"Whole heap o' things. The best guess is that he's a jail-break' from somewheres back in the States. He ain't no common 'bo; that's a dead cinch. Gatrow, the quarry foreman, puts it up that he done something he had to run for."
"Get him drunk and find out," suggested Stanton shortly.
"Not him," said the round-faced villain, with the ingratiating smile wrinkling at the corners of the fat-embedded eyes. "He's the take-a-drink-or-let-it-alone kind."
"Well, keep your eye on him and your ears open. I have a notion that he's been sent here—by some outfit that means to buck us. If he hasn't any backing——"
The interruption was the hurried incoming of the young man with sleepy eyes and the cigarette stains on his fingers, and for once in a way he was stirred out of his customary attitude of cynical indifference.
"Smith and Colonel Baldwin are over yonder in Kinzie's private office," he reported hastily. "Before they shut the door I heard Baldwin introducing Smith as the new acting financial secretary of the Timanyoni Ditch Company!"
XI
When Greek Meets Greek
Smith allowed himself ten brief seconds for a swift eye-measuring of the square-shouldered, stockily built man with a gray face and stubbly mustache sitting in the chair of authority at the Brewster City National before he chose his line of attack.