The Real Man. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ To tell the plain truth, we've had bigger things to wrestle with; and we have them yet, for that matter – enough of them to go all around the job twice and tie in a bow-knot."

      "Finances?" queried Smith, feeling some of the back-number instincts stirring within him.

      The chief engineer nodded; then he looked up with a twinkle in his closely set gray eyes. "If you'll tell me why you tried to kill Burdell the other day, maybe I'll open up the record – our record – for you."

      This time the cost-cutter's smile was good-naturedly derisive, and it ignored the reference to Burdell.

      "You don't have to open up your record – for me; it's the talk of the camp. You people are undercapitalized – to boil it down into one word. Isn't that about the way it sizes up?"

      "That is the way it has turned out; though we had capital enough to begin with. We've been bled to death by damage suits."

      Smith shook his head. "Why haven't you hired a first-class attorney, Mr. Williams?"

      "We've had the best we could find, but the other fellows have beaten us to it, every time. But the legal end of it hasn't been the whole thing or the biggest part of it. What we are needing most is a man who knows a little something about corporation fights and high finance." And at this the engineer forgot the Smith disabilities, real or inferential, and went on to explain in detail the peculiar helplessness of the Timanyoni Company as the antagonist of the as yet unnamed land and irrigation trust.

      Smith heard him through, nodding understandingly when the tale was told.

      "It's the old story of the big fish swallowing the little one; so old that there is no longer any saving touch of novelty in it," he commented. "I've been wondering if there wasn't something of that kind in your background. And you say you haven't any Belmonts or Morgans or Rockefellers in your company?"

      "We have a bunch of rather badly scared-up ranch owners and local people, with Colonel Baldwin in command, and that's all. The colonel is a fighting man, all right, and he can shoot as straight as anybody, when you have shown him what to shoot at. But he is outclassed, like all the rest of us, when it comes to a game of financial freeze-out. And that is what we are up against, I'm afraid."

      "There isn't the slightest doubt in the world about that," said the one who had been called in as an expert. "What I can't understand is why some of you didn't size the situation up long ago – before it got into its present desperate shape. You are at the beginning of the end, now. They've caught you with an empty treasury, and these stock sales you speak of prove that they have already begun to swallow you by littles. Timanyoni Common – I suppose you haven't any Preferred – at thirty-nine is an excellent gamble for any group of men who can see their way clear to buying the control. With an eager market for the water – and they can sell the water to you people, even if they don't put their own Escalante project through – the stock can be pushed to par and beyond, as it will be after you folks are all safely frozen out. More than that, they can charge you enough, for the water you've got to have, to finance the Escalante scheme and pay all the bills; and their investment, at the present market, will be only thirty-nine cents in the dollar. It's a neat little play."

      Williams was by this time far past remembering that his adviser was a man with a possible alias and presumably a fugitive from justice.

      "Can't something be done, Smith? You've had experience in these things; your talk shows it. Have we got to stand still and be shot to pieces?"

      "The necessity remains to be demonstrated. But you will be shot to pieces, to a dead moral certainty, if you don't put somebody on deck with the necessary brains, and do it quickly," said Smith with frank bluntness.

      "Hold on," protested the engineer. "Every man to his trade. When I said that we had nobody but the neighbors and our friends in the company, I didn't mean to give the impression that they were either dolts or chuckleheads. As a matter of fact, we have a pretty level-headed bunch of men in Timanyoni Ditch – though I'll admit that some of them are nervous enough, just now, to want to get out on almost any terms. What I meant to say was that they don't happen to be up in all the crooks and turnings of the high-finance buccaneers."

      "I didn't mean to reflect upon Colonel Baldwin and his friends," rejoined the ex-cashier good-naturedly. "It is nothing especially discrediting to them that they are not up in all the tricks of a trade which is not theirs. The financing of a scheme like this has come to be a business by itself, Mr. Williams, and it is hardly to be expected that a group of inexperienced men could do it successfully."

      "I know that, blessed well. That is what I said from the beginning, and I think Colonel Baldwin leaned that way, too. But it seemed like a very simple undertaking. A number of stockmen and crop growers wanted a dam and a ditch, and they had the money to pay for them. That seemed to be all there was to it in the beginning."

      Smith was leaning back in his chair and smoking reflectively.

      "Did you call me in here to get an expert opinion?" he asked, half humorously.

      "Something of that kind – yes; just on the bare chance that you could, and would, give us one," Williams admitted.

      "Well, I'm hardly an expert," was the modest reply; "but if I were in your place I should hire the best financial scrapper that money could pay for. I can't attempt to tell you what such a man would do, but he would at least rattle around in the box and try to give you a fighting chance, which is more than you seem to have now."

      The construction chief turned abruptly upon his cost-cutter.

      "Keeping in mind what you said a few minutes ago about 'back numbers,' would it be climbing over the fence too far for me to ask if your experience has been such as would warrant you in tackling a job of this kind?"

      "That is a fair question, and I can answer it straight," said the man under fire. "I've had the experience."

      "I thought so; and that brings on more talk. I'm not authorized to make you any proposal. But Colonel Baldwin and I were talking the matter over yesterday and your name was mentioned. I told the colonel that it was very evident that you were accustomed to handling bigger financial matters than these labor-and-material cost-cuttings you've been figuring on out here. If the colonel should ask you to, would you consider as a possibility the taking of the doctor's job on this sick project of ours?"

      "No," was the brief rejoinder.

      "Why not?"

      Smith looked away out of the one square window in the shack at the busy scene on the dam stagings.

      "Let us say that I don't care to mix and mingle with my kind, Mr. Williams, and let it go at that," he said.

      "You are not interested in that side of it?"

      "Interested, but not to the point of enlisting."

      "You don't think of anything that might make you change your mind?"

      "There is nothing that you could offer which would be a sufficient inducement."

      "Why isn't there?"

      "Because I'm not exactly a born simpleton, Mr. Williams. There are a number of reasons which are purely personal to me, and at least one which cuts ice on your side of the pond. Your financial 'doctor,' as you call him, would have to be trusted absolutely in the handling of the company's money and its negotiable securities. You would have a perfect right to demand any and every assurance of his fitness and trustworthiness. You could, and should, put him under a fairly heavy bond. I'll not go into it any deeper than to say that СКАЧАТЬ