The Real Man. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ was still time in which to clear the train, but at the critical instant the young woman apparently changed her mind and tried to stop the big car short of the crossing. The effort was unsuccessful. When the stop was made, the front wheels of the roadster were precisely in the middle of the main track, and the motor was killed.

      By this time Smith had thrown his coat away and was racing the backing train, with the ex-grade-laborer a poor second a dozen yards to the rear. Having ridden in the roadster, Smith knew that it had no self-starter. "Jump!" he yelled. "Get out of the car!" and then his heart came into his mouth when he saw that she was struggling to free herself and couldn't; that she was entangled in some way behind the low-hung tiller-wheel.

      Smith was running fairly abreast of the caboose when he made this discovery, and the hundred feet of clearance had shrunk to fifty. In imagination he could already see the gray car overturned and crushed under the wheels of the train. In a flying spurt he gained a few yards on the advancing menace and hurled himself against the front of the stopped roadster. He did not attempt to crank the motor. There was time only for a mighty heave and shove to send the car backing down the slope of the crossing approach; for this and for the quick spring aside to save himself; and the thing was done.

      VII

      A Notice to Quit

      Once started and given its push, the gray roadster drifted backward from the railroad crossing and kept on until it came to rest in the sag at the turn in the road. Running to overtake it, Smith found that the young woman was still trying, ineffectually, to free herself. In releasing the clutch her dress had been caught and Smith was glad enough to let the extricating of the caught skirt and the cranking of the engine serve for a breath-catching recovery.

      When he stepped back to "tune" the spark the young woman had subsided into the mechanician's seat and was retying her veil with fingers that were not any too steady. She was small but well-knit; her hair was a golden brown and there was a good deal of it; her eyes were set well apart, and in the bright morning sunlight they were a slaty gray – of the exact shade of the motor veil she was rearranging. Smith had a sudden conviction that he had seen the wide-set eyes before; also the straight little nose and the half boyish mouth and chin, though where he had seen them the conviction could give no present hint.

      "I sup-pup-pose I ought to say something appropriate," she was beginning, half breathlessly, while Smith stood at the fender and grinned in character-not with the ex-leader of the Lawrenceville younger set, but with the newer and more elemental man of all work on a desert dam-building job. "Wha-what is the proper thing to say when you have just been sus-snatched out of the way of a railroad train?"

      As J. Montague, the rescuer would have had a neatly turned rejoinder at his tongue's end; but the well-mannered phrases were altogether too conventional to suggest themselves to a strapping young barbarian in ill-fitting khaki and leggings and a slouch felt. Being unable to recall them, he laughed and pushed the J. Montague past still farther into the background.

      "You don't have to say anything. It's been a long time since I've had a chance to make such a bully grand-stand play as this." And then: "You're Colonel Baldwin's daughter, aren't you?"

      She nodded, saying:

      "How did you know?"

      "I know the car. And you have your father's eyes."

      She did not seem to take it amiss that he was making her eyes a basis for comparisons. One William Starbuck, a former cattleman and her father's time-tried friend, paid Miss Corona the compliment of saying that she never allowed herself to get "bogged down in the haughtinesses." She was her father's only son, as well as his only daughter, and she divided her time pretty evenly in trying to live up to both sets of requirements.

      "You have introduced me; wo-won't you introduce yourself?" she said, when a second crash of the shifting freight-train spent itself and gave her an opening.

      "I'm Smith," he told her; adding: "It's my real name."

      Her laugh was an instant easing of tensions.

      "Oh, yes; you're Mr. Williams's assistant. I've heard Colonel-da – my father, speak of you."

      "No," he denied in blunt honesty, "I'm not Williams's assistant; at least, the pay-roll doesn't say so. Up at the camp they call me 'The Hobo,' and that's what I was a week or so ago when your father picked me up and gave me a lift to the dam in this car."

      The young woman had apparently regained whatever small fraction of self-possession the narrow escape had shocked aside.

      "Are they never going to take that miserable train out of the way?" she exclaimed. "I've got to see Mr. Williams, and there isn't a minute to spare. That is why I was breaking all the speed limits."

      "They are about ready to pull out now," he returned, with a glance over his shoulder at the train. "I'm a sort of general utility man up at the camp: can you use me in any way?"

      "I'm afraid you won't do," she replied, with a little laughing grimace that made him wonder where and when in the past he had seen some young woman do the same thing under exactly similar conditions. "It's a matter of business – awfully urgent business. Colonel-da – I mean my father, has gone up to Red Butte, and a little while ago they telephoned over to the ranch from the Brewster office to say that there was going to be some more trouble at the dam."

      "They?" he queried.

      "Mr. Martin, the head bookkeeper. He said he'd been trying to get Mr. Williams, but the wires to the camp were out of order."

      "They're not," said Smith shortly, remembering that Perkins had been talking from the camp to the Brewster railroad agent within the half-hour. "But never mind that: go on."

      Again she let him see the piquant little grimace.

      "You say that just as if you were Mr. Williams's assistant," she threw back at him. "But I haven't time to quarrel with you this morning, Mr. Real-name Smith. If you'll take your foot off the fender I'll go on up to the dam and find Mr. Williams."

      "You couldn't quarrel with me if you should try," was the good-natured rejoinder, and Smith tried in vain to imagine himself taking his present attitude with any of the young women he had known in his cotillon days – with Verda Richlander, for example. Then he added: "You won't find Williams at the camp. He started out early this morning to ride the lower ditch lines beyond Little Creek, and he said he wouldn't be back until some time to-morrow. Now will you tell me what you're needing – and give me a possible chance to get my pay raised?"

      "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a little gasp of disappointment, presumably for the Williams absence. "I've simply got to find Mr. Williams – or somebody! Do you happen to know anything about the lawsuit troubles?"

      "I know all about them; Williams has told me."

      "Then I'll tell you what Mr. Martin telephoned. He said that three men were going to pretend to relocate a mining claim in the hills back of the dam, somewhere near the upper end of the reservoir lake-that-is-to-be. They're doing it so that they can get out an injunction, or whatever you call it, and then we'll have to buy them off, as the others have been bought off."

      Smith was by this time entirely familiar with the maps and profiles and other records of the ditch company's lands and holdings.

      "All the land within the limits of the flood level has been bought and paid for – some of it more than once, hasn't it?" he asked.

      "Oh, yes; but that doesn't make any difference. These men will claim that their location СКАЧАТЬ