Authors: Harold Bindloss
Saunders appeared to find some difficulty in preserving a befitting self-restraint, but he accomplished it.
"What did you do with the money you'd taken already?" was his next question.
"Wrapped it up in a flour-bag," said the man from Okanagan, cheerfully. "Then I pitched the thing into an empty sugar-keg. Wrote up what the boys owed you, and put the book into the keg too. Anyway, I wrote up as much as I could remember."
Saunders looked at Devine, who stood by, and there was contempt beyond expression in his eyes.
"That," he said, "is just the kind of blamed fool he is."
Then he turned to Jim.
"If I were to talk until to-morrow I couldn't quite tell you what I think of you."
Jim only grinned, and, sitting down by the fire, set about preparing a meal, while Saunders, who appeared lost in reflection, presently turned again to Devine.
"I guess I'll go down this afternoon," he said. "We'll have a fresh crowd pouring in, and they'll want provisions. Anyway, I've headed off those company men, and if it's necessary I can go through to the railroad and get hold of Weston by the wires."
Devine admitted that this might be advisable, and Saunders, who was a man of action, took the back trail in the next half-hour. He had held his own in one phase of the conflict which it was evident must be fought before the Grenfell Consolidated could be floated, and it was necessary that somebody should go down to despatch the specimens to Weston.
They were duly delivered to the latter; and the day after he got them it happened that he sat with Ida on a balcony outside a room on the lower floor, at the rear of Stirling's house. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon and very hot, but a striped awning was stretched above their heads, and a broad-leafed maple growing close below flung its cool shadow across them. Looking out beneath the roof of greenery they could see the wooded slope of the mountain cutting against a sky of cloudless blue, while the stir of the city came up to them faintly. Weston had already, at one time or another, spent several pleasant hours on that balcony. They had been speaking of nothing in particular, when at length Ida turned to him.
"Have you ever heard anything further from Scarthwaite?" she asked.
Weston fumbled in his pocket.
"I had a letter only a few days ago."
He took it out and handed it to her, with a little smile which he could not help, though he rather blamed himself for indulging in it.
"As you know the place and met my sister, you may enjoy reading it. Julia's unusually communicative. It almost seems as if I were a person of some consequence to them now."
Ida took the letter, and her face hardened as she read. Then she looked at him with a suggestive straightening of her brows.
"Isn't that only natural? You have found a mine," she said.
"The same idea occurred to me," laughed Weston; "but, after all, perhaps I shouldn't have shown you the letter. It wasn't quite the thing."
"Still, you felt just a little hurt, and that I could respect a confidence?"
Ida looked at him as if she expected an answer, and it occurred to Weston that she was very alluring in her long white dress, though the same thought had been uppermost in his mind for the last half-hour.
"Yes," he admitted, "I suppose that was it."
He could have answered more explicitly, but he felt that it would not be safe, for it seemed very probable that if he once gave his feelings rein they would run away with him; and this attitude, as the girl naturally had noticed on other occasions, tended to make their conversation somewhat difficult.
"What are you going to do about one very tactfully-worded suggestion?" she asked.
"You mean the hint that I should make a few shares in the Grenfell Consolidated over to my English relatives? After all, considering everything, it's not an unnatural request. I shall endeavor to fall in with it."
Ida's face did not soften. The man was her lover, for, though he had not declared himself, she was quite aware of that, and she was his partisan and very jealous of his credit. It was difficult to forgive those who had injured him, and these people in England had shown him scant consideration, and had spoken of him slightingly to her, a stranger. He noticed her expression and changed the subject.
"I have fancied now and then that you must have said something remarkably in my favor that day at Scarthwaite," he said. "I never quite understood what brought up the subject, but Julia once referred to a picture."
Ida laughed softly.
"I'm afraid I wasn't very tactful, and I shouldn't be astonished if your people still regard me as a partly-civilized Colonial. Anyway, there was a picture-a rather striking one. Do you remember Arabella's' making a sketch of you with the ax?"
"I certainly do. She wasn't complimentary in some of her remarks. She called me wooden. But the picture?"
"Would you like to see it before you go?"
Weston glanced at her sharply, and she nodded, while a faint trace of color crept into her face.
"Yes," she said. "I have it here. I made Arabella give it to me."
She saw the man set his lips, for it seemed scarcely probable to him that a young woman who begged for the picture of a man would do so merely because she desired to possess it as a work of art. Besides, he felt, and in this he was to some extent correct, that she had intended the admission to be provocative. He was, however, a man with a simple code which forbade his making any attempt to claim this woman's love while it was possible that in a few months he might once more become a wandering outcast. He sat still for a moment or two, and it seemed to Ida, who watched him quietly, that he had worn much the same look when he stood beside the helpless Grenfell, gripping the big ax. This was really the fact, though he now entered upon a sterner struggle than he had been ready to engage in then. Once more he was endeavoring to do what it seemed to him right.
"Miss Kinnaird would have been better employed if she had painted the big snow peak with the lake at its feet," he said at length.
Ida abandoned the attempt to move him. She had yielded to a momentary impulse, but she was too proud to persist.
"Well," she said, "that peak certainly was rather wonderful. You remember it?"
"Yes," said Weston with injudicious emphasis; "I remember everything about that camp. I can see the big black firs towering above the still water-and you were sitting where the light came slanting in between them. You wore that gray fishing suit with the belt round it, and you had your hat off. The light made little gold gleams in your hair that matched the warm red glow on the redwood behind you-and you had burst the strap of one little shoe."
"Haven't you overlooked Arabella?" suggested Ida, who realized that his memory was significantly clear.
"Miss Kinnaird?" said Weston. "Of course, she was with you-but it's rather curious that she's quite shadowy. I don't quite seem to fix her, though I have a notion that she didn't fit in. She was out of key."
"That," laughed Ida, "was probably the result of wearing a smart English skirt. Do you remember the day you fell down and broke her parasol, and what you said immediately afterward about women's fripperies?"
"I didn't know that I had an audience," explained Weston, with his eyes twinkling. "I certainly remember that when you fancied that I had hurt myself you would have carried half the things over the portage if I had let you. We went fishing that evening. There was one big trout that broke you in the pool beneath the rapid. The scent of the firs was wonderful."
She led him on with a few judicious questions and suggestions, and for half an hour they talked of thundering rivers, still lakes and shadowy bush. He remembered everything, and, without intending to do so, he made it clear that in every vivid memory she was the prominent figure. It was here she had hooked a big trout, and there she had, under his directions, run a canoe down an easy rapid. She had enjoyed all that the great cities had to offer, but as she listened to him she sighed for the silence of the pine-scented bush.
At last he rose with a deprecatory smile.
"I'm afraid I've rather abused your patience," he said; "and I have to call on Wannop about the mine."
"You have told me nothing about it," said Ida. "How is it getting on?"
A shadow crept into Weston's face.
"There isn't very much to tell, and it was a relief to get it out of my mind for an hour or so. As a matter of fact, it's by no means getting on as we should like it."
Then, after another word or two, he took up his hat and left her.
* * *
Business called Weston to Winnipeg a few days after his interview with Ida, and, as it happened, he met Stirling at the head of the companionway when the big lake steamer steamed out into Georgian Bay. Neither of them had any other acquaintance on board, and they sat together in the shade of a deckhouse as the steamer ploughed her way smoothly across Lake Huron a few hours later. Weston had arranged to meet a Chicago stock-jobber who had displayed some interest in the mine, and he had chosen to travel up the lakes because it was more comfortable than in the cars in the hot weather, besides being somewhat cheaper, which was a consideration with him. Stirling, it seemed, was going to inspect the route for a railroad which an iron-mining company contemplated building. He lay in a deck-chair, with a cigar in his hand, apparently looking out at the shining water which stretched away before them, a vast sheet of turquoise, to the far horizon.
"Well," he asked at length, "how's the Grenfell Consolidated progressing?"
"It seems to be making most progress backward," said Weston. "Still, I suppose the fact that somebody evidently considered it worth while to send up men to jump our claim might be considered encouraging."
He briefly related what had taken place at the mine, as far as Saunders' letter had acquainted him with the facts, and Stirling listened thoughtfully.
"It's a crude maneuver, so crude that, as you've nothing but suspicions to go upon, it would be wiser not to mention them to anybody else," he said. "After all, the jumpers may have been acting on their own account."
"You believe they were?"
Stirling smiled. "I naturally don't know enough about the matter to decide; but, in a general way, when I come across anything that seems to the discredit of any gentleman of importance, or big combine with which I may happen to be at variance, I keep it judiciously quiet until I have the proofs in hand. I find it an excellent rule." Then he added in a suggestive manner: "You probably have had another rather more favorable offer since those jumpers failed?"
Weston admitted that this was the case and said that he had ignored the offer. He further stated that, as he had found the mine, he meant to keep it until he could dispose of it on satisfactory terms.
"That," said Stirling, dryly, "is a very natural wish, but one now and then has some trouble in carrying out views of that kind. I've seen your prospectus. Any applications for your shares?"
"They're by no means numerous." And a flush of anger crept into Weston's face. "If that were the result of a depressed market or of investors' indifference I shouldn't mind so much, but we are evidently being subjected to almost every kind of unwarranted attack."
"Any mode of attack's legitimate in this kind of deal, and there's a rather effective one your friends don't seem to have tried yet. Quite sure it wouldn't be wiser to make what terms you can and let them have the mine?"
"I'm afraid I haven't considered the wisdom of the course I mean to adopt. Anyway, it's a simple one. If those people want that mine they must break us first."
"Well," Stirling said, "I guess if I were you I'd allot very few of those shares to what one might call general applicants. Locate them among your friends and Wannop's clerks."
"There are uncommonly few general applicants, and my friends are not the kind of men who have money to invest. The same thing probably applies to Wannop's clerks. It's quite certain that nobody connected with the Grenfell Consolidated could make them a present of the shares."
"Considering everything, that's unfortunate, for, as I once pointed out, the next move will probably be to sell your stock down. It's a game that contains a certain hazard in the case of a small concern, because the stock is generally in few hands; but I've no doubt your friends will try it."
"Then we're helpless," said Weston. "We must raise sufficient money among the general investors, or give up the mine."
"The situation," said Stirling, dryly, "seems unpleasant, but it's the kind of one in which a little man who will neither make terms with a big concern nor let his friends help him might expect to find himself."
Weston sat silent awhile, gazing at the steamer's smoke trail which stretched far back, a dingy smear on the blueness, across the shining lake; and the contractor watched him with a certain sympathy which, however, he carefully refrained from expressing. There had been a time in his career when it had seemed that every man of influence in his profession and all the powers of capital had been arrayed against him. He had been tricked into taking contracts the bigger men would not touch; his accounts had been held over until long after the convenanted settling day, and he had been compelled to submit to every deduction that perverted ingenuity could suggest. He had, however, hardened his heart, and toiled the more assiduously, planning half the night and driving machine or plying shovel himself by day, whenever a few dollars could be saved by doing so. He had lived on the plainest fare, but he had, without borrowing or soliciting favors from any man, borne the shrewd blows dealt him and struggled on inch by inch uphill in spite of them. Now it seemed to him that this young Englishman was bent on doing much the same. At length Weston turned to him with a wry smile.