"I reckon I can; there are only sixty or seventy of 'em. And Bob Stillings is your lawyer. Come around the corner and I'll introduce you."
XII
The Rocket and the Stick
For a full fortnight after the preliminary visit to the Brewster City National Bank, Smith was easily the busiest man in Timanyoni County. Establishing himself in the Hophra House, and discarding the working khaki only because he was shrewd enough to dress the new part becomingly, he flung himself into what Colonel Baldwin called the "miracle-working" campaign with a zest that knew no flagging moment.
Within the fourteen-day period new town offices were occupied on the second floor of the Brewster City National Building; Stillings, most efficient of corporation counsels, had secured the new charter; and the stock-books of Timanyoni High Line had been opened, with the Brewster City National named as the company's depository and official fiduciary agent.
At the dam the building activities had been generously doubled. An electric-light plant had been installed, and Williams was working day and night shifts both in the quarries and on the forms. Past this, the new financial manager, himself broadening rapidly as his field broadened, was branching out in other directions. After a brief conference with a few of his principal stockholders he had instructed Stillings to include the words "Power and Light" in the cataloguing of the new company's possible and probable charter activities, and by the end of the fortnight the foundations of a power-house were going in below the dam, and negotiations were already on foot with the Brewster city council looking toward the sale of electric current to the city for lighting and other purposes.
Notwithstanding all the demands made upon him as the chief energizer in the working field, Smith had made the planting of his financial anchor securely to windward his first care. Furnished with a selected list by Colonel Baldwin, he had made a thorough canvas of possible investors, and by the time the new stock was printed and ready for delivery through Kinzie's bank, an iron-clad pool of the majority of the original Timanyoni Ditch stock had been organized, and Smith had sold to Maxwell, Starbuck, and other local capitalists a sufficient amount of the new treasury stock to give him a fighting chance; this, with a promise of more if it should be needed.
The stock-selling campaign was a triumph, and though he did not recognize it as such, it marked the longest step yet taken in the march of the metamorphosis. As the cashier in Dunham's bank Smith had been merely a high-grade clerk. There had been no occasion for the development of the precious quality of initiative, and he had hardly known the meaning of the word. But now there seemed to be no limit to the new powers of accomplishment. Men met him upon his own ground, and a lilting sense of triumph gave him renewed daring when he found that he could actually inspire them with some portion of his own confidence and enthusiasm.
But in all this there had been no miracle, one would say; nothing but enterprise and shrewd business acumen and lightning-like speed in bringing things to pass. If there were a miracle, it lay in this: that not to Maxwell or to any of the new investors had Smith revealed the full dimensions of the prize for which Timanyoni High Line was entering the race. Colonel Baldwin and one William Starbuck, Maxwell's brother-in-law, by courtesy, and his partner in the Little Alice mine, alone knew the wheel within the wheel; how the great Eastern utility corporation represented by Stanton had spent a million or more in the acquisition of the Escalante Grant, which would be practically worthless as agricultural land without the water which could be obtained only by means of the Timanyoni dam and canal system.