"Perfectly. But something is going to be done. Mr. K. has had Colonel B. with him in the bank. I saw the colonel go in while I was at breakfast. When are you coming back to town?"
"Not for some time; I have a drive to make that will keep me out until afternoon."
"Very well; you'd better stay away as long as you can, and then you'd better communicate with me before you show yourself much in public. I'll have Jibbey looking out for you."
Smith said "good-by" and hung up the receiver with a fresh twinge of dissatisfaction. Every step made his dependence upon Verda Richlander more complete. To be sure, he told himself, they had both forsworn sentiment in the old days, but was that any guaranty that it was not now awakening in Josiah Richlander's daughter? And Corona Baldwin: what would she say to this newest alliance? Would she not say again, and this time with greater truth, that he was a coward of the basest sort; of the type that makes no scruple of hiding behind a woman's skirts?
Happily, there was work to do, and he went out and did it. With the new car to cover the longer interspaces, a complete round of Williams's sentries was made, with détours up and down the line of the abandoned Red Butte Southwestern, whose right-of-way claims had been so recently revived. Smith tried to tell himself that he was only making a necessary reconnaissance thoroughly; that he was not delaying his return to town because Verda had told him to. But when the real motive could no longer be denied, he brought himself up with a jerk. If it had come to this, that he was afraid to face whatever might be awaiting him in Brewster, it was time to take counsel once more of the elemental things.
"Back to Brewster, Billy, by way of the camp," he directed, and the overworked car was turned and headed accordingly.
It was some little time before this, between the noon-hour and the one-o'clock Hophra House luncheon, to be exact, that Mr. David Kinzie, still halting between two opinions, left his desk and the bank and crossed the street to the hotel. Inquiry at the lobby counter revealing the fact that Miss Richlander was in her rooms, Kinzie wrote his name on a card and let the clerk send it up. The boy came back almost immediately with word that Miss Richlander was waiting in the mezzanine parlors.
The banker tipped the call-boy and went up alone. He had seen Miss Richlander, once when she was driving with Smith and again at the theatre in the same company. So he knew what to expect when he tramped heavily into the parlor overlooking the street. None the less, the dazzling beauty of the young woman who rose to shake hands with him and call him by name rather took him off his feet. David Kinzie was a hopeless bachelor, from choice, but there are women, and women.
"Do you know, Mr. Kinzie, I have been expecting you all day," she said sweetly, making him sit down beside her on one of the flaming red monstrosities billed in the hotel inventories as "Louis Quinze sofas". "My father sent me a note by one of your young men, and he said that perhaps you would—that perhaps you might want to—" Her rich voice was at its fruitiest, and the hesitation was of exactly the proper shade.
Kinzie, cold-blooded as a fish with despondent debtors, felt himself suddenly warmed and moved to be gentle with this gracious young woman.