"Your friends have money, Montague—plenty of it."
"No," was the sober decision; and then he gave his reasons. "If I could do what you propose, I shouldn't be worth the powder it would take to drive a bullet through me, Verda, for now, you see, I know what love means. You say I have changed, and I have changed: I can imagine the past-and-gone J. Montague jumping at the chance you are offering. But the mill will never grind with the water that is past: I'll take what is coming to me, and try to take it like a man. Good-night—and good-by." And he turned his back upon the temptation and went away.
Fifteen minutes later he was in his office in the Kinzie Building, trying in vain to get Colonel Baldwin on the distance wire; trying also—and also in vain—to forget the recent clash and break with Verda Richlander. He had called it a temptation at the moment, but perhaps it was scarcely that. It was more like a final effort of the man who had been to retransform the man who was. For a single instant the doors of all his former ambitions had stood open. He saw how Josiah Richlander's money and influence, directed by Verda's compelling demands, could be used to break Dunham; and that done, all the rest would be easy, all the paths to the success he had once craved would be made smooth.
On the other hand, there was everything to lose, and nothing, as the world measures results, to be gained. In a few hours at the furthest the good name he had earned in Brewster would be hopelessly lost, and, so far as human foresight could prefigure, there was nothing ahead but loss and bitter disgrace. In spite of all this, while the long-distance "central" was still assuring him that the Hillcrest wire was busy, he found time to be fiercely glad that the choice had been only a choice offered and not a choice accepted. For love's sake, if for no higher motive, he would go down like a man, fighting to the end for the right to live and think and love as a man.
He was jiggling the switch of the desk 'phone for the twentieth time in the effort to secure the desired line of communication with Baldwin when a nervous step echoed in the corridor and the door opened to admit William Starbuck. There was red wrath in the mine owner's ordinarily cold eyes when he flung himself into a chair and eased the nausea of his soul in an outburst of picturesque profanity.
"The jig's up—definitely up, John," he was saying, when his speech became lucid enough to be understood. "We know now what Stanton's 'other string' was. A half-hour ago, a deputy United States marshal, with a posse big enough to capture a town, took possession of the dam and stopped the work. He says it's a court order from Judge Lorching at Red Butte, based on the claims of that infernal paper railroad!"
Smith pushed the telephone aside.
"But it's too late!" he protested. "The dam is completed; Williams 'phoned me before I went to dinner. All that remains to be done to save the charter is to shut the spillways and let the water back up so that it will flow into the main ditch!"
"Right there's where they've got us!" was the rasping reply. "They won't let Williams touch the spillway gates, and they're not going to let him touch them until after we have lost out on the time limit! Williams's man says they've put the seal of the court on the machinery and have posted armed guards everywhere. Wouldn't that make you run around in circles and yelp like a scalded dog?"