Branded Part 22

But our lawyers were too shrewd to be caught in such a flimsy net as this. At Benedict's suggestion we drove a drainage tunnel on the purchased property and unwatered the three shafts which the Nebraskans had sunk; an expedient which enabled us to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that the Mary Mattock, at the time of its abandonment by its original owners, was nothing more than a series of prospect holes, and that the property was valueless save for a dumping ground.

Through all these bickerings and compromisings the Lawrenceburg fight held on, giving us the most trouble and costing the most money.

Blackwell proved himself to be a sc.r.a.pper of sorts, leaving no expedient untried in his attempts to tie us up and put us out of business. Shortly after we began developing in earnest, he put a shaft-sinking force on the nearest of the Lawrenceburg upper claims on the hillside above us, hoping, as we supposed, to flood us out by tapping one of the numerous underground water bodies with which the region abounds and turning it loose on us. At least, we could imagine no other reason for the move, since the growing dump at this upper working was entirely barren of ore, and remained so.

On our own part we were able to get back at Blackwell only in small ways. When he tried to shut us out of our wagon road right-of-way in the gulch, we beat him in the courts and made him pay damages for obstructing us. Later, when his upper dump began to encroach upon our ground, we sued him again and got more damages, with a peremptory order from the court to vacate.

Still later we took Phineas Everton away from him. The a.s.sayer had had some disagreement with Blackwell, the nature of which was not explained, but which I, for one, could easily understand, and Everton, apologetic now for his early suspicion of us, had told Barrett that he was open to a proposal. The proposal was promptly made and we installed Everton as our a.s.sayer and expert in the town offices, fitting up a laboratory for him which lacked nothing that money could buy in the way of furnishings and equipment.

Consequent upon this change, Barrett and I both saw more of the Evertons. They took a small house in town and Polly welcomed us both, making no distinction, so far as I could determine, between the president and the secretary-treasurer. Barrett's att.i.tude toward Polly puzzled me not a little. He was a frequent visitor in the cottage on the hill, but he rarely went without asking me to go along. If he were really Mary Everton's lover, he was certainly going about his love-making most moderately, I concluded.

I like to remember that I was loyal to him at this time in spite of the puzzlement. It is perhaps needless to say that these cottage visits had done their worst for me and I was hopelessly in love with the sweet-faced, honest-hearted young woman who had grown out of the brown-eyed little girl of the Glendale school-days. Nevertheless, I was still able to recognize the barrier which my conviction, imprisonment and escape, together with the ever-present peril of recapture, interposed; also I was able to recognize Barrett's prior claim, and the fact that he could leave wife and children the priceless heritage of a good name and a clean record--as I could not.

Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as a corporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at a distance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where he had been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, all unconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped in pa.s.sing to ask a question of the clerk. That near-encounter showed me that I was neither better nor worse than the man who had stood, loaded weapon in hand, on the sidewalk in the heart of a June night, coldly deliberating upon the advisability of committing a murder. I was conscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognize me--as he did not--but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil was whispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never went abroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office.

And I was ready.

This mania, which seemed fated to seize me at any moment when my liberty was threatened, added another stone to the barrier of good resolutions which I had builded in behalf of my loyalty to Barrett and a more or less chivalrous consideration for Mary Everton and her future peace of mind. If the ex-convict might not venture, the potential man-slayer was at a still greater disadvantage.

I recall, as vividly as if it were yesterday, how the first small breach was made in this barrier of good resolutions. Barrett and I were in Denver together, joining forces in our regular monthly fight with the smelter pirates. We had been to the theater and were smoking bedtime cigars in the mezzanine lounge of the Brown Palace. I have forgotten the name of the play we had seen, and even the plot of it; all that I recollect is that it turned upon the well-worn theme of loyalty in love.

Barrett seldom talked of himself or his past, even to me; and I was closer to him, I think, than anyone else in the West. But the play seemed to have touched some hidden spring. Almost before I knew it he was telling me of his college days, and of his a.s.sured future at that time as the only son of a well-to-do New England manufacturer.

"Those were the days when I didn't have a care in the world," he said.

"My father was the typical American business man, intent upon piling up a fortune for my mother and sister and me. I couldn't see that he was wearing himself out in the effort to get ahead, and at the same time to give us all the luxuries as we went along; none of us could see it.

His notion was to put me through the university, give me a year or so abroad, and then to take me into the business with him. . . . Don't let me bore you."

"You are not boring me," I said.

"Then there was the girl: that had been arranged for both of us, too, though we were carefully kept from suspecting it. I can't tell you what she was to me, Jimmie, but in a worldful of women she was the only one. She was in college, too, but we had our vacations together--at a little place on the Maine coast where her people and mine had cottages less than a stone's throw apart."

Barrett's cigar had gone out, but he seemed not to know it. His eyes were half-closed, and for the moment his strong clean-cut young face looked almost haggard. I let him take his own time. In such confidences it is only the sympathetic ear that is welcome; speech in any sort can scarcely be less than impertinent.

"I shall never forget our last summer together," he went on, after a bit. "It seemed as if everything conspired to make it memorable. We were both fond of canoeing and sailing and swimming; she could do all three better than most men. Then there were the moonlit nights on the beach when we sat together on the white sands and planned for the future, the future of clear skies, of ambitions working out their fulfilment in the pa.s.sing years, the blessed after-while in which there were to be an ideal home and little children, and always and evermore the love that makes all things beautiful, all things possible.

"We planned it all out in those August days and moonlit nights. I had one more year in the university, and after that we were to be married and go to Europe together. No young fellow in this world ever had brighter prospects than I had on the day when I went back to college to begin my senior year, Jimmie." He paused for a moment and then went on with a deeper note in his voice. "The lights all went out, blink, between two days, as you might say. The treasurer of the company of which my father was the president became an embezzler, and the crash ruined us financially and practically killed my father--though the doctors called it heart failure. And I had been at home less than a month, trying to save something out of the wreck for my mother and sister, when I lost the girl."

"She couldn't stand the change in circ.u.mstances?" I offered.

"She was drowned in a yachting accident, and they never found her body."

"Oh, good heavens!" I exclaimed, suddenly and acutely distressed and remorseful for the cynical suggestion I had thrust in.

He shook his head slowly. "It came near smashing me, Jimmie. It seemed so unnecessary; so hideously out of tune with everything. I thought at the time that I should never get over it and be myself again, and I still think so, though the pa.s.sing years have dulled the sharp edges of the hurt. There never was another girl like her, and there never will be another--for me."

"But you will marry, some day, Bob," I ventured.

"Possibly--quite probably. Sentiment, of the sort our fathers and mothers knew, has gone out of fashion, and the money chase has made new men and women of the present generation. But some of the old longings persist for a few of us. I want a home, Jimmie, and at least a few of the things that the word stands for. Some day I hope to be able to find a woman who will take what there is left of me and give me what she can in return. I shan't ask much because I can't give much."

"I guess you have already found her," I said, with a dull pain at my heart.

"Not Polly," he denied quickly. "I couldn't get my own consent to cheat a woman like Polly Everton. She has a right to demand the best that a man can give, and all of it. Besides, it doesn't lie altogether with me or my possible leanings, in Polly's case--as no man knows better than yourself."

"Oh, you are wrong there, entirely wrong!" I hastened to say. "Polly and I are the best of good friends--nothing more."

His smile was a deal more than half sad.

"If there is 'nothing more,' Jimmie, it is very pointedly your own fault," he returned. "I've been wondering what you are waiting for.

You have been poking your head into the sand like a silly old ostrich, but you haven't fooled me--or Polly, either, I think--for a single minute. What's the obstacle?"

I was silent. Not even to so close a friend as Robert Barrett could I give the real reason why my lips were sealed and must remain so. He went on, after a time, good-naturedly ignoring my hesitancy.

"It was all right at first, of course; while we couldn't tell whether we had a mine or only a costly muddle of litigation. But it's different now. We are going to beat the Lawrenceburg people in the end, and apart from that, if we should split up right here and now, we've got an undivided surplus of--how much was it yesterday?--you've got the records."

"A little under a million."

"Call it nine hundred thousand to divide among the three of us. Your share of that would at least enable you and Polly to begin light house-keeping in a five-room flat, don't you think?"

What could I say? How could I tell him that he was opening a door for me that I could never enter; that by all the canons of decency and honor I should never seek to enter? In the mingled emotions of the moment there was a blind anger at the thought that he had unconsciously made my hard case infinitely harder by showing me that my loyalty to him was entirely needless.

"There are good reasons why I can't think of such a thing," I began; but when I would have gone on the words froze in my throat. Since the hour was nearly midnight, the mezzanine lounge was practically deserted. But as I choked up and stopped, a couple, a man and a woman who had come around from the other side of the gallery parlors, pa.s.sed us on their way to the elevator alcove.

I hardly saw the man of the pair. A second after they had pa.s.sed I could not have told whether he was black or white. That was because the woman, fair, richly gowned, statuesquely handsome and apparently in perfect health, was Agatha Geddis.

XVIII

"The Woman . . . Whose Hands are as Bands"

If I looked as stricken as I felt--and I doubtless did--Barrett had ample reason for a.s.suming that I had been suddenly taken sick.

"Why, Jimmie, old man!" he exclaimed in instant concern; and then he took the half-burned cigar from between my fingers and threw it away, at the same time sending the floor boy scurrying after a drink for me.

I couldn't touch the whiskey when it came; and I was still trying to persuade Barrett that I wasn't sick when he walked me to the elevator.

Wanting only to be free, I still had to let him go all the way with me to the door of my room. But the moment he was gone I hurried out again and descended to the lobby.

The night clerk knew me; or if he didn't, he knew the Little Clean-Up; and he was quite willing to talk. Miss Geddis was only temporarily a guest of the house, he told me. She was with a party of friends from the East, but her Denver home was with Mrs. Altberg, a widow and a prominent society woman. Yes, Miss Geddis was quite well known in social circles; she was reputed to be wealthy, and the clerk understood that she had originally come to Colorado for her health.

Under the stimulus of a particularly good gift cigar the man behind the register grew more confidential. Miss Geddis had always impressed him as being a woman with a history. It was not generally known, he said, but there was a whisper that she had come perilously near getting herself dragged into the lime-light as co-respondent in a certain high-life divorce case. The clerk did not vouch for this, but he did know that she had been seen often and openly in public with the man in the case, since the granting of the divorce.

I didn't sleep very well that night, as may be imagined; and the following day I should certainly have taken the first train for Cripple Creek if business had permitted. But business would not permit. There was an acc.u.mulated difference of some fifteen thousand dollars in ore values between us and the smelter people, and I was obliged to stay on with Barrett and help wrangle for our side in the discrepancy dispute.

At dinner time that evening I managed to elude Barrett, and upon going to the lobby desk for my mail, found a violet-scented envelope addressed to "Mr. James Bertrand" in a handwriting that I remembered only too well.

To anyone looking over my shoulder the enclosed note might have read as a casual and friendly greeting from an old acquaintance. But for me it spelled out death and destruction.

"Dear 'Bert," it ran. "I am not going to scold you for not speaking to me last night in the mezzanine parlor; nor for changing your name; nor for growing a beard. But if you should call this evening between eight and nine at Mrs. Altberg's house on the Boulevard, you will find me at home and more than willing to listen to your apologies and explanations.