Читать книгу The Fight on the Standing Stone - Lynde Francis - Страница 9

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On the way across the electric-lighted railroad yard Stannard was telling himself in sardonic humor that the delay in answering the banker-director's summons might be made to figure as something less than an open hostility, since it had doubtless given Mr. Westervelt time to finish his dinner. Reaching the river-bank spur-track, he found that the private car and its extra had been pushed down to a coupling touch with the string of empty steel flats. The lights were turned low in the central compartment, and under the darkened balcony formed by the "umbrella roof" of the rear platform there were lounging figures; among them somebody with a musical ear and a rich baritone voice who was humming a song to the twanking time-beat of a banjo accompaniment.

Determined to dodge the social hazard effectively, Stannard went to the forward vestibule, was admitted by the coffee-colored porter and had himself shown to the private compartment where a large-bodied gentleman, shrewd-eyed, with thin hair graying reluctantly at his temples, and wearing a metallic smile in permanence on a face which in spite of the smile figured as a dry desert of inscrutability, was working his way through the market record in a bundle of New York newspapers picked up from the passing Fast Mail at Yellow Medicine.

At the door-opening the waiting magnate laid his newspapers aside, looking up in a way which gave the young engineer the impression that the cold eyes were taking in every detail of his working-clothes unpresentability, down to the missing button on the shapeless khaki coat.

"Ah, Mr. Stannard; you're here at last, are you?" was the colorless greeting. "Sit down, if you please. I didn't know but you had forgotten."

Stannard found a seat on the narrow single-berth divan, wishing heartily that he had been really able to carry the ignoring process to the actual point of forgetting the banker's summons.

"This is a pretty busy camp, Mr. Westervelt," he returned, clipping the words to make them fit his resentment. And then: "I'm here because you sent for me, but I hope you're not going to ask anything in the way of entertainment for your party in the Travois."

"Oh, no," rejoined the banker-director dryly; "we were not expecting to be entertained. All we thought of asking of you was a little common, ordinary hospitality."

Here was the opening which Stannard had determined that he would make for himself if it should not be offered by the chief invader and he took instant advantage of it.

"Hospitality is a large word, when a man has neither time nor the means at hand to make it a workable possibility, Mr. Westervelt."

"Ah?" said the banker mildly. "Frankly, then you don't want us here. Is that what you are trying to tell me?"

"I should have wired you yesterday that we had no room in the Travois yards for a pleasure party, if it hadn't been for that fact that you are, in a certain sense, my superior officer—a director in our company," retorted Stannard, taking his courage in both hands. "It is strictly a matter of business. As you must know, we are pushing the work on the Cut-off, practically night and day. If we don't get the grading and steel-laying up to the tunnel before snow flies, we shall be unable to move material, and the tunnel-driving will have to be held up until next spring, heavily increasing the cost."

"True; very true," was the toneless comment. "But what, if I may ask, has all this to do with the few feet of track space which we may occupy in your construction yard for a week or so?"

Stannard frowned and bit his lip, finding himself helplessly caught in the trap which is always set for the unwary one who takes refuge in the half-truth. It was manifestly impossible to tell the whole-truth, that the Travois camp might shortly become a scene of a fierce labor battle with the hard-rock men; or that he was living in daily anticipation of a clash with the on-coming Overland Northern construction force.

"It isn't the track room, altogether," he began; "it's the—well, it's the incongruity of dropping a junketing party down here in the midst of things. You'd have to be a workingman yourself to understand how much of a disturbing influence a car-load of play-people will exert, in the circumstances."

The metallic smile was broadening upon the banker's dry-desert face, but it did not rise to the level of the calculating eyes.

"I think you are always a little impractical on what you doubtless call your practical side, Mr. Stannard," he said, letting the smile soften the criticism as it might; "at least I found you so last summer, under conditions which were much more favorable than the present. I can understand your impatience of any interruptions in your work, and I think I can promise that the interruptions shall be judiciously minimized. A little information to begin with, and later, perhaps, permission to replenish our kitchen stores from your commissary—"

Stannard threw up his hand in a quick gesture of surrender.

"I've said all I'm going to say, and it was perhaps more than any G. L. & P. hired man has a right to say to a member of his own board of directors. Let it go, and tell me what I can do for you."

Again the fine-grained smile reached its high-water mark just beneath the stony eyes. "You make me the victim of misplaced confidence, Mr. Stannard; you do, indeed. It was in my mind that a small and, so to speak, momentary, admixture of the social element in your strenuous life out here at the end-of-track might serve as a pleasant relaxation for you and the young men of your staff. But if you insist upon regarding it as an intrusion—"

"When you talk that way, I'm not insisting upon anything," said Stannard, anxious now only to make his escape while the escaping was good.

"As I have said, we are not asking much beyond a little friendly tolerance and advice. To-morrow, at your leisure, we should like to be put in touch with some one who can furnish guides and horses for the bear hunt. And by the way, while I think of it, are there any bears to be found in the Buckskin region?"

Stannard's suspicions, acutely alert on general principles, caught quickly at this tacit admission that the bear-hunting phase of the expedition was secondary to some other object. "I saw a few last year, when I was out with the locating parties," he replied guardedly, adding; "naturally there wouldn't be much game to be found in the neighborhood of a camp as big as ours."

"No, I supposed not," said the banker, quite coolly. And then, in the vein of subtle irony which fitted the permanent smile: "For your true city-bred sportsman, Mr. Stannard, it is the hunting that counts, rather than the size of the game-bag. I suppose we may assume that the hunting is good, even in the neighborhood of a camp as big as yours?"

Stannard's grin was a tribute to the audacity of the joke which this cold-blooded money lord was apparently playing upon his guests.

"Oh, yes; there will be good hunting—plenty of rough work and hard riding, if that's what you're looking for. And as for the guides and horses, I'll send word in the morning to Crumley, who has a cattle ranch in the valley on the other side of Rock Face. He'll give you the pick of his cow ponies, and a cow-puncher or two to make it look real, I guess."

"Good!" said the banker. "As for the rest, we shall get on well enough, I dare say. As I have intimated, we sha'n't ask much beyond the standing-room for the Egeria. That, and a little neighborliness, perhaps, for those of us who may be minded to stay behind after the cow ponies have been paraded."

There was a stir in the other part of the car advertising the return of the rear-platform loungers, or some of them, and presently the notes of a piano began to chord with the twanging of the banjo. Still sourly determined to dodge the social entanglement, Stannard got upon his feet.

"If there is nothing else, I'll go back to my job," he said shortly.

"Nothing more at present, I think—unless you would like to meet the other members of the party," was the suave rejoinder.

"Not to-night," Stannard refused, almost curtly; and a moment later he had left the presence and was groping his way through the narrow side corridor to the forward vestibule.