CHAPTER XXIII
HELGA STRAWN PLAYS THE GAME
The winter which had begun unusually early, battled fiercely for eightweeks in the mountain fastnesses, and went down in grumbling defeatbefore an early spring. And, as the stern face of the Sierra washidden under the snow that robed the higher peaks in royal ermine anddrifted sixty feet in the deeper canons, so was the vital thing in thelives of Wayne Shandon and Wanda Leland covered by silence and secrecy.Each day was tense and eager to them; to the world whose prying eyescould not penetrate through the barricade of winter it was as thoughthose lives were stagnating.
Wanda delivered Wayne's letter safely and promptly to Brisbane, the SanFrancisco lawyer. She took her mother into the secret, she told hermother everything now, for the close companionship of last winter hadborne its fruit of warm sympathy, and the two women went out of thevalley, ostensibly to spend a few weeks shopping and visiting in SanFrancisco. The letter never left the girl's person until, in a privateroom, it was placed in the hands of Brisbane.
Brisbane's wise old eyes looked at her shrewdly from behind the mask ofhis clean shaven face, the greatest poker face, men said, that had evergone its inscrutable way up and down the city of fogs and wet winds.He had asked his few questions in an absent-minded sort of fashionwhich disappointed and distressed the girl. He evinced not a whit moreinterest than he would have done in watching a stranger stamp the mudoff his feet, or, for that matter, than he would have shown had theroof broken into flames over his head. But he took the case.
Upon a storm filled night, as black as ebony, Brisbane met WayneShandon in White Rock. A man lived there, whom Shandon could trust, anold friend of his father, and at his house the meeting was held withlittle difficulty or danger. In less than two hours Brisbane had puthimself in possession of all the facts which Shandon could give himthat bore upon the matter in hand. There was the germ of a caseagainst Hume he admitted, but it would have to grow considerably to beworth anything to a jury. Yes, the crooked work in the foreclosure ofthe mortgage would help a little; not much though. He would attend tothe mortgage, taking Shandon's note for the amount, and would see thatit was paid off immediately. As to advising Shandon as to the bestthing to do now, the lawyer smiled one of his rare, noncommittal smiles.
"By avoiding arrest in the first place," he said drily, "you putyourself in wrong with any jury in the world. But you've done italready. I can't see now that it makes much difference whether you goand give yourself up or whether you keep on the dodge. If you preferthis sort of thing to a nice warm jail, why suit yourself my boy!"
He would see further that the shrewdest detective in the City was fullyinstructed and put on the case immediately. Finally he gave Shandon aletter from Wanda in which she promised to return to the valley as soonas possible, shook hands as warmly as his absent minded manner wouldpermit and went to bed.
Through the winter the various threads of men's destinies, golden andblack, gay and sombre, too fine for human eye to see, too strong forhuman might to break, were being woven into the intricate pattern oflife and fate. Though miles lay between the many men whose lives wereunalterably mingled, though each man went selfishly or unselfishlyabout his own pursuits, although each fashioned daily his life for theday, still the mills of God were grinding, the looms were weaving, andgrist and kernel, warp and woof found their way from the individualexistences into the scheme of the whole.
Dart had left with Mrs. Leland and Wanda and made a straight line toBig Bill and Little Saxon. He made it his own special business in lifeto see that no knockout stuff was slipped into the horse's oats, thatno slippery gent got the show to put Little Saxon out of the game. Heeven took the precaution to partition off a tiny room for himself inthe hay loft above Little Saxon's stall, where he spent the nightsdozing and snatching up the ancient shot gun down the muzzle of whichhis enthusiastic fingers had rammed enough buck shot to explode thepiece and blow himself as well as any unhappy intruder into that landfrom which there is no return.
Big Bill, acting foreman now, took upon himself the unremitting work ofmaking the racehorse fit. Nearly as good a man as Shandon withanimals, he continued through the winter the task that had been littlemore than begun. The fact that the man who had first proposed theraces which were to be run off in the Spring, was a fugitive, accusedof a grave crime, had aroused much sensational talk and newspaperbabble, but it had increased rather than lessened interest and newentries were being daily arranged. Big Bill assured those who cared toask that the race would be run, that Shandon would have come in andbeen cleared of any charges against him long before June, and thatthere would be no change in plans. And though he sometimes doubted thestatement he made so bluntly he let no single day pass without addingto Little Saxon's education.
MacKelvey was taciturn. But he was not the man to give up a quest oncebegun. He grew irritable under the sting of Sledge Hume's sneers andMartin Leland's regular weekly enquiries; but he pushed his worktirelessly. As is always the case when the law wants a fugitive therewere many conflicting and empty reports, that would have aided had theybeen true but which only hampered since they were not. A report thatWayne Shandon had been seen boarding a train in Reno was followed threedays later by two other rumours, one claiming that he was on a ranchjust out of San Jose, the other that he had been recognised ten daysago in Los Angeles. Each report with the vaguest hint of truth in itMacKelvey hunted down doggedly, and the wires into El Toyon from bothdirections were kept busy. It was the opinion of many people thatShandon had long ago made good his escape and had gone abroad; it washeld by many a mild mannered man or timid old maid that he was even nowthe head of a lawless gang terrorising whatever near or distant city orcountryside the most lurid headlines came from; not a few people shooktheir heads and prophesied that when the Spring thaw came the body of areckless, blood tainted monster would be found where it had been hurledin desperation from a high cliff. The sheriff's own personal opinion,known only to the sheriff, perhaps came as close to the truth as anyman's.
Of all the men and women who knew him, perhaps none evinced lessconcern in Wayne Shandon's fate than Helga Strawn. She had somethingelse to do. Looking ahead far and carefully, doing nothing hastily,planning and shaping her way, with Sledge Hume and her lost interest inthe Dry Lands always looming large in the foreground of her thoughts,she was already supplying her quota of grist to the great invisiblemills. She bought, upon her own initiative, a small farm just on theedge of Hume's land, investing ten thousand dollars in it, and camethere to live. She bought conservatively at twenty dollars an acre.If the project, now involved in uncertainty, were perfected her landwould be worth from two to five times what she had paid for it. On theother hand, if nothing came of the campaign for irrigation, it wasalways worth twenty dollars. It was Helga Strawn's way to play safe.
She saw much of Sledge Hume. Or rather she allowed Sledge Hume to seemuch of her. The same thing with a variation, and that variationimportant in the woman's shrewd eyes. Hume had no means of knowing howmuch money she possessed, but he did know that she had paid out tenthousand dollars in cash. He knew also that she was a woman. In hiseyes, never clearsighted from the mote of conceit and the dust ofarrogant superiority, a woman was a fool. He needed money, he wantedmoney, her money as well as another's. He had gone far already in theproject that would make him a rich man if it succeeded; he was goingfurther. If litigation now were to raise its long wall against him hemeant to surmount the wall or tunnel under it. He had gone too far tostop; his money was invested; he wanted more money to invest with it.
While he made the woman his study she coolly dissected his character,not satisfied with the composite, both patient and shrewd in heranalysis. While he sought to read her, handicapped by his prejudice,she spelled the letters of the man's soul.
She came to see, after the first few days, that Hume's one workingtheory of life was that of the survival of the fittest. Eminently fithimself, capable physically in strong, clean
body, mentally in cool,calculating, single purposed brain, morally in a code of ethics whichresolved all considerations to his working theory of life, he lookeddown upon other lives than his own from the passionless heights of asupreme impudence. In most things he was unusually frank, bluntlyhonest. Wanting no man to give him a place in the world which he feltthoroughly competent to secure for himself, he curried favour nowhere,fawned upon no one. Frankly satisfied with himself as he had madehimself, he had no desire, seeing no need, to pretend to be other thanhe was. Egotism, approximating the absolute, made him careless, evencontemptuous, of the opinion of others. His mental attitude mightperhaps be likened to that of the colossally mad man of Europe, theonly man of whom he was ever known to speak in words of approval. "Iand God did this thing!" the Emperor had said. So Hume might havesaid, "I and the rest of the world."
The free stride of his activities was not restricted by any form ofwhat he would have called squeamishness. The means were incidental,intrinsically negligible; he justified them by the end for which hestrove. That end was unvarying. From this grew the man's power, suchas it was.
That end took him, in moments which otherwise would have been empty, toHelga Strawn. She had made her little home cosy and comfortable, theliving room almost luxurious. She wore rare gowns, painstakinglychosen; she kept him waiting when he called; she received him withindifference. She seemed to grow as frank with him as he with her, andoften enough the frankness was genuine. She told him coolly at theoutset that she knew he would swindle her out of her money if he gotthe chance and that he was not going to get the chance. She informedhim that she did not trust him but that that need make no difference intheir relations; if she became convinced that the project were safe shewould go into it as deeply as any one.
She treated Sledge Hume very much as he treated the rest of the world;and she noted with keen relish that her treatment irritated him. Shealready knew the man well enough to be sure that he would come againthe sooner, and more frequently, to force her by the very dominance ofhis virile personality to see him as he saw himself, in a word as hersuperior.
As only a very clever woman could have done she drew him out to talkabout himself, about his motives. She listened always in apparent coolindifference, always in keen, hard interest under the surface she choseto wear. She never forgot that she had sold to him for twenty-fivethousand dollars property for which she would not now accept twice thatamount and which he would not relinquish for such a sum. She neverforgot that, legally, she had no hope of regaining it. But there wouldbe a way, when she came to know the man utterly, when she came to feelout every nerve of his moral being. She tried to make him talk freelyabout himself by the one method which must remain infallible as long asSledge Hume was Sledge Hume, by cool criticism of him.
One day as they idled in her living room she told him abruptly that hewas the most selfish man she had ever known. Her smile, as near asneer as a smile may be and not become unlovely, the tapping of herFrench slipper, did not cease during his rather lengthy rejoinder.
"Selfish?" he had answered roughly. "Of course I am. Who isn't? Youmean that I am the only man you know who isn't afraid to say so! Allcreation is selfish; selfishness is the keynote of progress, ofevolution, of any sort of success. It begins with the lowest forms oflife where each single celled unit takes what it needs for its owngood; it is the thing which keeps life in the four footed world; it isthe highest concern of the priest who while he pretends to serve mereman and a mythological Saviour never loses sight of his own reward atthe end of it. It is the basic principle underlying all religion; takeout of it the personal, selfish consideration, 'Be good and you can goto Heaven! be bad and go to Hell!' and your whole religion falls topieces. Take selfishness out of the world and the world will stagnateand rot."
"I have never heard you wax so eloquent in your own defence!"
"I am not defending myself, I am explaining. I am showing you thedifference between yourself and me. I see things as they are; you lookat them obliquely. You wouldn't admit it, but you are as selfish as Iam."
"The difference is that you are the more honest?"
"Both with myself and the world, yes."
"You pride yourself on your honesty?"
"I don't take the trouble to dissimulate."
"You have never done anything which you have kept hidden?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I have never found it necessary to make the world my father confessor."
"Do you wish me to regard you as what people call an honest man, Mr.Hume? Aren't you telling me that to put money in your own pocket youwould do what people call a dishonourable act?"
"You are the only woman I have ever met who has any claim to brains,"he answered, paying the compliment in his blunt, rough fashion. "Don'tyou know me well enough to realise that I don't ask people to set mystandards for me? Don't you know a man, when you see him, big enoughto set his own standards?"
She came to see that the man was not without a rough hewn sort ofgreatness, that in his way as he had said, he was a big man. He bredin her strange, dual emotions. In the beginning she had felt for himonly the cold hatred of which the woman was thoroughly capable;gradually and begrudgingly she began to feel an equally cold admirationfor the strength of the man. She told herself that that admiration wasutterly impersonal, that it arose from the fact that Hume was inreality stronger than other men she knew, that it was possible for herto acknowledge it because she did have brains, as he had said. It wasan admiration which, she judged coolly, need in no way lessen herhatred for him, which rather would intensify it.
Throughout the winter she strove with single purpose to slip into theman's confidence. Having recognised Hume's peculiar strength, havingsought his weaknesses, knowing that he was no man's or woman's fool,she did not make a fool of herself by giving him an inkling of herintentions. When she was most interested it was her role to appearmost indifferent; here was the one vulnerable point her searchingfingers had found in the shell of his egoism. Indifference piqued him.
It was as though she had gathered three armies and hurled them at him.From the centre she attacked with indifference, striving to draw hisattention from other points. She massed two distinct flankingmovements stealthily. Upon one side she brought to bear upon a keenbrain a brain as keen; upon the other she calmly deployed the charm ofher regal beauty. The man had seemed a machine, emotionless. Butsince he was human, since blood, Hume blood though it was, ran throughhis veins, he must have emotions like other men. They might be hidden,they might be of stunted, pale growth. In one case she would uncoverthem, in another she would develop. Already she admired him as avital, compelling force. She would make him admire a similar force Inher; she would make him admire the physical perfection of her. She wasa woman, she was amply endowed with brain and instinct and beauty. Andshe was far too shrewd to overlook a single weapon which lay at herhand.
The eternal looms were weaving, the warp of her being, the woof of hisbeing were drawn into the intricate pattern of human destiny. Smilesand tears, hopes and fears, emotions of which a man is unconscious,ambitions and failures, achievements--all go into the invisible fabric.Already Sledge Hume and Helga Strawn had come to find something toadmire in each other. The short sight of a clever man and a cleverwoman could not discern what lay at the end. And the end was rushingupon them with tremendous speed.