Maxwell refused his dessert and ordered a second cup of black coffee.
“This suspense is something fierce, Calvin,” he said, when the waiter left them. “Have we got to sit still and do nothing?”
“That is your part in it,” was the quiet reply. “If a party of prominent citizens should call upon you for a special train at some odd hour of the day or night, you want to be ready to supply it suddenly. Aside from that, you are to keep hands off.”
For forty-eight hours beyond this evening dinner in the Topaz café—two days during which the railroad agent at Angels reported increased activities at the Mesquite dam—the newspaper wrangle over the merits and demerits of the irrigation project in the edge of the Red Desert went on with growing acrimony on both sides. But by the end of the second day it was apparent that The Tribune had public sentiment with it almost unanimously.
It was also on this second day that further bitterness was engendered by a street report that Judge Watson had enjoined the High Line Company from interfering in any way with the operations on the Mesquite. This was the last straw, and public indignation found expression that night in a monster mass meeting of protest, in which the speakers, with J. Montague Smith to set them the example, criticised the court sharply in free Western phrase.
After the meeting, adopting all sorts of resolutions condemnatory of everything in sight, adjourned—which was between nine and ten o’clock—there was a street rumor to the effect that Judge Watson would declare some of the speakers in contempt, and cinch them accordingly.
Maxwell and Starbuck brought this report to Sprague, who was smoking one of his big, black cigars on the porch of the hotel.
“Going to institute contempt proceedings, is he?” said the expert, with interest apparently only half-aroused.
“Wouldn’t that jar you?” commented Starbuck. “I was telling Dick just now that Judge Watson has about outlived his usefulness in this little old shack town. This injunction of his is about the rawest thing that ever came over the range.”
“Smith is red-hot,” Maxwell put in; “hot enough to get out and scrap somebody. And his directors are all with him.”