The Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its upper and lower reaches, becomes a placid river of the plain at Brewster, dividing its flow among sandy islets, and broadening in its bed to make the long bridge connecting the city with the grass-land mesas a low, trestled causeway. On the northern bank of the river the Brewster street, of which the bridge is a prolongation, becomes a country road, forking a few hundred yards from the bridge approach to send one of its branchings northward among the Little Creek ranches and another westward up the right bank of the stream.

At this fork of the road, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the night of alarms, Sheriff Harding's party of special deputies began to assemble; mounted ranchmen for the greater part, summoned by the rural telephones and drifting in by twos and threes from the outlying grass-lands. Under each man's saddle-flap was slung the regulation weapon of the West – a scabbarded repeating rifle; and the small troop bunching itself in the river road looked serviceably militant and businesslike.

While Harding was counting his men and appointing his lieutenants an automobile rolled silently down the mesa road from the north and came to a stand among the horses. The sheriff drew rein beside the car and spoke to one of the two occupants of the double seat, saying:

"Well, Mr. Smith, we're all here."

"How many?" was the curt question.

"Twenty."

"Good. Here is your authority" – handing the legal papers to the officer. "Before we go in you ought to know the facts. A few hours ago a man named M'Graw, calling himself a deputy United States marshal and claiming to be acting under instructions from Judge Lorching's court in Red Butte, took possession of our dam and camp. On the even chance that he isn't what he claims to be, we are going to arrest him and every man in his crowd. Are you game for it?"

"I'm game to serve any papers that Judge Warner's got the nerve to issue," was the big man's reply.

"That's the talk; that's what I hoped to hear you say. We may have the law on our side, and we may not; but we certainly have the equities. Was Stanton arrested?"

"He sure was. Strothers found him in the Hophra House bar, and the line of talk he turned loose would have set a wet blanket afire. Just the same, he had to go along with Jimmie and get himself locked up."

"That is the first step; now if you're ready, we'll take the next."

Harding rode forward to marshal his troop, and when the advance began Starbuck shut off his car lamps and held his place at the rear of the straggling column, juggling throttle and spark until the car kept even pace with the horses and the low humming of the motor was indistinguishable above the muffled drumming of hoof-beats.

For the first mile or so the midnight silence was unbroken save by the subdued progress noises and the murmurings of the near-by river in its bed. Once Smith took the wheel while Starbuck rolled and lighted a cigarette, and once again, in obedience to a word from the mine owner, he turned the flash-light upon the gasolene pressure-gauge. In the fulness of time it was Starbuck who harked back to the talk which had been so abruptly broken off at the waiting halt in the Little Creek road.

"Let's not head into this ruction with an unpicked bone betwixt us, John," he began gently. "Maybe I said too much, back yonder at the foot of the hill."

"No; you didn't say too much," was the low-toned reply. And then: "Billy, I've had a strange experience this summer; the strangest a man ever lived through, I believe. A few months ago I was jerked out of my place in life and set down in another place where practically everything I had learned as a boy and man had to be forgotten. It was as if my life had been swept clean of everything that I knew how to use – like a house gutted of its well-worn and familiar furniture, and handed back to its tenant to be refitted with whatever could be found and made to serve. I don't know that I'm making it understandable to you, but – "

"Yes, you are," broke in the man at the wheel. "I've had to turn two or three little double somersaults myself in the years that are gone."

"They used to call me 'Monty-Boy,' back there in Lawrenceville, and I fitted the name," Smith went on. "I was neither better nor worse than thousands of other home-bred young fellows just like me, nor different from them in any essential way. I had my little tin-basin round of work and play, and I lived in it. I've spent half an hour, many a time, in a shop picking out the exactly right shade in a tie to wear with the socks that I had, perhaps, spent another half-hour in selecting."

"I'm getting you," said Starbuck, not without friendly sympathy. "Go on."

"Then, suddenly, as I have said, the house was looted. And, quite as suddenly, it grew and expanded and took on added rooms and spaces that I'd never dreamed of. I've had to fill it up as best I could, Billy: I couldn't put back any of the old things; they were so little and trivial and childish. And some of the things I've been putting in are fearfully raw and crude. I've just had to do the best I could – with an empty house. I found that I had a body that could stand man-sized hardship, and a kind of savage nerve that could give and take punishment, and a soul that could drive both body and nerve to the limit. Also, I've found out what it means to love a woman."

Starbuck checked the car's speed a little more to keep it well in the rear of the ambling cavalcade.

"That's your one best bet, John," he said soberly.

"It is. I've cleaned out another room since you called me down back yonder in the Little Creek road, Starbuck. I can't trust my own leadings any more; they are altogether too primitive and brutal; so I'm going to take hers. She'd send me into this fight that is just ahead of us, and all the other fights that are coming, with a heart big enough to take in the whole world. She said I'd understand, some day; that I'd know that the only great man is one who is too big to be little; who can fight without hating; who can die to make good, if that is the only way that offers."

"That's Corry Baldwin, every day in the week, John. They don't make 'em any finer than she is," was Starbuck's comment. And then: "I'm beginning to kick myself for not letting you go and have one more round-up with her. She's doing you good, right along."

"You didn't stop me," Smith affirmed; "you merely gave me a chance to stop myself. It's all over now, Billy, and my little race is about run. But whatever happens to me, either this night, or beyond it, I shall be a free man. You can't put handcuffs on a soul and send it to prison, you know. That is what Corona was trying to make me understand; and I couldn't – or wouldn't."

Harding had stopped to let the auto come up. Over a low hill just ahead the pole-bracketed lights at the dam were starring themselves against the sky, and the group of horsemen was halting at the head of the railroad trestle which marked the location of the north side unloading station.

From the halt at the trestle head, Harding sent two of his men forward to spy out the ground. Returning speedily, these two men reported that there were no guards on the north bank of the river, and that the stagings, which still remained in place on the down-stream face of the dam, were also unguarded. Thereupon Harding made his dispositions. Half of the posse was to go up the northern bank, dismounted, and rush the camp by way of the stagings. The remaining half, also on foot, was to cross at once on the railroad trestle, and to make its approach by way of the wagon road skirting the mesa foot. At an agreed-upon signal, the two detachments were to close in upon the company buildings in the construction camp, trusting to the surprise and the attack from opposite directions to overcome any disparity in numbers.

At Smith's urgings, Starbuck went with the party which crossed by way of the railroad trestle, Smith himself accompanying the sheriff's detachment. With the horses left behind under guard at the trestle head, the up-river approach was made by both parties simultaneously, though in the darkness, and with the breadth of the river intervening, neither could see the movements of the other. Smith kept his place beside Harding, and to the sheriff's query he answered that he was unarmed.

"You've got a nerve," was all the comment Harding made, and at that they topped the slight elevation and came among the stone débris in the north-side quarries.

From the quarry cutting the view struck out by the camp mastheads was unobstructed. The dam and the uncompleted power-house, still figuring to the eye as skeleton masses of form timbering, lay just below them, and on the hither side the flooding torrent thundered through the spillway gates, which had been opened to their fullest capacity. Between the quarry and the northern dam-head ran the smooth concreted channel of the main ditch canal, with the water in the reservoir lake still lapping several feet below the level of its entrance to give assurance that, until the spillways should be closed, the charter-saving stream would never pour through the canal.

On the opposite side of the river the dam-head and the camp street were deserted, but there were lights in the commissary, in the office shack, and in Blue Pete Simms's canteen doggery. From the latter quarter sounds of revelry rose above the spillway thunderings, and now and again a drunken figure lurched through the open door to make its way uncertainly toward the rank of bunk-houses.

Harding was staring into the farther nimbus of the electric rays, trying to pick up some sign of the other half of his posse, when Smith made a suggestion.

"Both of your parties will have the workmen's bunk-houses in range, Mr. Harding, and we mustn't forget that Colonel Baldwin and Williams are prisoners in the timekeeper's shack. If the guns have to be used – "

"There won't be any wild shooting, of the kind you're thinking of," returned the sheriff grimly. "There ain't a single man in this posse that can't hit what he aims at, nine times out o' ten. But here's hopin' we can gather 'em in without the guns. If they ain't lookin' for us – "

The interruption was the whining song of a jacketed bullet passing overhead, followed by the crack of a rifle. "Down, boys!" said the sheriff softly, setting the example by sliding into the ready-made trench afforded by the dry ditch of the outlet canal; and as he said it a sharp fusillade broke out, with fire spurtings from the commissary building and others from the mesa beyond to show that the surprise was balked in both directions.

"They must have had scouts out," was Smith's word to the sheriff, who was cautiously reconnoitring the newly developed situation from the shelter of the canal trench. "They are evidently ready for us, and that knocks your plan in the head. Your men can't cross these stagings under fire."

"Your 'wops' are all right, anyway," said Harding. "They're pouring out of the bunk-houses and that saloon over there and taking to the hills like a flock o' scared chickens." Then to his men: "Scatter out, boys, and get the range on that commissary shed. That's where most of the rustlers are cached."

Two days earlier, two hours earlier, perhaps, Smith would have begged a weapon and flung himself into the fray with blood lust blinding him to everything save the battle demands of the moment. But now the final mile-stone in the long road of his metamorphosis had been passed and the darksome valley of elemental passions was left behind.

"Hold up a minute, for God's sake!" he pleaded hastily. "We've got to give them a show, Harding! The chances are that every man in that commissary believes that M'Graw has the law on his side – and we are not sure that he hasn't. Anyway, they don't know that they are trying to stand off a sheriff's posse!"

Harding's chuckle was sardonic. "You mean that we'd ought to go over yonder and read the riot act to 'em first? That might do back in the country where you came from. But the man that can get into that camp over there with the serving papers now 'd have to be armor-plated, I reckon."

"Just the same, we've got to give them their chance!" Smith insisted doggedly. "We can't stand for any unnecessary bloodshed —I won't stand for it!"

Harding shrugged his heavy shoulders. "One round into that sheet-iron commissary shack'll bring 'em to time – and nothing else will. I hain't got any men to throw away on the dew-dabs and furbelows."

Smith sprang up and held out his hand.

"You have at least one man that you can spare, Mr. Harding," he snapped. "Give me those papers. I'll go over and serve them."

At this the big sheriff promptly lost his temper.

"You blamed fool!" he burst out. "You'd be dog-meat before you could get ten feet away from this ditch!"

"Never mind: give me those papers. I'm not going to stand by quietly and see a lot of men shot down on the chance of a misunderstanding!"

"Take 'em, then!" rasped Harding, meaning nothing more than the calling of a foolish theorist's bluff.

Smith caught at the warrants, and before anybody could stop him he was down upon the stagings, swinging himself from bent to bent through a storm of bullets coming, not from the commissary, but from the saloon shack on the opposite bank – a whistling shower of lead that made every man in the sheriff's party duck to cover.

How the volunteer process-server ever lived to get across the bridge of death no man might know. Thrice in the half-minute dash he was hit; yet there was life enough left to carry him stumbling across the last of the staging bents; to send him reeling up the runway at the end and across the working yard to the door of the commissary, waving the folded papers like an inadequate flag of truce as he fell on the door-step.

After that, all things were curiously hazy and undefined for him; blind clamor coming and going as the noise of a train to a dozing traveller when the car doors are opened and closed. There was the tumult of a fierce battle being waged over him; a deafening rifle fire and the spat-spat of bullets puncturing the sheet-iron walls of the commissary. In the midst of it he lost his hold upon the realities, and when he got it again the warlike clamor was stilled and Starbuck was kneeling beside him, trying, apparently, to deprive him of his clothes with the reckless slashings of a knife.

Protesting feebly and trying to rise, he saw the working yard filled with armed men and the returning throng of laborers; saw Colonel Baldwin and Williams talking excitedly to the sheriff; then he caught the eye of the engineer and beckoned eagerly with his one available hand.

"Hold still, until I can find out how dead you are!" gritted the rough-and-ready surgeon who was plying the clothes-ripping knife. But when Williams came and bent down to listen, Smith found a voice, shrill and strident and so little like his own that he scarcely recognized it.

"Call 'em out – call the men out and start the gate machinery!" he panted in the queer, whistling voice which was, and was not, his own. "Possess – possession is nine points of the law – that's what Judge Warner said: the spillways, Bartley – shut 'em quick!"

"The men are on the job and the machinery is starting right now," said Williams gently. "Don't you hear it?" And then to Starbuck: "For Heaven's sake, do something for him, Billy – anything to keep him with us until a doctor can get here!"

Smith felt himself smiling foolishly.

"I don't need any doctor, Bartley; what I need is a new ego: then I'd stand some sha – some chance of finding – " he looked up appealingly at Starbuck – "what is it that I'd stand some chance of finding, Billy? I – I can't seem to remember."

Williams turned his face away and Starbuck tightened his benumbing grip upon the severed artery in the bared arm from which he had cut the sleeve. Smith seemed to be going off again, but he suddenly opened his eyes and pointed frantically with a finger of the one serviceable hand. "Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield, and he's going to dy-dynamite the dam!"

Clinging to consciousness with a grip that not even the blood loss could break, Smith saw Williams spring to his feet and give the alarm; saw three or four of the sheriff's men drop their weapons and hurl themselves upon another man who was trying to make his way unnoticed to the stagings with a box of dynamite on his shoulder. Then he felt the foolish smile coming again when he looked up at Starbuck.

"Don't let them hurt him, Billy; him nor Simms nor Lanterby, nor that other one – the short-hand man – I – I can't remember his name. They're just poor tools; and we've got to – to fight without hating, and – and – " foolish witlessness was enveloping him again like a clinging garment and he made a masterful effort to throw it off. "Tell the little girl – tell her – you know what to tell her, Billy; about what I tried to do. Harding said I'd get killed, but I remembered what she said, and I didn't care. Tell her I said that that one minute was worth living for – worth all it cost."

The raucous blast of a freak auto horn ripped into the growling murmur of the gate machinery, and a dust-covered car pulled up in front of the commissary. Out of it sprang first the doctor with his instrument bag, and, closely following him, two plain-clothes men and a Brewster police captain in uniform. Smith looked up and understood.

"They're just – a little – too late, Billy, don't you think?" he quavered weakly. "I guess – I guess I've fooled them, after all." And therewith he closed his eyes wearily upon all his troubles and triumphings.

XXXIII
In Sunrise Gulch

William Starbuck drew the surgeon aside after the first aid had been rendered, and Smith, still unconscious, had been carried from the makeshift operating-table in the commissary to Williams's cot in the office shack.

"How about it, Doc?" asked the mine owner bluntly.

The surgeon shook his head doubtfully.

"I can't say. The arm and the shoulder won't kill him, but that one in the lung is pretty bad; and he has lost a lot of blood."

"Still, he may pull through?"

"He may – with good care and nursing. But if you want my honest opinion, I'm afraid he won't make it. He'll be rather lucky if he doesn't make it, won't he?"

Starbuck remembered that the doctor had come out in the auto with the police captain and the two plain-clothes men.

"Hackerman has been talking?" he queried.

The surgeon nodded. "He told me on the way out that Smith was a fugitive from justice; that he'd be likely to get ten years or more when they took him back East. If I were in Smith's place, I'd rather pass out with a bullet in my lung. Wouldn't you?"

Starbuck was frowning sourly. "Suppose you make it a case of suspended judgment, Doc," he suggested. "The few of us here who know anything about it are giving John the benefit of the doubt. I've got a few thousand dollars of my own money that says he isn't guilty; and if he makes a live of it, they'll have to show me, and half a dozen more of us, before they can send him over the road."

"He knew they were after him?"

"Sure thing; and he had all the chance he needed to make his get-away. He wouldn't take it; thought he owed a duty to the High Line stockholders. He's a man to tie to, Doc. He was shot while he was trying to get between and stop the war and keep others from getting killed."

"It's a pity," said the surgeon, glancing across at the police captain to whom Colonel Baldwin was appealing. "They'll put him in the hospital cell at the jail, and that will cost him whatever slender chance he might otherwise have to pull through."

Starbuck looked up quickly. "Tell 'em he can't be moved, Doc Dan," he urged suddenly. And then: "You're Dick Maxwell's family physician, and Colonel Dexter's, and mine. Surely you can do that much for us?"

"I can, and I will," said the surgeon promptly, and then he went to join Baldwin and the police captain, who were still arguing. What he said was brief and conclusive; and a little later, when the autos summoned from town by Sheriff Harding came for their lading of prisoners, Smith was left behind, with two of M'Graw's men who were also past moving. In the general clearing of the field Starbuck and Williams stayed behind to care for the wounded, and one of the plain-clothes men remained to stand guard.

Three days after the wholesale arrest at the dam, Brewster gossip had fairly outworn itself telling and retelling the story of how the High Line charter had been saved; of how Crawford Stanton's bold ruse of hiring an ex-train-robber to impersonate a federal-court officer had fallen through, leaving Stanton and his confederates, ruthlessly abandoned by their unnamed principals, languishing bailless in jail; of how Smith, the hero of all these occasions, was still lying at the point of death in the office shack at the construction camp, and David Kinzie, once more in keen pursuit of the loaves and fishes, was combing the market for odd shares of the stock which was now climbing swiftly out of reach. But at this climax of exhaustion – or satiety – came a distinctly new set of thrills, more titillating, if possible, than all the others combined.

It was on the morning of the third day that the Herald announced the return of Mr. Josiah Richlander from the Topaz; and in the marriage notices of the same issue the breakfast-table readers of the newspapers learned that the multimillionaire's daughter had been privately married the previous evening to Mr. Tucker Jibbey. Two mining speculators, who had already made Mr. Jibbey's acquaintance, were chuckling over the news in the Hophra House grill when a third late breakfaster, a man who had been sharing Stanton's office space as a broker in improved ranch lands, came in to join them.

"What's the joke?" inquired the newcomer; and when he was shown the marriage item he nodded gravely. "That's all right; but the Herald man didn't get the full flavor of it. It was a sort of runaway match, it seems; the fond parent wasn't invited or consulted. The boys in the lobby tell me that the old man had a fit when he came in this morning and a Herald reporter showed him that notice and asked for more dope on the subject."

"I don't see that the fond parent has any kick coming," said the one who had sold Jibbey a promising prospect hole on Topaz Mountain two days earlier. "The young fellow's got all kinds of money."

"I know," the land broker put in. "But they're whispering it around that Mr. Richlander had other plans for his daughter. They also say that Jibbey wouldn't stay to face the music; that he left on the midnight train last night a few hours after the wedding, so as not to be among those present when the old man should blow in."

"What?" – in a chorus of two – "left his wife?"

"That's what they say. But that's only one of the new and startling things that isn't in the morning papers. Have you heard about Smith? – or haven't you been up long enough yet?"

"I heard yesterday that he was beginning to mend," replied the breakfaster on the left; the one who had ordered bacon and eggs, with the bacon cooked to a cinder.

"You're out of date," this from the dealer in ranches. "You know the story that was going around about his being an escaped convict, or something of that sort? It gets its 'local color' this morning. There's a sheriff here from back East somewhere – came in on the early train; name's Macauley, and he's got the requisition papers. But Smith's fooled him good and plenty."

Again the chorus united in an eager query.

"How?"

"He died last night – a little past midnight. They say they're going to bury him out at the dam – on the job that he pulled through and stood on its feet. One of Williams's quarrymen drifted in with the story just a little while ago. I'm here to bet you even money that the whole town goes to the funeral."

"Great gosh!" said the man who was crunching the burnt bacon. "Say, that's tough, Bixby! I don't care what he'd run away from back East; he was a man, right. Harding has been telling everybody how Smith wouldn't let the posse open fire on that gang of hold-ups last Friday night; how he chased across on the dam stagings alone and unarmed to try to serve the warrants on 'em and make 'em stop firing. It was glorious, but it wasn't war."

To this the other mining man added a hard word. "Dead," he gritted; "and only a few hours earlier the girl had taken snap judgment on him and married somebody else! That's the woman of it!"

"Oh, hold on, Stryker," the ranch broker protested. "Don't you get too fierce about that. There are two strings to that bow and the longest and sorriest one runs out to Colonel Baldwin's place on Little Creek, I'm thinking. The Richlander business was only an incident. Stanton told me that much."

As the event proved, the seller of ranch lands would have lost his bet on the funeral attendance. For some unknown reason the notice of Smith's death did not appear in the afternoon papers, and only a few people went out in autos to see the coffin lowered by Williams's workmen into a grave on the mesa behind the construction camp; a grave among others where the victims of an early industrial accident at the dam had been buried. Those who went out from town came back rather scandalized. There had been a most hard-hearted lack of the common formalities, they said; a cheap coffin, no minister, no mourners, not even the poor fellow's business associates in the company he had fought so hard to save from defeat and extinction. It was a shame!

With this report passing from lip to lip in Brewster, another bit of gossip to the effect that Starbuck and Stillings had gone East with the disappointed sheriff, "to clear Smith's memory," as the street-talk had it, called forth no little comment derogatory. As it chanced, the two mining speculators and Bixby, the ranch seller, met again in the Hophra House café at the dinner-table on the evening of the funeral day, and Stryker, the captious member of the trio, was loud in his criticisms of the High Line people.

"Yes!" he railed; "a couple of 'em will go on a junketing trip East to 'clear his memory,' after they've let their 'wops' at the dam bury him like a yellow dog! I thought better than that of Billy Starbuck, and a whole lot better of Colonel Dexter. And this Richlander woman; they say she'd known him ever since he and she were school kids together; she went down and took the train with her father just about the time they were planting the poor devil among the sagebrush roots up there on that bald mesa!"

"I'm disappointed, too," confessed the dealer in improved ranch lands. "I certainly thought that if nobody else went, the little girl from the Baldwin place would be out there to tell him good-by. But she wasn't."

Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by without incident other than the indictment by the grand jury of Crawford Stanton, Barney M'Graw, and a number of others on a charge of conspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of the grand battue in which Sheriff Harding had figured as the master of the hunt, had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery in the lately finished power-house.

Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni a wandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike in Sunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty years earlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely, the tale-bringer confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike; but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading to the old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he had seen smoke arising.

As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was not at fault. On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, clad in serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy Stetson and buff top-boots in good countenance by riding astride in a man's saddle, was pushing her mount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little rise the abandoned camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravel sprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and its crumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitable entirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch.

At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and shaded her eyes with a gauntleted hand. On a bench beside the door of the single tenanted cabin a man was sitting, and she saw him stand to answer her hand-wave. A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in a sling and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands, was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, but she pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing at him out of a pair of slate-gray eyes and saying: "How often have I got to tell you that you simply can't help a woman out of a man's saddle?"

The man smiled at that.

"It's automatic," he returned. "I shall never get over wanting to help you, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I can go?"

Flinging the bridle-reins over the head of the wiry little cow-pony which was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creek valley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sit down.

"You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?" she teased, sitting beside him. "Every time I come it's always the same thing: 'When can I go?' You're not well yet."

"I'm well enough to do what I've got to do, Corona; and until it's done… Besides, there is Jibbey."

"Where is Mr. Jibbey this morning?"

"He has gone up the creek, fishing. I made him go. If I didn't take a club to him now and then he'd hang over me all the time. There never was another man like him, Corona. And at home we used to call him 'the black sheep' and 'the failure,' and cross the street to dodge him when he'd been drinking too much!"