There was fire in his eye and hot wrath in his tone; and once more Kinzie found his conclusions warping.
"Oh, don't fly off the handle so brashly, young man," he protested. "You've been in the banking business, yourself—you needn't deny it—and you know what a banker's first care should be. Sit down again and let's thresh this thing out. I don't want to have to drop you."
Being fairly at bay, with Debritt in town and Josiah Richlander due to come back to Brewster at any moment, Smith put his back to the wall and ignored the chair.
"You are at liberty to do anything you see fit, so far as I am concerned," he rapped out, "and whatever you do, I'll try to hand it back to you, with interest."
"That is good strong talk," retorted the banker, "but it doesn't tell me who you are, or why you are so evidently anxious to forget your past, Mr. Smith. I'm not asking much, if you'll stop to consider. And you'll give me credit for being fair and aboveboard with you. I might have held that engraving salesman and questioned him; he knows you—knows your other name."
Smith put the entire matter aside with an impatient gesture. "Leave my past record out of it, if you please, Mr. Kinzie. At the present moment I am the financial head of Timanyoni High Line. What I want to know is this: do you continue to stand with us? or do you insist upon the privilege of seesawing every time Stanton turns up with a fresh scare? Let me have it, yes or no; and then I shall know what to do."
The gray-haired man in the big chair took time to think about it, pursing his lips and making a quick-set hedge of his cropped mustache. In the end he capitulated.
"I don't want to break with you—or with Dexter Baldwin," he said, at length. "But I'm going to talk straight to you. Your little local crowd of ranchmen and mining men will never be allowed to hold that dam and your ditch right of way; never in this world, Smith."
"If you are our friend, you'll tell us why," Smith came back smartly.
"Because you have got too big a crowd to fight; a crowd that can spend millions to your hundreds. I didn't know until to-day who was behind Stanton, though I had made my own guess. You mustn't be foolish, and you mustn't pull Dexter Baldwin in over his head—which is what you are doing now."