The Real Man. Lynde Francis

went on: "Say, Smith, you're too good a man for anything I've got for you here. Haven't you realized that?"

      Smith pulled a memorandum-book from his hip pocket and ran his eye over the private record he had been keeping.

      "I've shown you how to effect a few little savings which total up something like fifteen per cent of your cost of production and operation," he said. "Don't you think I'm earning my wages?"

      "That's all right; I've been keeping tab, too, and I know what you're doing. But you are not beginning to earn what you ought to, either for yourself or the company," put in the chief shrewdly. And then: "Loosen up, Smith, and tell me something about yourself. Who are you, and where do you come from, and what sort of a job have you been holding down?"

      Smith's reply was as surprising as it was seemingly irrelevant.

      "If you're not too busy, Mr. Williams, I guess you'd better make out my time-check," he said quietly.

      Williams took a reflective half-minute for consideration, turning the sudden request over deliberately in his mind, as his habit was.

      "I suppose, by that you mean that you'll quit before you will consent to open up on your record?" he assumed.

      "You've guessed it," said the man who had sealed the book of his past.

      Again Williams took a little time. It was discouraging to have his own and the colonel's prefigurings as to Smith's probable state and standing so promptly verified.

      "I suppose you know the plain inference you're leaving, when you say a thing like that?"

      Smith made the sign of assent. "It leaves you entirely at liberty to finish out the story to suit yourself," he admitted, adding: "The back numbers – my back numbers – are my own, Mr. Williams. I've kept a file of them, as everybody does, but I don't have to produce it on request."

      "Of course, there's nothing compulsory about your producing it. But unless you are what they call in this country a 'crooked' crook, you are standing in your own light. You have such a staving good head for figures and finances that it seems a pity for you to be wasting it here on an undergraduate's job in cost-cutting. Any young fellow just out of a technical school could do what you're doing in the way of paring down expenses."

      The cost-cutter's smile was mildly incredulous.

      "Nobody seemed to be doing it before I came," he offered.

      "No," Williams allowed, "that's the fact. 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