The Short Cut Part 14

Shandon looked at him in amazement, thinking at first that the man was a little mad. But Ettinger's shrewd eyes were sane enough.

"We go right up to your lake," he cried shrilly. "We git busy with some engineers an' pick an' shovel men. We blow the side of a hill all to h.e.l.l an' what happens? The water just comes a bulgin' down into Dry Creek, an' all we got to do down in the valley, twenty, thirty miles away, is dig ditches an' watch our land turn into a gold mine!"

In a flash Shandon saw the utter simplicity of the whole scheme.

Whereas now the river from Laughter Lake shot down the mountains through its rocky gorge, watering his own land and running through little narrow, rocky valleys to the lower slopes, it might here near the head be deflected so that it sped at first through the canon of the upper Dry Creek, and following a natural course be brought with little expense to Dry Valley. Ettinger's proposition was no fanciful dream; it was hard, unvarnished fact. And, as so often happens when a man sees a radiant possibility, he wondered that he had not seen it for himself long ago.

Here was the golden opportunity his soul, in a mist, had yearned for!

He shot out his hand gripping Ruf Ettinger's until the little man squirmed. But even the pain of nearly crushed fingers did not drive the grin from Ettinger's face.

"You're on," he cried exultantly. "Shandon, we'll frame a deal that'll make millionaires out of us."

"And man's work!" was the thought stirring Shandon's heart and brightening his eyes.

They rode on, as Ettinger had planned from the beginning, and covered the two miles to Laughter Lake in a few minutes. They rode up the shoulder of the ridge to the level of the lake; and there Ruf Ettinger's eager finger pointed out where the work was to be done.

It was work which Nature might have planned when the mountains were carved, the lake set in its deep bowl. Fifteen feet from this end of the lake the water swept into a narrow channel, a ridge running down from each side. Here was the spot to deflect the waters before they sped on down over the steep fall. Upon the south side there was a jagged cut in the saw-toothed cliff line. Even now the lowest part of that cut, when once the free soil was scooped out, was not ten feet above the level of the water.

"I rode up here purt' near a week ago," said Ettinger. "I looked this over an' rode back all the way down Dry Creek. It's dead easy, Shandon."

Already Ettinger visualised the cut deepened and widened here with flood gates to control the current. He spurred his horse up the bank as far as he could force the animal, then got down and scrambled on, gesticulating and talking swiftly. Shandon followed him. In a little they came to a point from which they could look back upon the lake, and forward to the windings of the canon through which Dry Creek ran in winter and spring.

"It can be done," muttered Shandon slowly. "It can be done, Ettinger.

I don't know what it will cost, five thousand or ten or twenty; but I do know that those lands down in Dry Valley are going to jump over the moon."

Ettinger made little clucking sounds with his mouth, his way of expressing joy unbounded.

"An' you don't see it all yet," he chuckled. "Lord, I've been layin'

awake nights figgerin' on it. We'll bond everything that's loose in the valley. I've got Norfolk settin' tight and we'll round up a lot of the little fellers. It's sort of late, maybe, but them other fellers ain't got everything sewed up by a jugful."

"What other fellows?" asked Shandon, mystified.

Then Ettinger, in his rare good humour loosened his tongue until it poured out everything there was in his seething brain. He told of the scheme of Martin Leland and Sledge Hume, for Garth Conway had dropped an incautious word and the shrewd brain of Ettinger had worked out the puzzle. He told how the three men were trying to do this very thing, how they had planned on getting the water themselves, how Martin Leland had tied up thousands in options and purchases, how Ettinger had been one too many for them and had beat them to Shandon. He chuckled over everything, but most of all over the fact that Martin Leland had tried to buy him out. Old Leland was the keenest business man in the county, was he? Well, Ettinger had fooled him! Ettinger had blinded him with a promise to sell next week for seventy-five thousand. By that time, when Leland came to him--

"What's all this?" frowned Shandon. "You say that Leland, Conway and Hume are already at work, planning to put water from the Bar L-M into Dry Valley?"

"Already?" cried Ettinger. "They been clawin' at the job over a year now. The Lord knows what makes 'em so slow; think n.o.body else in the world can see straight, or shy on the money end, maybe. Anyhow they've gone to it tooth and toe nail; they've sunk thousands into it, thousands I tell you! An' now, you an' me, Shandon, can make the bunch of 'em eat out of our hands! They can't do nothin' without your water; that's where we got 'em."

Wayne Shandon's eyes grew bright with a vision, the muscles of his jaw hardened. In sober truth his opportunity had come to him. Hume, a man he hated, Leland, a man who had called him laggard, spendthrift, scoundrel, had put many thousands of dollars into a project which he could smash into pieces. Ettinger had said it: the two of them could make Leland and Hume eat out of their hands! They could get Norfolk and the little fellows; they could tear out the side of the ridge, release what waters they chose, make their ditches, and by improving only their own property make Leland's and Hume's holdings worth nothing. Leland had started it; Leland's unreasonable censure had been a challenge. Here was his answer!

It was business, straight business. Had Leland and Hume been his friends it would have been different. But they deserved no consideration from him. It was his water; he had the right to dispose of it as he saw fit. He would be treating Leland as fairly as he had been treated. Why had they not come to him in the first place? Why had they not offered him the opportunity to get in on the ground floor with them? He would have given them the water then, glad to see Wanda's father prospering. But they were holding out, they were waiting for something, they had made sure of his consent to let them have what they wanted. Why? When they had everything cornered they would offer him a small sum, they would believe him fool enough to leap at it, mouth open, like a fish. Even Garth Conway, his own cousin, had not told him! What consideration did Conway deserve?

"By Heaven!" cried Shandon.

And then he fell suddenly silent.

"We got to git busy in a hurry, Shandon," Ettinger ran on swiftly.

"When old Sure-Thing Leland comes to me to close the deal I want to laugh at him."

Slowly the light died out of Shandon's eyes. Was this, after all, the opportunity for which he had yearned? He grew uncertain, a little troubled. An opportunity for what? For becoming worthy of Wanda, for being a man, square and just, a man who must make a new name for himself, a name which would never bring discredit to her when she became Wanda Shandon? In trying to ruin Sledge Hume for the sordid motives of hatred and gain, in trying to strike back at Wanda's father in vengeful bitterness, would he be doing a thing of which later he would be proud to have her know? Was he proving his manhood by accepting for his first business partner a man like Ettinger, who laughed over his feat of tricking another man by a lie? Was he not seeking to blind himself to the right and the wrong of it? This was the sort of thing that Sledge Hume would do; should Wayne Shandon do it? Was his first venture after the priceless gift of Wanda's love to him, to be a thing like this? Had this been the opportunity he had yearned for, to grasp gold full handed, to wreak vengeance, to retaliate against unfair treatment by striking back treacherously?

Martin Leland had been unjust, yes. But had there not been strong human reasons for that injustice? Had not his own wild living been cause enough? Was he, from the sharp words of an old man who was jealous in his love for his daughter, to draw an excuse to strike at his own cousin and Wanda's father?

"Ettinger," he said quietly. "I can't do it. You had better keep your promise to Leland."

Ettinger's jaw dropped, his brows puckered in astonishment.

"What's the matter with you?" he demanded sharply. "Can't you see the play? We got the chance to git the water on the land and make them fellers pay for it or sell to us at our own figger, ain't we? Why, it's as good as gold, man! If you don't see enough in it as it stands you are in a place where you can hold 'em up for a bonus to boot."

Shandon turned away, Ettinger's point of view suddenly disgusting him.

His golden opportunity had crumbled into dust and ashes. And although the little man by his side waxed voluble in alternating rage and supplication, Wayne Shandon's final word was a positive,

"No!"

CHAPTER XI

WANDA'S DISCOVERY

A supreme happiness had filled Wanda Leland's heart for a few golden hours, so thoroughly permeating every fibre of her emotional being that when sorrow came afterward it could not entirely drive out the whispering gladness.

Never had the forest land seemed so big, so vast and still as during the slow days which followed. She went to it for the comfort she could not bring herself to ask of her mother just yet, and it mothered her, crooned and whispered and sang to her. Through the dew filled mornings she wandered silently; rarely did she return to the house until the sun was low in the west. Never had this world she loved seemed so vitally close to her, so big in a new sense, so eloquently an expression of the divine eternal. Her heart swelled and the talk of the pine tops entered it.

They were sad, glad days. Gladness sang in her heart when in the sun-flooded mornings she rode out alone, and perhaps her devious way brought her to the spot where Red Reckless had swept her up into his arms for the first time, when his kiss had brought love into full blossom in her breast. Sadness brought its shadow and listlessness when day after day pa.s.sed and she did not see him again, when the eager hope of the morning that he too would ride to that spot to meet her died down in the afternoon's invariable disappointment. Gladness when she thought of him, just of him; sadness when she thought of her father's stern face.

Red Reckless had made no attempt to see her, or to communicate with her. Even while she sought to find excuses for him, that hurt her more than her loyalty would let her whisper to herself. He would come soon.

He would know where to find her, know that her woman's heart was taking her to the spot where that heart had really become a woman's. He was thinking of her now as she thought of him. Her heart heard his heart talking to it across the forests and streams.

A woman's heart trusted him, but a maiden's pride permitted no question when Garth rode over as he did twice during the following week. When Garth remarked casually that his cousin was the same old chap he'd always been, and that he seemed to have nothing in his rollicking brain more serious than the breaking of a wild devil of a colt and a horse race which he had set his heart upon, Wanda bent her head a little over her book and gave no other sign of having heard the statement elicited by her mother's question. But the news hurt, too, just a little.

There was a quick sting that came and was gone as her love for him surged up again, and it was the same sort of sting, only stronger, that she had felt as a little girl when she thought of him as happy in his boyish pursuits with any one but her. It did not matter now whether it was Little Saxon or Big Bill. She told herself in her own little room that she was a jealous cat. But--

"Oh, dear G.o.d, how I love you, Wayne!"

Then, when the days pa.s.sed and she did not hear from him, there came for the first time a quick fear which was the first ally of that twinge of jealousy. The fifth day came, the day on which he was riding to Laughter Lake with Ruf Ettinger, and she could not know that his every thought was of her. She only felt that, had she been the man, she would not have stayed away. And there came the question and the fear,

"Does he love me as I love him?"

The old, lovers' question ever since Auca.s.sin and Nicolette; the matter for long debate and reiterated argument: "It may not be that thou shouldst love me even as I love thee!" She found herself blushing hotly as she rode alone through the forest at the thought that she was again going to meet him, and that he did not come to meet her. She felt suddenly ashamed and angry both with him and with herself. Was she, to him, like a ripe apple that had dropped into his hand at the touch? Did he think other--?

Her face crimson she reined the startled Gypsy around with a savage jerk, turned her back squarely upon the Bar L-M, and without a look behind her rode swiftly in the opposite direction. She rode for an hour, not turning once, although many a time her heart fluttered wildly and then grew painfully still at some slight noise which to her yearning ears sounded like the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her.

To-day she crossed the narrow valley toward the cliffs rising like a wall upon the far side of Echo Creek. Stubbornly she shut her mind from its daily wanderings; her camera, that she had not used for a week, was going to work for her to-day. The birds that had come trooping back from wintering in the south--robins and blue birds, blue jays and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, larks and yellow hammers--made merry din in the morning air. Shep, running on ahead as usual, disturbed half a dozen grouse from the underbrush in a little canon, and the m.u.f.fled roll of their whirring wings threw Shep into brief consternation and prolonged subsequent joy. She saw the bob and flash of a rabbit's tail, noticed again and again the lean, muscular body of a tree squirrel, heard upon a wooded slope the snapping and crashing of brush that told of the leaping flight of a deer. The woods were alive with animal folk, her "friends" called to her from every tree and tiny valley, they peeped out at her from burrows and hollow trees.

"We are going to quit being a little fool," she told Gypsy with tremulous emphasis. "And we are going to get a real picture to-day."

A day or so before she had heard with scant attention and no subsequent interest something which in the old careless, love free days sooner would have sent her riding this way in haste. One of her father's men, Charley or Jim, had found a dead cow under the cliffs and had seen signs of bear. He had returned to the spot later and had killed the animal, a she bear, and had seen one of her cubs making its swift, awkward way into the brush. Recollecting the story, and because to-day she yearned feverishly for something to do, Wanda turned Gypsy toward the cliffs, thinking how she should like, if her fortune were very great, to be able to show Wayne Shandon when he did come to her, the picture of a bear cub playing in the woods.

"I've had so much fun hunting for him!" she would say then. And Wayne would never know how unmaidenly she had been.