"Don't you make any brash breaks, John. Mr. Hiram Fairbairn and his crowd can swing twenty millions to your one little old dollar and a half, and they're not going to leave any of the pebbles unturned when it comes to saving their investment in the Escalante. I don't care specially for my own ante—Stella and I will manage to get a bite to eat, anyway. But for your own sake and Colonel Dexter's, you don't want to let the grass grow under your feet; not any whatsoever. You go ahead and get that dam finished, pronto, if you have to put a thousand men on it and work 'em Sundays as well as nights. That's all; I just thought I'd drop in and tell you."
Smith went to his rooms in the hotel a few minutes later to change for dinner. Having been restocking his wardrobe to better fit his new state and standing as the financial head of Timanyoni High Line, he found the linen drawer in his dressing-case overflowing. Opening another, he began to arrange the overflow methodically. The empty drawer was lined with a newspaper, and he took the paper out to fold it afresh. In the act he saw that it was a copy of the Chicago Tribune some weeks old. As he was replacing it in the drawer bottom, a single head-line on the upturned page sprang at him like a thing living and venomous. He bent lower and read the underrunning paragraph with a dull rage mounting to his eyes and serving for the moment to make the gray of the printed lines turn red.
Lawrenceville, May 19.—The grand jury has found a true bill against Montague Smith, the absconding cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust, charged with embezzling the bank's funds. The crime would have been merely a breach of trust and not actionable but for the fact that Smith, by owning stock in the bankrupt Westfall industries lately taken over by the Richlander Company, had so made himself amenable to the law. Smith disappeared on the night of the 14th and is still at large. He is also wanted on another criminal count. It will be remembered that he brutally assaulted President Dunham on the night of his disappearance. The reward of $1,000 for his apprehension and arrest has been increased to $2,000 by the bank directors.
XIII
The Narrow World
At the fresh newspaper reminder that his sudden bound upward from the laboring ranks to the executive headship of the irrigation project had merely made him a more conspicuous target for the man-hunters, Smith scanted himself of sleep and redoubled his efforts to put the new company on a sound and permanent footing. In the nature of things he felt that his own shrift must necessarily be short. Though his own immediate public was comparatively small, the more or less dramatic coup in Timanyoni High Line had advertised him thoroughly. He was rapidly coming to be the best-known man in Brewster, and he cherished no illusions about lost identities, or the ability to lose them, in a land where time and space have been wired and railroaded pretty well out of existence.
Moreover, Dunham's bank was a member of a protective association, and Smith knew how wide a net could be spread and drawn when any absconding employee was really wanted. The doubling of the reward gave notice that Dunham was vindictively in earnest, and in that event it would be only a question of time until some one of the hired man-hunters would hit upon the successful clew.
It was needful that he should work while the day was his in which to work; and he did work. There was still much to be done. Williams was having a threat of labor troubles at the dam, and Stillings had unearthed another possible flaw in the land titles dating back to the promotion of a certain railroad which had never gotten far beyond the paper stage and the acquiring of some of its rights of way.
Smith flung himself masterfully at the new difficulties as they arose, and earned his meed of praise from the men for whom he overcame them. But under the surface current of the hurrying business tide a bitter undertow was beginning to set in. In every characterizing change it is inevitable that there should be some loss in the scrapping of the old to make way for the new. Smith saw himself in two aspects. In one he stood as a man among men, with a promise of winning honors and wealth; with the still more ecstatic promise of being able, perhaps, to win the love of the vivifying young woman who had once touched the spring of sentiment in him—and was touching it again. In the other he was a fugitive and an outlaw, waiting only for some spreader of the net to come and tap him on the shoulder.