
+support her through the ordeal.
+
+Virginia came, and henceforth two women, both of them young and
+unusually attractive, gave countenance to the man being tried for his
+life. Not that he needed their support for himself, but for the effect
+they might have on the jury. Harley had shrewdly guessed that the
+white-faced child he had married, whose pathetic beauty was of so
+haunting a type, and whose big eyes were so quick to reflect emotions,
+would be a valuable asset to set against the black-clad widow of Vance
+Edwards.
+
+For its effect upon himself, so far as the trial was concerned, Simon
+Harley cared not a whit. He needed no bolstering. The old wrecker
+carried an iron face to the ordeal. His leathern heart was as foreign
+to fear as to pity. The trial was an unpleasant bore to him, but
+nothing worse. He had, of course, cast an anchor of caution to windward
+by taking care to have the jury fixed. For even though his array of
+lawyers was a formidably famous one, he was no such child as to trust
+his case to a Western jury on its merits while the undercurrent of
+popular opinion was setting so strongly against him. Nor had he
+neglected to see that the court-room was packed with detectives to
+safeguard him in the event that the sympathy of the attending miners
+should at any time become demonstrative against him.
+
+The most irritating feature of the trial to the defendant was the
+presence of the little woman in black, whose burning eyes never left
+for long his face. He feigned to be unconscious of her regard, but
+nobody in the court-room was more sure of that look of enduring,
+passionate hatred than its victim. He had made her a widow, and her
+heart cried for revenge. That was the story the eyes told dumbly.
+
+From first to last the case was bitterly contested, and always with the
+realization among those present—except for that somber figure in black,
+whose beady eyes gimleted the defendant—that it was another move in the
+fight between the rival copper kings. The district attorney had worked
+up his case very carefully, not with much hope of securing a
+conviction, but to mass a total of evidence that would condemn the
+Consolidated leader-before the world.
+
+To this end, the foreman, Donleavy, had been driven by a process of
+sweating to turn State’s evidence against his master. His testimony
+made things look black for Harley, but when Hobart took the stand, a
+palpably unwilling witness, and supported his evidence, the Ridgway
+adherents were openly jubilant. The lawyers for the defense made much
+of the fact that Hobart had just left the Consolidated service after a
+disagreement with the defendant and had been elected to the senate by
+his enemies, but the impression made by his moderation and the fine
+restraint of his manner, combined with his reputation for scrupulous
+honesty, was not to be shaken by the subtle innuendos and blunt
+aspersions of the legal array he faced.
+
+Nor did the young district attorney content himself with Hobart’s
+testimony. He put his successor, Mott, on the stand, and gave him a bad
+hour while he tried to wring the admission out of him that Harley had
+personally ordered the attack on the miners of the Taurus. But for the
+almost constant objections of the opposing counsel, which gave him time
+to recover himself, the prosecuting attorney would have succeeded.
+
+Ridgway, meeting him by chance after luncheon at the foot of the hotel
+elevator—for in a town the size of Avalanche, Waring had found it
+necessary to put up at the same hotel as the enemy or take second best,
+an alternative not to his fastidious taste—rallied him upon the
+predicament in which he had found himself.
+
+“It’s pretty hard to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
+the truth, without making indiscreet admissions about one’s friends,
+isn’t it?” he asked, with his genial smile.
+
+“Did I make any indiscreet admissions?”
+
+“I don’t say you did, though you didn’t look as if you were enjoying
+yourself. I picked up an impression that you had your back to the wall;
+seemed to me the jury rather sized it up that way, Mott.”
+
+“We’ll know what the jury thinks in a few days.”
+
+“Shall we?” the other laughed aloud. “Now, I’m wondering whether we
+shall know what they really think.”
+
+“If you mean that the jury has been tampered with it is your duty to
+place your evidence before the court, Mr. Ridgway.”
+
+“When I hear the verdict I’ll tell you what I think about the jury,”
+returned the president of the Ore-producing Company, with easy
+impudence as he passed into the elevator.
+
+At the second floor Waring left it and turned toward the ladies’
+parlor. It had seemed to him that Aline had looked very tired and frail
+at the morning session, and he wanted to see Virginia about arranging
+to have them take a long drive into the country that afternoon. He had
+sent his card up with a penciled note to the effect that he would wait
+for her in the parlor.
+
+But when he stepped through the double doorway of the ornate room it
+was to become aware of a prior occupant. She was reclining on a divan
+at the end of the large public room. Neither lying nor sitting, but
+propped up among a dozen pillows with head and limbs inert and the long
+lashes drooped on the white cheeks, Aline looked the pathetic figure of
+a child fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion after a long strain.
+
+Since he was the man he was, unhampered by any too fine sense of what
+was fitting, he could no more help approaching than he could help the
+passionate pulse of pity that stirred in his heart at sight of her
+forlorn weariness.
+
+Her eyes opened to find his grave compassion looking down at her. She
+showed no surprise at his presence, though she had not previously known
+of it. Nor did she move by even so much as the stir of a limb.
+
+“This is wearing you out,” he said, after the long silence in which her
+gaze was lost helplessly in his. “You must go home—away from it all.
+You must forget it, and if it ever crosses your mind think of it as
+something with which you have no concern.”
+
+“How can I do that—now.”
+
+The last word slipped out not of her will, but from an undisciplined
+heart. It stood for the whole tangled story of her troubles: the
+unloved marriage which had bereft her of her heritage of youth and joy,
+the love that had found her too late and was so poignant a fount of
+distress to her, the web of untoward circumstance in which she was so
+inextricably entangled.
+
+“How did you ever come to do it?” he asked roughly, out of the bitter
+impulse of his heart.
+
+She knew that the harshness was not for her, as surely as she knew what
+he meant by his words.
+
+“I did wrong. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. Though even
+then I felt troubled about it. But my guardian said it was best, and I
+knew so little. Oh, so very, very little. Why was I not taught things,
+what every girl has a right to know—until life teaches me—too late?”
+
+Nothing he could say would comfort her. For the inexorable facts
+forbade consolation. She had made shipwreck of her life before the
+frail raft of her destiny had well pushed forth from harbor. He would
+have given much to have been able to take the sadness out of her great
+childeyes, but he knew that not even by the greatness of his desire
+could he take up her burden. She must carry it alone or sink under it.
+
+“You must go away from here back to your people. If not now, then as
+soon as the trial is over. Make him take you to your friends for a
+time.”
+
+“I have no friends that can help me.” She said it in an even little
+voice of despair.
+
+“You have many friends. You have made some here. Virginia is one.” He
+would not name himself as only a friend, though he had set his iron
+will to claim no more.
+
+“Yes, Virginia is my friend. She is good to me. But she is going to
+marry you, and then you will both forget me.”
+
+“I shall never forget you.” He cried it in a low, tense voice, his
+clenched hands thrust into the pockets of his sack coat.
+
+Her wan smile thanked him. It was the most he would let himself say.
+Though her heart craved more, she knew she must make the most of this.
+
+“I came up to see Virginia,” he went on, with a change of manner. “I
+want her to take you driving this afternoon. Forget about that wretched
+trial if you can. Nothing of importance will take place to-day.”
+
+He turned at the sound of footsteps, and saw that Miss Balfour had come
+into the room.
+
+“I want you to take Mrs. Harley into the fresh sunshine and clear air
+this afternoon. I have been telling her to forget this trial. It’s a
+farce, anyhow. Nothing will come of it. Take her out to the Homes—take
+and cheer her up.”
+
+“Yes, my lord.” Virginia curtseyed obediently.
+
+“It will do you good, too.”
+
+She shot a mocking little smile at him. “It’s very good of you to think
+of me.”
+
+“Still, I do sometimes.”
+
+“Whenever it is convenient,” she added.
+
+But with Aline watching them the spirit of badinage in him was
+overmatched. He gave it up and asked what kind of a rig he should send
+round. Virginia furnished him the necessary specifications, and he
+turned to go.
+
+As he left the room Simon Harley entered. They met face to face, and
+after an instant’s pause each drew aside to allow the other to pass.
+The New Yorker inclined his head silently and moved forward toward his
+wife. Ridgway passed down the corridor and into the elevator.
+
+As the days of the trial passed excitement grew more tense. The lawyers
+for the prosecution and the defense made their speeches to a crowded
+and enthralled court-room. There was a feverish uncertainty in the air.
+It reached a climax when the jury stayed out for eleven hours before
+coming to a verdict. From the moment it filed back into the court-room
+with solemn faces the dramatic tensity began to foreshadow the tragedy
+about to be enacted. The woman Harley had made a widow sat erect and
+rigid in the seat where she had been throughout the trial. Her eyes
+blazed with a hatred that bordered madness. Ridgway had observed that
+neither Aline Harley nor Virginia was present, and a note from the
+latter had just reached him to the effect that Aline was ill with the
+strain of the long trial. Afterward Ridgway could never thank his pagan
+gods enough that she was absent.
+
+There was a moment of tense waiting before the judge asked:
+
+“Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”
+
+The foreman rose. “We have, your honor.”
+
+A folded note was handed to the judge. He read it slowly, with an
+inscrutable face.
+
+“Is this your verdict, gentlemen of the jury?”
+
+“It is, your honor.”
+
+Silence, full and rigid, held the room after the words “Not guilty” had
+fallen from the lips of the judge. The stillness was broken by a shock
+as of an electric bolt from heaven.
+
+The exploding echoes of a pistol-shot reverberated. Men sprang wildly
+to their feet, gazing at each other in the distrust that fear
+generates. But one man was beyond being startled by any more earthly
+sounds. His head fell forward on the table in front of him, and a thin
+stream of blood flowed from his lips. It was Simon Harley, found
+guilty, sentenced, and executed by the judge and jury sitting in the
+outraged, insane heart of the woman he had made a widow.
+
+Mrs. Edwards had shot him through the head with a revolver she had
+carried in her shoppingbag to exact vengeance in the event of a
+miscarriage of justice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+ALINE TURNS A CORNER
+
+
+Aline might have been completely prostrated by the news of her
+husband’s sudden end, coming as it did as the culmination of a week of
+strain and horror. That she did not succumb was due, perhaps, to
+Ridgway’s care for her. When Harley’s massive gray head had dropped
+forward to the table, his enemy’s first thought had been of her. As
+soon as he knew that death was sure, he hurried to the hotel.
+
+He sent his card up, and followed it so immediately that he found her
+scarcely risen from the divan on which she had been lying in the
+receiving-room of her apartments. The sleep was not yet shaken from her
+lids, nor was the wrinkled flush smoothed from the soft cheek that had
+been next the cushion. Even in his trouble for her he found time to be
+glad that Virginia was not at the moment with her. It gave him the
+sense of another bond between them that this tragic hour should belong
+to him and her alone—this hour of destiny when their lives swung round
+a corner beyond which lay wonderful vistas of kindly sunbeat and dewy
+starlight stretching to the horizon’s edge of the long adventure.
+
+She checked the rush of glad joy in her heart the sight of him always
+brought, and came forward slowly. One glance at his face showed that he
+had brought grave news.
+
+“What is it? Why are you here?” she cried tensely.
+
+“To bring you trouble, Aline.”
+
+“Trouble!” Her hand went to her heart quickly.
+
+“It is about—Mr. Harley.”
+
+She questioned him with wide, startled eyes, words hesitating on her
+trembling lips and flying unvoiced.
+
+“Child—little partner—the orders are to be brave.” He came forward and
+took her hands in his, looking down at her with eyes she thought full
+of infinitely kind pity.
+
+“Is it—have they—do you mean the verdict?”
+
+“Yes, the verdict; but not the verdict of which you are thinking.”
+
+She turned a quivering face to his. “Tell me. I shall be brave.”
+
+He told her the brutal fact as gently as he could, while he watched the
+blood ebb from her face. As she swayed he caught her in his arms and
+carried her to the divan. When, presently, her eyes fluttered open, it
+was to look into his pitiful ones. He was kneeling beside her, and her
+head was pillowed on his arm.
+
+“Say it isn’t true,” she murmured.
+
+“It is true, dear.”
+
+She moved her head restlessly, and he took away his arm, rising to draw
+a chair close to the lounge. She slipped her two hands under her head,
+letting them lie palm to palm on the sofapillow. The violet eyes looked
+past him into space. Her tangled thoughts were in a chaos of disorder.
+Even though she had known but a few months and loved not at all the
+grim, gray-haired man she had called husband, the sense of wretched
+bereavement, the nearness of death, was strong on her. He had been kind
+to her in his way, and the inevitable closeness of their relationship,
+repugnant as it had been to her, made its claims felt. An hour ago he
+had been standing here, the strong and virile ruler over thousands. Now
+he lay stiff and cold, all his power shorn from him without a second’s
+warning. He had kissed her good-by, solicitous for her welfare, and it
+had been he that had been in need of care rather than she. Two big
+tears hung on her lids and splashed to her cheeks. She began to sob,
+and half-turned on the divan, burying her face in her hands.
+
+Ridgway let her weep without interruption for a time, knowing that it
+would be a relief to her surcharged heart and overwrought nerves. But
+when her sobs began to abate she became aware of his hand resting on
+her shoulder. She sat up, wiping her eyes, and turned to him a face
+sodden with grief.
+
+“You are good to me,” she said simply.
+
+“If my goodness were only less futile! Heaven knows what I would give
+to ward off trouble from you. But I can’t, nor can I bear it for you.”
+
+“But it is a help to know you would if you could. He—I think he wanted
+to ward off grief from me, but he could not, either. I was often lonely
+and sad, even though he was kind to me. And now he has gone. I wish I
+had told him how much I appreciated his goodness to me.”
+
+“Yes, we all feel that when we have lost some one we love. It is
+natural to wish we had been better to them and showed them how much we
+cared. Let me tell you about my mother. I was thirteen when she died.
+It was in summer. She had not been well for a long time. The boys were
+going fishing that day and she asked me to stay at home. I had set my
+heart on going, and I thought it was only a fancy of hers. She did not
+insist on my staying, so I went, but felt uncomfortable all day. When I
+came back in the evening they told me she was dead. I felt as if some
+great icy hand were tightening, on my heart. Somehow I couldn’t break
+down and cry it out. I went around with a white, set face and gave no
+sign. Even at the funeral it was the same. The neighbors called me
+hard-hearted and pointed me out to their sons as a terrible warning.
+And all the time I was torn with agony.”
+
+“You poor boy.”
+
+“And one night she came to me in a dream. She did not look as she had
+just before she died, but strong and beautiful, with the color in her
+face she used to have. She smiled at me and kissed me and rumpled my
+hair as she used to do. I knew, then, it was all right. She understood,
+and I didn’t care whether others did or not. I woke up crying, and
+after I had had my grief out I was myself again.”
+
+“It was so sweet of her to think to come to you. She must have been
+loving you up in heaven and saw you were troubled, and came down just
+to comfort you and tell you it was all right,” the girl cried with soft
+sympathy.
+
+“That’s how I understood it. Of course, I was only a boy, but somehow I
+knew it was more than a dream. I’m not a spiritualist. I don’t believe
+such things happen, but I know it happened to me,” he finished
+illogically, with a smile.
+
+She sighed. “He was always so thoughtful of me, too. I do wish I
+had—could have been—more—”
+
+She broke off without finishing, but he understood.
+
+“You must not blame yourself for that. He would be the first to tell
+you so. He took you for what you could give him, and these last days
+were the best he had known for many years.”
+
+“He was so good to me. Oh, you don’t know how good.”
+
+“It was a great pleasure to him to be good to you, the greatest
+pleasure he knew.”
+
+She looked up as he spoke, and saw shining deep in his eyes the spirit
+that had taught him to read so well the impulse of another lover, and,
+seeing it, she dropped her eyes quickly in order not to see what was
+there. With him it had been only an instant’s uncontrollable surge of
+ecstasy. He meant to wait. Every instinct of the decent thing told him
+not to take advantage of her weakness, her need of love to rest upon in
+her trouble, her transparent care for him and confidence in him so
+childlike in its entirety. For convention he did not care a turn of his
+hand, but he would do nothing that might shock her self-respect when
+she came to think of it later. Sternly he brought himself back to
+realities.
+
+“Shall I see Mr. Mott for you and send him here? It would be better
+that he should make the arrangements than I.”
+
+“If you please. I shall not see you again before I go, then?” Her lips
+trembled as she asked the question.
+
+“I shall come down to the hotel again and see you before you go. And
+now good-by. Be brave, and don’t reproach yourself. Remember that he
+would not wish it.”
+
+The door opened, and Virginia came in, flushed with rapid walking. She
+had heard the news on the street and had hurried back to the hotel.
+
+Her eyes asked of Ridgway: “Does she know?” and he answered in the
+affirmative. Straight to Aline she went and wrapped her in her arms,
+the latent mothering instinct that is in every woman aroused and
+dormant.
+
+“Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried softly.
+
+Ridgway slipped quietly from the room and left them together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+A GOOD SAMARITAN
+
+
+Yesler, still moving slowly with a walking stick by reason of his green
+wound, left the street-car and made his way up Forest Road to the house
+which bore the number 792. In the remote past there had been some
+spasmodic attempt to cultivate grass and raise some shade-trees along
+the sidewalks, but this had long since been given up as abortive. An
+air of decay hung over the street, the unmistakable suggestion of
+better days. This was writ large over the house in front of which
+Yesler stopped. The gate hung on one hinge, boards were missing from
+the walk, and a dilapidated shutter, which had once been green, swayed
+in the breeze.
+
+A woman of about thirty, dark and pretty but poorly dressed, came to
+the door in answer to his ring. Two little children, a boy and a girl,
+with their mother’s shy long-lashed Southern eyes of brown, clung to
+her skirts and gazed at the stranger.
+
+“This is where Mr. Pelton lives, is it not?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Is he at home?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“May I see him?”
+
+“He’s sick.”
+
+“I’m sorry to hear it. Too sick to be seen? If not, I should like very
+much to see him. I have business with him.”
+
+The young woman looked at him a little defiantly and a little
+suspiciously. “Are you a reporter?”
+
+Sam smiled. “No, ma’am.”
+
+“Does he owe you money?” He could see the underlying blood dye her
+dusky cheeks when she asked the question desperately, as it seemed to
+him with a kind of brazen shame to which custom had inured her. She had
+somehow the air of some gentle little creature of the forests defending
+her young.
+
+“Not a cent, ma’am. I don’t want to do him any harm.”
+
+“I didn’t hear your name.”
+
+“I haven’t mentioned it,” he admitted, with the sunny smile that was a
+letter of recommendation in itself. “Fact is I’d rather not tell it
+till he sees me.”
+
+From an adjoining room a querulous voice broke into their conversation.
+“Who is it, Norma?”
+
+“A gentleman to see you, Tom.”
+
+“Who is it?” more sharply.
+
+“It is I, Mr. Pelton. I came to have a talk with you.” Yesler pushed
+forward into the dingy sitting-room with the pertinacity of a
+bookagent. “I heard you were not well, and I came to find out if I can
+do anything for you.”
+
+The stout man lying on the lounge grew pale before the blood reacted in
+a purple flush. His very bulk emphasized the shabbiness of the stained
+and almost buttonless Prince Albert coat he wore, the dinginess of the
+little room he seemed to dwarf.
+
+“Leave my house, seh. You have ruined this family, and you come to
+gloat on your handiwork. Take a good look, and then go, Mr. Yesler. You
+see my wife in cotton rags doing her own work. Is it enough, seh?”
+
+The slim little woman stepped across the room and took her place beside
+her husband. Her eyes flashed fire at the man she held responsible for
+the fall of her husband. Yesler’s generous heart applauded the loyalty
+which was proof against both disgrace and poverty. For in the past
+month both of these had fallen heavily upon her. Tom Pelton had always
+lived well, and during the past few years he had speculated in ventures
+far beyond his means. Losses had pursued him, and he had looked to the
+senatorship to recoup himself and to stand off the creditors pressing
+hard for payment. Instead he had been exposed, disgraced, and finally
+disbarred for attempted bribery. Like a horde of hungry rats his
+creditors had pounced upon the discredited man and wrested from him the
+remnants of his mortgaged property. He had been forced to move into a
+mere cottage and was a man without a future. For the only profession at
+which he had skill enough to make a living was the one from which he
+had been cast as unfit to practise it. The ready sympathy of the
+cattleman had gone out to the politician who was down and out. He had
+heard the situation discussed enough to guess pretty close to the
+facts, and he could not let himself rest until he had made some effort
+to help the man whom his exposure had ruined, or, rather, had hastened
+to ruin, for that result had been for years approaching.
+
+“I’m sorry, Mr. Pelton. If I’ve injured you I want to make it right.”
+
+“Make it right!” The former congressman got up with an oath. “Make it
+right! Can you give me back my reputation, my future? Can you take away
+the shame that has come upon my wife, and that my children will have to
+bear in the years to come? Can you give us back our home, our comfort,
+our peace of mind?”
+
+“No, I can’t do this, but I can help you to do it all,” the cattleman
+made answer quietly.
+
+He offered no defense, though he knew perfectly well none was needed.
+He had no responsibility in the calamity that had befallen this family.
+Pelton’s wrong-doing had come home to those he loved, and he could
+rightly blame nobody but himself. However much he might arraign those
+who had been the agents of his fall, he knew in his heart that the
+fault had been his own.
+
+Norma Pelton, tensely self-repressed, spoke now. “How can you do this,
+sir?”
+
+“I can’t do it so long as you hold me for an enemy, ma’am. I’m ready to
+cry quits with your husband and try a new deal. If I injured him he
+tried to even things up. Well, let’s say things are squared and start
+fresh. I’ve got a business proposition to make if you’re willing to
+listen to it.”
+
+“What sort of a proposition?”
+
+“I’m running about twenty-five thousand sheep up in the hills. I’ve
+just bought a ranch with a comfortable ranch-house on it for a kind of
+central point. My winter feeding will all be done from it as a chief
+place of distribution. Same with the shearing and shipping. I want a
+good man to put in charge of my sheep as head manager, and I would be
+willing to pay a proper salary. There ain’t any reason why this
+shouldn’t work into a partnership if he makes good. With wool jumping,
+as it’s going to do in the next four years, the right kind of man can
+make himself independent for life. My idea is to increase my holdings
+right along, and let my manager in as a partner as soon as he shows he
+is worth it. Now that ranch-house is a decent place. There’s a pretty
+good school, ma’am, for the children. The folks round that neighborhood
+may not have any frills, but—”
+
+“Are you offering Tom the place as manager?” she demanded, in
+amazement.
+
+“That was my idea, ma’am. It’s not what you been used to, o’ course,
+but if you’re looking for a change I thought I’d speak of it,” he said
+diffidently.
+
+She looked at him in a dumb surprise. She, too, in her heart knew that
+this man was blameless. He had done his duty, and had nearly lost his
+life for it at the hands of her husband. Now, he had come to lift them
+out of the hideous nightmare into which they had fallen. He had come to
+offer them peace and quiet and plenty in exchange for the future of
+poverty and shame and despair which menaced them. They were to escape
+into God’s great hills, away from the averted looks and whispering
+tongues and the temptations to drown his trouble that so constantly
+beset the father of her children. Despite his faults she still loved
+Tom Pelton; he was a kind and loving husband and father. Out on the
+range there still waited a future for him. When she thought of it a
+lump rose in her throat for very happiness. She, who had been like a
+rock beside him in his trouble, broke down now and buried her head in
+her husband’s coat.
+
+“Don’t you, honey—now, don’t you cry.” The big man had lost all his
+pomposity, and was comforting his sweetheart as simply as a boy. “It’s
+all been my fault. I’ve been doing wrong for years—trying to pull
+myself out of the mire by my bootstraps. By Gad, you’re a man, Sam
+Yesler, that’s what you are. If I don’t turn ovah a new leaf I’d ought
+to be shot. We’ll make a fresh start, sweetheart. Dash me, I’m nothing
+but a dashed baby.” And with that the overwrought man broke down, too.
+
+Yesler, moved a good deal himself, maintained the burden of the
+conversation cheerfully.
+
+“That’s all settled, then. Tell you I’m right glad to get a competent
+man to put in charge. Things have been running at loose ends, because I
+haven’t the time to look after them. This takes a big load off my mind.
+You better arrange to go up there with me as soon as you have time,
+Pelton, and look the ground over. You’ll want to make some changes if
+you mean to take your family up there. Better to spend a few hundreds
+and have things the way you want them for Mrs. Pelton than to move in
+with things not up to the mark. Of course, I’ll put the house in the
+shape you want it. But we can talk of that after we look it over.”
+
+In his embarrassment he looked so much the boy, so much the culprit
+caught stealing apples and up for sentence, that Norma Pelton’s
+gratitude took courage. She came across to him and held out both hands,
+the shimmer of tears still in the soft brown eyes.
+
+“You’ve given us more than life, Mr. Yesler. You can’t ever know what
+you have done for us. Some things are worse than death to some people.
+I don’t mean poverty, but—other things. We can begin again far away
+from this tainted air that has poisoned us. I know it isn’t good form
+to be saying this. One shouldn’t have feelings in public. But I don’t
+care. I think of the children—and Tom. I didn’t expect ever to be happy
+again, but we shall. I feel it.”
+
+She broke down again and dabbed at her eyes with her kerchief. Sam,
+very much embarrassed but not at all displeased at this display of
+feeling, patted her dark hair and encouraged her to composure.
+
+“There. It’s all right, now, ma’am. Sure you’ll be happy. Any mother
+that’s got kids like these—”
+
+He caught up the little girl in his arms by way of diverting attention
+from himself.
+
+This gave a new notion to the impulsive little woman.
+
+“I want you to kiss them both. Come here, Kennie. This is Mr. Yesler,
+and he is the best man you’ve ever seen. I want you to remember that he
+has been our best friend.”
+
+“Yes, mama.”
+
+“Oh, sho, ma’am!” protested the overwhelmed cattleman, kissing both the
+children, nevertheless.
+
+Pelton laughed. He felt a trifle hysterical himself. “If she thinks it
+she’ll say it when she feels that way. I’m right surprised she don’t
+kiss you, too.”
+
+“I will,” announced Norma promptly, with a pretty little tide of color.
+
+She turned toward him, and Yesler, laughing, met the red lips of the
+new friend he had made.
+
+“Now, you’ve got just grounds for shooting me,” he said gaily, and
+instantly regretted his infelicitous remark.
+
+For both husband and wife fell grave at his words. It was Pelton that
+answered them.
+
+“I’ve been taught a lesson, Mr. Yesler. I’m never going to pack a gun
+again as long as I live, unless I’m hunting or something of that sort,
+and I’m never going to drink another drop of liquor. It’s all right for
+some men, but it isn’t right for me.”
+
+“Glad to hear it. I never did believe in the hip-pocket habit. I’ve
+lived here twenty years, and I never found it necessary except on
+special occasions. When it comes to whisky, I reckon we’d all be better
+without it.”
+
+Yesler made his escape at the earliest opportunity and left them alone
+together. He lunched at the club, attended to some correspondence he
+had, and about 3:30 drifted down the street toward the post-office. He
+had expectations of meeting a young woman who often passed about that
+time on her way home from school duties.
+
+It was, however, another young woman whose bow he met in front of
+Mesa’s largest department store.
+
+“Good afternoon, Miss Balfour.”
+
+She nodded greeting and cast eyes of derision on him.
+
+“I’ve been hearing about you. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. What for in particular? There are so many things.”
+
+“You’re a fine Christian, aren’t you?” she scoffed.
+
+“I ain’t much of a one. That’s a fact,” he admitted. “What is it this
+time—poker?”
+
+“No, it isn’t poker. Worse than that. You’ve been setting a deplorable
+example to the young.”
+
+“To young ladies—like Miss Virginia?” he wanted to know.
+
+“No, to young Christians. I don’t know what our good deacons will say
+about it.” She illuminated her severity with a flashing smile. “Don’t
+you know that the sins of the fathers are to descend upon their
+children even to the third and fourth generation? Don’t you know that
+when a man does wrong he must die punished, and his children and his
+wife, of course, and that the proper thing to do is to stand back and
+thank Heaven we haven’t been vile sinners?”
+
+“Now, don’t you begin on that, Miss Virginia,” he warned.
+
+“And after the man had disgraced himself and shot you, after all
+respectable people had given him an extra kick to let him know he must
+stay down and had then turned their backs upon him. I’m not surprised
+that you’re ashamed.”
+
+“Where did you get hold of this fairy-tale?” he plucked up courage to
+demand.
+
+“From Norma Pelton. She told me everything, the whole story from
+beginning to end.”
+
+“It’s right funny you should be calling on her, and you a respectable
+young lady—unless you went to deliver that extra kick you was
+mentioning,” he grinned.
+
+She dropped her raillery. “It was splendid. I meant to ask Mr. Ridgway
+to do something for them, but this is so much better. It takes them
+away from the place of his disgrace and away from temptation. Oh, I
+don’t wonder Norma kissed you.”
+
+“She told you that, too, did she?”
+
+“Yes. I should have done it, too, in her place.”
+
+He glanced round placidly. “It’s a right public place here, but—”
+
+“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to.” And before she disappeared within
+the portals of the department store she gave him one last thrust. “It’s
+not so public up in the library. Perhaps if you happen to be going that
+way?”
+
+She left her communication a fragment, but he thought it worth acting
+upon. Among the library shelves he found Laska deep in a new volume on
+domestic science.
+
+“This ain’t any kind of day to be fooling away your time on cook-books.
+Come out into the sun and live,” he invited.
+
+They walked past the gallows-frames and the slag-dumps and the
+shaft-houses into the brown hills beyond the point where green copper
+streaks showed and spurred the greed of man. It was a day of spring
+sunshine, the good old earth astir with her annual recreation. The
+roadside was busy with this serious affair of living. Ants and crawling
+things moved to and fro about their business. Squirrels raced across
+the road and stood up at a safe distance to gaze at these intruders.
+Birds flashed back and forth, hurried little carpenters busy with the
+specifications for their new nests. Eager palpitating life was the
+key-note of the universe.
+
+“Virginia told me about the Peltons,” Laska said, after a pause.
+
+“It’s spreading almost as fast as if it were a secret,” he smiled. “I’m
+expecting to find it in the paper when we get back.”
+
+“I’m so glad you did it.”
+
+“Well, you’re to blame.”
+
+“I!” She looked at him in surprise.
+
+“Partly. You told me how things were going with them. That seemed to
+put it up to me to give Pelton a chance.”
+
+“I certainly didn’t mean it that way. I had no right to ask you to do
+anything about it.”
+
+“Mebbe it was the facts put it up to me. Anyhow, I felt responsible.”
+
+“Mr. Roper once told me that you always feel responsible when you hear
+anybody is in trouble,” the young woman answered.
+
+“Roper’s a goat. Nobody ever pays any attention to him.”
+
+Presently they diverged from the road and sat down on a great flat rock
+which dropped out from the hillside like a park seat. For he was still
+far from strong and needed frequent rests. Their talk was desultory,
+for they had reached that stage of friendship at which it is not
+necessary to bridge silence with idle small talk. Here, by some whim of
+fate, the word was spoken. He knew he loved her, but he had not meant
+to say it yet.
+
+But when her steady gray eyes came back to his after a long stillness,
+the meeting brought him a strange feeling that forced his hand.
+
+“I love you, Laska. Will you be my wife?” he asked quietly.
+
+“Yes, Sam,” she answered directly. That was all. It was settled with a
+word. There in the sunshine he kissed her and sealed the compact, and
+afterward, when the sun was low among the hill spurs, they went back
+happily to take up again the work that awaited them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+FRIENDLY ENEMIES
+
+
+Ridgway had promised Aline that he would see her soon, and when he
+found himself in New York he called at the big house on Fifth Avenue,
+which had for so long been identified as the home of Simon Harley. It
+bore his impress stamped on it. Its austerity suggested the Puritan
+rather than the classic conception of simplicity. The immense rooms
+were as chill as dungeons, and the forlorn little figure in black, lost
+in the loneliness of their bleakness, wandered to and fro among her
+retinue of servants like a butterfly beating its wings against a pane
+of glass.
+
+With both hands extended she ran forward to meet her guest.
+
+“I’m so glad, so glad, so glad to see you.”
+
+The joy-note in her voice was irrepressible. She had been alone for
+weeks with the conventional gloom that made an obsession of the shadow
+of death which enveloped the house. All voices and footsteps had been
+subdued to harmonize with the grief of the mistress of this mausoleum.
+Now she heard the sharp tread of this man unafraid, and saw the alert
+vitality of his confident bearing. It was like a breath of the hills to
+a parched traveler.
+
+“I told you I would come.”
+
+“Yes. I’ve been looking for you every day. I’ve checked each one off on
+my calendar. It’s been three weeks and five days since I saw you.”
+
+“I thought it was a year,” he laughed, and the sound of his uncurbed
+voice rang strangely in this room given to murmurs.
+
+“Tell me about everything. How is Virginia, and Mrs. Mott, and Mr.
+Yesler? And is he really engaged to that sweet little school-teacher?
+And how does Mr. Hobart like being senator?”
+
+“Not more than a dozen questions permitted at a time. Begin again,
+please.”
+
+“First, then, when did you reach the city?”
+
+He consulted his watch. “Just two hours and twenty-seven minutes ago.”
+
+“And how long are you going to stay?”
+
+“That depends.”
+
+“On what?”
+
+“For one thing, on whether you treat me well,” he smiled.
+
+“Oh, I’ll treat you well. I never was so glad to see a real live
+somebody in my life. It’s been pretty bad here.” She gave a dreary
+little smile as she glanced around at the funereal air of the place.
+“Do you know, I don’t think we think of death in the right way? Or,
+maybe, I’m a heathen and haven’t the proper feelings.”
+
+She had sat down on one of the stiff divans, and Ridgway found a place
+beside her.
+
+“Suppose you tell me about it,” he suggested.
+
+“I know I must be wrong, and you’ll be shocked when you hear.”
+
+“Very likely.”
+
+“I can’t help feeling that the living have rights, too,” she began
+dubiously. “If they would let me alone I could be sorry in my own way,
+but I don’t see why I have to make a parade of grief. It seems to—to
+cheapen one’s feelings, you know.”
+
+He nodded. “Just as if you had to measure your friendship for the dead
+with a yardstick of Mother Grundy. It’s a hideous imposition laid on us
+by custom, one of Ibsen’s ghosts.”
+
+“It’s so good to hear you say that. And do you think I may begin to be
+happy again?”
+
+“I think it would be allowable to start with one smile a day, say, and
+gradually increase the dose,” he jested. “In the course of a week, if
+it seems to agree with you, try a laugh.”
+
+She made the experiment without waiting the week, amused at his
+whimsical way of putting it. Nevertheless, the sound of her own
+laughter gave her a little shock.
+
+“You came on business, I suppose?” she said presently.
+
+“Yes. I came to raise a million dollars for some improvements I want to
+make.”
+
+“Let me lend it to you,” she proposed eagerly.
+
+“That would be a good one. I’m going to use it to fight the
+Consolidated. Since you are now its chief stockholder you would be
+letting me have money with which to fight you.”
+
+“I shouldn’t care about that. I hope you beat me.”
+
+“You’re my enemy now. That’s not the way to talk.” His eyes twinkled
+merrily.
+
+“Am I your enemy? Let’s be friendly enemies, then. And there’s
+something I want to talk to you about. Before he died Mr. Harley told
+me he had made you an offer. I didn’t understand the details, but you
+were to be in charge of all the copper-mines in the country. Wasn’t
+that it?”
+
+“Something of that sort. I declined the proposition.”
+
+“I want you to take it now and manage everything for me. I don’t know
+Mr. Harley’s associates, but I can trust you. You can arrange it any
+way you like, but I want to feel that you have the responsibility.”
+
+He saw again that vision of power—all the copper interests of the
+country pooled, with himself at the head of the combination. He knew it
+would not be so easy to arrange as she thought, for, though she had
+inherited Harley’s wealth, she had not taken over his prestige and
+force. There would be other candidates for leadership. But if he
+managed her campaign Aline’s great wealth must turn the scale in their
+favor.
+
+“You must think this over again. You must talk it over with your
+advisers before we come to a decision,” he said gravely.
+
+“I’ve told Mr. Jarmyn. He says the idea is utterly impossible. But
+we’ll show him, won’t we? It’s my money and my stock, not his. I don’t
+see why he should dictate. He’s always ‘My dear ladying’ me. I won’t
+have it,” she pouted.
+
+The fighting gleam was in Ridgway’s eyes now. “So Mr. Jannyn thinks it
+is impossible, does he?”
+
+“That’s what he said. He thinks you wouldn’t do at all.”
+
+“If you really mean it we’ll show him about that.”
+
+She shook hands with him on it.
+
+“You’re very good to me,” she said, so naively that he could not keep
+back his smile.
+
+“Most people would say I was very good to myself. What you offer me is
+a thing I might have fought for all my life and never won.”
+
+“Then I’m glad if it pleases you. That’s enough about business. Now,
+we’ll talk about something important.”
+
+He could think of only one thing more important to him than this, but
+it appeared she meant plans to see as much as possible of him while he
+was in the city.
+
+“I suppose you have any number of other friends here that will want
+you?” she said.
+
+“They can’t have me if this friend wants me,” he answered, with that
+deep glow in his eyes she recognized from of old; and before she could
+summon her reserves of defense he asked: “Do you want me, Aline?”
+
+His meaning came to her with a kind of sweet shame. “No, no, no—not
+yet,” she cried.
+
+“Dear,” he answered, taking her little hand in his big one, “only this
+now: that I can’t help wanting to be near you to comfort you, because I
+love you. For everything else, I am content to wait.”
+
+“And I love you,” the girl-widow answered, a flush dyeing her cheeks.
+“But I ought not to tell you yet, ought I?”
+
+There was that in her radiant tear-dewed eyes that stirred the deepest
+stores of tenderness in the man. His finer instincts, vandal and pagan
+though he was, responded to it.
+
+“It is right that you should tell me, since it is true, but it is
+right, too, that we should wait.”
+
+“It is sweet to know that you love me. There are so many things I don’t
+understand. You must help me. You are so strong and so sure, and I am
+so helpless.”
+
+“You dear innocent, so strong in your weakness,” he murmured to
+himself.
+
+“You must be a guide to me and a teacher.”
+
+“And you a conscience to me,” he smiled, not without amusement at the
+thought.
+
+She took it seriously. “But I’m afraid I can’t. You know so much better
+than I do what is right.”
+
+“I’m quite a paragon of virtue,” he confessed.
+
+“You’re so sure of everything. You took it for granted that I loved
+you. Why were you so sure?”
+
+“I was just as sure as you were that I cared for you. Confess.”
+
+She whispered it. “Yes, I knew it, but when you did not come I thought,
+perhaps—— You see, I’m not strong or clever. I can’t help you as
+Virginia could.” She stopped, the color washing from her face. “I had
+forgotten. You have no right to love me—nor I you,” she faltered.
+
+“Girl o’ mine, we have every right in the world. Love is never wrong
+unless it is a theft or a robbery. There is nothing between me and
+Virginia that is not artificial and conventional, no tie that ought not
+to be broken, none that should ever of right have existed. Love has the
+right of way before mere convention a hundredfold.”
+
+“Ah! If I were sure.”
+
+“But I was to be a teacher to you and a judge for you.”
+
+“And I was to be a conscience to you.”
+
+“But on this I am quite clear. I can be a conscience to myself.
+However, there is no hurry. Time’s a great solvent.”
+
+“And we can go on loving each other in the meantime.”
+
+He lifted her little pink fingers and kissed them. “Yes, we can do that
+all the time.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+BREAKS ONE AND MAKES ANOTHER ENGAGEMENT
+
+
+Miss Balfour’s glass made her irritably aware of cheeks unduly flushed
+and eyes unusually bright. Since she prided herself on being sufficient
+for the emergencies of life, she cast about in her mind to determine
+which of the interviews that lay before her was responsible for her
+excitement. It was, to be sure, an unusual experience for a young woman
+to be told that her fiance would be unable to marry her, owing to a
+subsequent engagement, but she looked forward to it with keen
+anticipation, and would not have missed it for the world. Since she
+pushed the thought of the other interview into the background of her
+mind and refused to contemplate it at all, she did not see how that
+could lend any impetus to her pulse.
+
+But though she was pleasantly excited as she swept into the
+reception-room, Ridgway was unable to detect the fact in her cool
+little nod and frank, careless handshake. Indeed, she looked so
+entirely mistress of herself, so much the perfectly gowned exquisite,
+that he began to dread anew the task he had set himself. It is not a
+pleasant thing under the most favorable circumstances to beg off from
+marrying a young woman one has engaged oneself to, and Ridgway did not
+find it easier because the young woman looked every inch a queen, and
+was so manifestly far from suspecting the object of his call.
+
+“I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you personally yet,” she said,
+after they had drifted to chairs. “I’ve been immensely proud of you.”
+
+“I got your note. It was good of you to write as soon as you heard.”
+
+She swept him with one of her smile-lit side glances. “Though, of
+course, in a way, I was felicitating myself when I congratulated you.”
+
+“You mean?”
+
+She laughed with velvet maliciousness. “Oh, well, I’m dragged into the
+orbit of your greatness, am I not? As the wife of the president of the
+Greater Consolidated Copper Company—the immense combine that takes in
+practically all the larger copper properties in the country—I should
+come in for a share of reflected glory, you know.”
+
+Ridgway bit his lip and took a deep breath, but before he had found
+words she was off again. She had no intention of letting him descent
+from the rack yet.
+
+“How did you do it? By what magic did you bring it about? Of course,
+I’ve read the newspapers’ accounts, seen your features and your history
+butchered in a dozen Sunday horrors, and thanked Heaven no enterprising
+reporter guessed enough to use me as copy. Every paper I have picked up
+for weeks has been full of you and the story of how you took Wall
+Street by the throat. But I suspect they were all guesses, merely
+superficial rumors except as to the main facts. What I want to know is
+the inside story—the lever by means of which you pried open the door
+leading to the inner circle of financial magnates. You have often told
+me how tightly barred that door is. What was the open-sesame you used
+as a countersign to make the keeper of the gate unbolt?”
+
+He thought he saw his chance. “The countersign was ‘Aline Harley,’” he
+said, and looked her straight in the face. He wished he could find some
+way of telling her without making him feel so like a cad.
+
+She clapped her hands. “I thought so. She backed you with that
+uncounted fortune her husband left her. Is that it?”
+
+“That is it exactly. She gave me a free hand, and the immense fortune
+she inherited from Harley put me in a position to force recognition
+from the leaders. After that it was only a question of time till I had
+convinced them my plan was good.” He threw back his shoulders and tried
+to take the fence again. “Would you like to know why Mrs. Harley put
+her fortune at my command?”
+
+“I suppose because she is interested in us and our little affair.
+Doesn’t all the world love a lover?” she asked, with a disarming
+candor.
+
+“She had a better reason,” he said, meeting her eyes gravely.
+
+“You must tell me it—but not just yet. I have something to tell you
+first.” She held out her little clenched hand. “Here is something that
+belongs to you. Can you open it?”
+
+He straightened her fingers one by one, and took from her palm the
+engagement-ring he had given her. Instantly he looked up, doubt and
+relief sweeping his face.
+
+“Am I to understand that you terminate our engagement?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“May I ask why?”
+
+“I couldn’t bring myself to it, Waring. I honestly tried, but I
+couldn’t do it.”
+
+“When did you find this out?”
+
+“I began to find it out the first day of our engagement. I couldn’t
+make it seem right. I’ve been in a process of learning it ever since.
+It wouldn’t be fair to you for me to marry you.”
+
+“You’re a brick, Virginia!” he cried jubilantly.
+
+“No, I’m not. That is a minor reason. The really important one is that
+it wouldn’t be fair to me.”
+
+“No, it would not,” he admitted, with an air of candor.
+
+“Because, you see, I happen to care for another man,” she purred.
+
+His vanity leaped up fully armed. “Another man! Who?”
+
+“That’s my secret,” she answered, smiling at his chagrin.
+
+“And his?”
+
+“I said mine. At any rate, if three knew, it wouldn’t be a secret,” was
+her quick retort.
+
+“Do you think you have been quite fair to me, Virginia?” he asked, with
+gloomy dignity.
+
+“I think so,” she answered, and touched him with the riposte: “I’m
+ready now to have you tell me when you expect to marry Aline Harley.”
+
+His dignity collapsed like a pricked bladder. “How did you know?” he
+demanded, in astonishment.
+
+“Oh well, I have eyes.”
+
+“But I didn’t know—I thought—”
+
+“Oh, you thought! You are a pair of children at the game,” this
+thousand-year-old young woman scoffed. “I have known for months that
+you worshiped each other.”
+
+“If you mean to imply” he began severely.
+
+“Hit somebody of your size, Warry,” she interrupted cheerfully, as to
+an infant. “If you suppose I am so guileless as not to know that you
+were coming here this afternoon to tell me you were regretfully
+compelled to give me up on account of a more important engagement, then
+you conspicuously fail to guess right. I read it in your note.”
+
+He gave up attempting to reprove her. It did not seem feasible under
+the circumstances. Instead, he held out the hand of peace, and she took
+it with a laugh of gay camaraderie.
+
+“Well,” he smiled, “it seems possible that we may both soon be subjects
+for congratulation. That just shows how things work around right. We
+never would have suited each other, you know.”
+
+“I’m quite sure we shouldn’t,” agreed Virginia promptly. “But I don’t
+think I’ll trouble you to congratulate me till you see me wearing
+another solitaire.”
+
+“We’ll hope for the best,” he said cheerfully. “If it is the man I
+think, he is a better man than I am.”
+
+“Yes, he is,” she nodded, without the least hesitation.
+
+“I hope you will be happy with him.”
+
+“I’m likely to be happy without him.”
+
+“Not unless he is a fool.”
+
+“Or prefers another lady, as you do.”
+
+She settled herself back in the low easy chair, with her hands clasped
+behind her head.
+
+“And now I’d like to know why you prefer her to me,” she demanded
+saucily. “Do you think her handsomer?”
+
+He looked her over from the rippling brown hair to the trim suede
+shoes. “No,” he smiled; “they don’t make them handsomer.”
+
+“More intellectual?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Of a better disposition?”
+
+“I like yours, too.”
+
+“More charming?”
+
+“I find her so, saving your presence.”
+
+“Please justify yourself in detail.”
+
+He shook his head, still smiling. “My justification is not to be
+itemized. It lies deeper—in destiny, or fate, or whatever one calls
+it.”
+
+“I see.” She offered Markham’s verses as an explanation:
+
+“Perhaps we are led and our loves are fated,
+And our steps are counted one by one;
+Perhaps we shall meet and our souls be mated,
+After the burnt-out sun.”
+
+
+“I like that. Who did you say wrote it?”
+
+The immobile butler, as once before, presented a card for her
+inspection. Ridgway, with recollections of the previous occasion,
+ventured to murmur again: “The fairy prince.”
+
+Virginia blushed to her hair, and this time did not offer the card for
+his disapproval.
+
+“Shall I congratulate him?” he wanted to know.
+
+The imperious blood came to her cheeks on the instant. The sudden storm
+in her eyes warned him better than words.
+
+“I’ll be good,” he murmured, as Lyndon Hobart came into the room.
+
+His goodness took the form of a speedy departure. She followed him to
+the door for a parting fling at him.
+
+“In your automobile you may reach a telegraph-office in about five
+minutes. With luck you may be engaged inside of an hour.”
+
+“You have the advantage of me by fifty-five minutes,” he flung back.
+
+“You ought to thank me on your knees for having saved you a wretched
+scene this afternoon,” was the best she could say to cover her
+discomfiture.
+
+“I do. I do. My thanks are taking the form of leaving you with the
+prince.”
+
+“That’s very crude, sir—and I’m not sure it isn’t impertinent.”
+
+Miss Balfour was blushing when she returned to Hobart. He mistook the
+reason, and she could not very well explain that her blushes were due
+to the last wordless retort of the retiring “old love,” whose hand had
+gone up in a ridiculous bless-you-my-children attitude just before he
+left her.
+
+Their conversation started stiffly. He had come, he explained, to say
+good-by. He was leaving the State to go to Washington prior to the
+opening of the session.
+
+This gave her a chance to congratulate him upon his election. “I
+haven’t had an opportunity before. You’ve been so busy, of course,
+preparing to save the country, that your time must have been very fully
+occupied.”
+
+He did not show his surprise at this interpretation of the fact that he
+had quietly desisted from his attentions to her, but accepted it as the
+correct explanation, since she had chosen to offer it.
+
+Miss Balfour expressed regret that he was going, though she did not
+suppose she would see any less of him than she had during the past two
+months. He did not take advantage of her little flings to make the talk
+less formal, and Virginia, provoked at his aloofness, offered no more
+chances. Things went very badly, indeed, for ten minutes, at the end of
+which time Hobart rose to go. Virginia was miserably aware of being
+wretched despite the cool hauteur of her seeming indifference. But he
+was too good a sportsman to go without letting her know he held no
+grudge.
+
+“I hope you will be very happy with Mr. Ridgway. Believe me, there is
+nobody whose happiness I would so rejoice at as yours.”
+
+“Thank you,” she smiled coolly, and her heart raced. “May I hope that
+your good wishes still obtain even though I must seek my happiness
+apart from Mr. Ridgway?”
+
+He held her for an instant’s grave, astonished questioning, before
+which her eyes fell. Her thoughts side-tracked swiftly to long for and
+to dread what was coming.
+
+“Am I being told—you must pardon me if I have misunderstood your
+meaning—that you are no longer engaged to Mr. Ridgway?”
+
+She made obvious the absence of the solitaire she had worn.
+
+Before the long scrutiny of his steady gaze: her eyes at last fell.
+
+“If you don’t mind, I’ll postpone going just yet,” he said quietly.
+
+Her racing heart assured her fearfully, delightfully, that she did not
+mind at all.
+
+“I have no time and no compass to take my bearings. You will pardon me
+if what I say seems presumptuous?”
+
+Silence, which is not always golden, oppressed her. Why could she not
+make light talk as she had been wont to do with Waring Ridgway?
+
+“But if I ask too much, I shall not be hurt if you deny me,” he
+continued. “For how long has your engagement with Mr. Ridgway been
+broken, may I ask?”
+
+“Between fifteen and twenty minutes.”
+
+“A lovers’ quarrel, perhaps!” he hazarded gently.
+
+“On the contrary, quite final and irrevocable Mr. Ridgway and I have
+never been lovers. She was not sure whether this last was meant as a
+confession or a justification.
+
+“Not lovers?” He waited for her to explain Her proud eyes faced him.
+“We became engaged for other reasons. I thought that did not matter.
+But I find my other reasons were not sufficient. To-day I terminated
+the engagement. But it is only fair to say that Mr. Ridgway had come
+here for that purpose. I merely anticipated him.” Her self-contempt
+would not let her abate one jot of the humiliating truth. She flayed
+herself with a whip of scorn quite lost on Hobart.
+
+A wave of surging hope was flushing his heart, but he held himself well
+in hand.
+
+“I must be presumptuous still,” he said. “I must find out if you broke
+the engagement because you care for another man?”
+
+She tried to meet his shining eyes and could not. “You have no right to
+ask that.”
+
+“Perhaps not till I have asked something else. I wonder if I should
+have any chance if I were to tell you that I love you?”
+
+Her glance swept him shyly with a delicious little laugh. “You never
+can tell till you try.”
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIDGWAY OF MONTANA ***
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