BILL BUYS PAROWAN

On the streets groups of men stood and talked together, scanned eagerly the faces of pedestrians, asked questions that halted men in their stride, formed new groups as some fresh bit of news became known. And without exception, all up and down the town, men talked of Bill Dale and Parowan Consolidated.

Before the bank a prominent group had gathered. Men went up and down the stairs to the office, coming out upon the street to run the gauntlet of human eyes, and sometimes saying, "I got mine, all right—maybe." A trip in to the teller's window, and a nod of assurance as they came out again.

Glances went up and clung to the windows of the office where a queer gathering sat silent, or did what Bill Dale commanded. Emmett and Rayfield had turned surly. The typist was in tears, having broken unexpectedly into speech. Things she had seen, sentences which she had overheard, trifles most of them, she told to Bill. Nothing was sufficiently definite to serve as evidence of fraud, but she accomplished one thing at least: She convinced Bill that she was not in their plot, that she was innocent of all knowledge of the inner workings of the office.

Bill had a lawyer there,—a man whom he trusted to a certain extent, though he was not really trusting any one save Tommy, just now. The lawyer took the girl's name and address, and told her that she might go for the time being. "Which left Bill freer in his mind. He had not wanted to seem harsh with the girl if he could possibly avoid it.

Rayfield looked up at him and sneered when the door closed behind her.

"Now you've done every melodramatic stunt you can think of, with a lawyer in one room and an auditor in the next, and a roughneck with a gun at our backs, just what do you really expect to accomplish? It's all well enough to dissolve the Corporation, as you say you intend to do; but you surely don't expect to keep us here until that is accomplished, do you?"

"It won't take so long," said Bill. "The written consent of the stockholders, waiving a meeting, and so on—Fuller, here, has all the dope, and can give you the details—why, it won't take long, at all."

"With stock scattered from Coast to Coast? You'll have a nice time, Bill, getting the signatures of the stockholders!" Then the necessity of fighting for his honor occurred to Rayfield. He blustered a good deal about the outrage, and about Bill's insanity and his ingratitude.

"That's all right," Bill retorted imperturbably. "And Parowan stock is not scattered as badly as you think, maybe. I hold most of it myself. Been picking it up all summer, fast as I could without sending the price up. And you've helped quite a lot, unloading what you held, and lying about me and the way I've been squandering the money. I didn't know all of it, until yesterday. I thought you meant to carry things along smooth on the surface till the last minute, and then duck. I was ready for that. But you took me by surprise, working it this way. However," he yawned, "I'm an adaptable cuss.

"You don't know it, but there's a bunch of bulletins being put up, right now, saying that Bill Dale will buy Parowan Consolidated at two dollars a share. Some will make money at that, and some will lose. But it can't be helped; I can't trail down every buyer and find out just what he paid. And the losers won't lose so much as if you had played it through your way."

"You damn fool," said Rayfield softly, "You'll spend your last dime for nothing. The ore's gone. I made sure of that. No depth—like so many of these rich strikes." His good eye dwelt speculatively upon the lawyer. "Everything has been done properly, Mr. Fuller. Bill's biting off more than a mouthful, and it's your duty to tell him that he is not obliged to buy in the stock. John knows to a dollar what his income has been. It was big, I admit that. He's had close to a million dollars out of the mine so far—and the town site. What he's managed to spend is not my business, of course. But if he hadn't spent a dollar, you can see where he will wind up if he tries to buy up Parowan stock. I wish he would," he sighed. "I hold some shares I should like to dispose of."

"Oh, you're going to get rid of them," said Bill. "Right now while I'm in the mood, if you've got any sense. But don't think I'll pay you any fancy price. Ten cents a share for all you've got will be about right."

Rayfield studied him, gave up trying to read his mind, and accepted the price. With less grace, Emmett followed. They hadn't much, and the insignificance of their holdings, their acceptance of his offer which he had intended as an insult, was more enlightening to Bill than all their protestations had been.

They believed the mine had been worked out. They had held up the faith of the public until they could unload their stock; it was quite possible that his agents had bought in theirs and paid them a good price for it. The market was broken now. A panic was growing in the town. People were leaving by the dozens. They could not have gone out of the office and sold Parowan stock for one tenth of what Bill had contemptuously offered them.

A man came in, holding a long envelope in his hand. He moved deprecatingly toward Bill.

"It says down on the street that you're paying two dollars for Parowan," he said. "I paid six for mine, but if you'll take it at two dollars you can have it—and glad to get rid of it," he added in a mutter that Bill caught quite plainly.

"Here's your money. Go back and tell the rest it's no dream," Bill said shortly, blotting the check with a vicious thump of his fist. "Ask them not to obstruct the traffic, if they can help it, and to please form in line."

The man folded his check and hurried out, ashamed of his act, but manifestly relieved to have recovered a part of his investment. In five minutes there were five other men in the office.

All that day, Bill bought Parowan. The broker down the street, having been enterprising enough to wire Goldfield, Tonopah, all the towns within reach, came and sold to Bill Parowan stock,—stock which he could not deliver until the mail came in.

That night Doris met him in the door of the big house on the hill. Her face was white, her eyes clouded with troubled anger.

"Bill, you haven't been buying Parowan stock!" she began, trembling all over. "They told me you've been buying like a madman, for two dollars a share. It must be a lie. You aren't that crazy!"

Her emphasis hit Bill's pride. He grinned down at her, though his eyes were tired and a bit sunken in his head.

"Yup, I'm that crazy," he said. "Sign this slip of paper, and I'll have bought yours, too. Only I'm paying top price for yours, old girl. You get five dollars."

"Five hundred thousand dollars?" She looked at him strangely. "All right, Bill. Only, where's the money? I'd have to sell for cash, dear."

"Cash in the bank, sure. I haven't that much on me, right now." Bill sat down at the nearest table, pushed away a costly vase with flowers from Los Angeles drooping toward him, and shook his fountain pen.

His check fluttering faintly in her white fingers, he watched her scrawl her name under the agreement of sale. "Doris Mary Dale," she wrote, and he saw how her right hand shook, and that there was no breeze to flutter his check in her left hand. She stood up, breathing quickly.

"There's that much you can't throw away on strangers," she said triumphantly. "And you can't possibly have much more. But what possessed you to buy stock you know is worthless? These people have made their money out of Parowan. Let them go! They'll get it back in the next boom. They're just rushing out of town as if we had the plague here," she continued. "The bottom's dropped out of everything, I heard. And you stayed in that office and paid two dollars a share for Parowan stock! Bill, what did you do it for?"

"Well, because I wanted Parowan stock, I guess," Bill evaded her flippantly. "And these poor devils needed to sell, I reckon. And there is such a thing as honor."

"Honor!" Doris stared at him. "Do you mean to tell me there is any honor in throwing away your last dollar? I wonder," she said, "whether you've got enough to cover this check! Have you gone over your account, Bill, since you started this—this orgy of honor? You can't have this much left!"

Bill flushed, then paled slowly.

"So you think I'd give you a bad check?" His own voice shook slightly. "Do you think that? When I've given you all of myself, and let this mine go to hell because I couldn't be away from you, and you wanted to be where you could dazzle and be dazzled—do you think, when the whole thing smashes, I'd give you a bad check for your stock? You can give that check back to me, Doris." His eyes burned into hers. "As soon as mail can travel to Frisco and back, I'll have the money for you. Or place it on deposit for you at the Hibernian—if you can trust the bank's word when you get it! Since the committee called here at the house, I've been writing checks. There hasn't been a drunken Bohunk that asked if my check was good! Parowan has mopped them up and been glad to get them. It remains for my wife to question my honesty!"

He picked up his hat and left the house again, going back into the town. His nerves were raw, his pride had been seared over and over by the open distrust of men who had grown prosperous in the town he had created. He wanted sympathy, Doris' arms around his neck, her indignant condemnation of the thieves who had after all wrecked the mine. He had thought that Doris would understand his reasons for doing what he had done. He had believed that her own pride would demand that they stand back of Parowan with their last dollar.

He sent a long code telegram to Baker Cole, and one to his bank. Then, with hell still in his heart, he walked up the other slope, across the gulch, and entered the tent (now boarded and roofed and floored, but otherwise not changed) where he felt that he could at least call himself at home.

Luella, banished since the fateful party that had set the gossips talking, greeted him with hysterical chatter. Hez poked a cold nose ingratiatingly into his palm. Even Sister Mitchell, long ago retrieved from her winter quarters under a rock by the cellar, crawled from under the stove and craned her long neck at him, begging for something green. Bill looked in the cupboard and found nothing eatable. He had been away too long, he remembered now. He had lost count of the time, so completely had his mind been given to meet a humiliating situation in such a way that he need never be ashamed to look any man in the face.

Well, his menagerie was hungry and begging for food. He went out again, hurried to the nearest grocery and bought what he wanted, careless of the curious looks he excited. He stopped at Tommy's Place and told Tommy that he wouldn't be needed, close-herding anybody. The auditor had reported to Bill that he could find nothing wrong with the books, and there was not much chance of getting hold of any actual proof of crookedness against either Rayfield or Emmett.

"And are yuh still buyin' Parowan stock, Mr. Dale?" Tommy's soft voice was softer, more plaintive than ever.

"As long as there's a share out, I'm in the market," Bill answered shortly—defiantly too, though there was no reason for defiance.

He returned to his camp and fed Sister Mitchell her lettuce, Luella a cookie, and flung a stale mutton chop outside the door for Hez. He did not cook anything for himself. He was too heartsick to think of food. The whole damnable robbery, the treachery,—and then, Doris!

He tried to recall what words had passed between them; to remember just what Doris had said. But then he knew that it was not the words; she had not actually said anything awful, he suspected. But her tones, the hard, condemning look in her eyes! He could see her again, trembling with anger because he was spending money to keep his name—and hers—above reproach among men. In all the time since they were married, Bill had never seen Doris like that. The months had not been altogether peaceful, to be sure. Doris had frequently found something in her husband that required correcting, had enumerated his faults to him many, many times. She had often hurt Bill, had made him angry, so that he would go away until he forgot it. But there had been nothing like this.

"Damn money, if that's what it does to people!" Bill groaned aloud, when Luella recalled him to his surroundings by crying, "Give us a light! Give us a light!" He lighted a lantern and hung it from the hook on the ridgepole, and for a long while he stood staring at the cased saxophone.

Only two years ago he had dreamed of learning to play that thing,—to forward his wooing of Doris!

"I didn't need music," he told himself bitterly, all her hysteria over money and luxury flooding his mind with a nauseating enlightenment. "She took me, quick enough, when she saw the gold! Money, money! That's all she has thought of, from the day I showed her the vein. Little peacock, strutting around, showing off her finery. What a blind fool a man can be. And it had to wind up this way. She took money from me for her stock—thinking it was my last dollar. Afraid my account wouldn't cover it! If she thinks I'm that near broke, why did she take that check? Sell out, just like all the rest, because Parowan's on the rocks and the stock's not worth a damn, and she stood to lose something if she didn't unload quick. So she unloaded—five dollars a share because I offered it—to me! Her own husband, the man who gave her the claim that put her in the Company to begin with.

"What has she ever done to help? What's she doing now? Looking after her own little dollar pile—that's what. And she didn't need it! I gave her half a million in bonds, last Christmas. My God, even Rayfield wouldn't have done what she did to-night! And the way she's treated her folks. That shows the stuff she's made of. I don't blame Don for turning me down every time I tried to do something for him. They're proud—the right kind of pride. They're proud to make their own way. But Doris—neglecting them and not wanting them in California for a visit—excuses, the thinnest kind of excuses. Ashamed to have them at the hotels, that was why. She couldn't bear the thought of leading her pudgy old mother and her big, awkward dad into the dining room to her table! Afraid they might eat their salad with the fork dedicated to fish! Old Don might possibly put his soup spoon into his mouth front end forward! Snob! Cold-blooded, heartless little snob!"

So he railed at her, lashing his anger with the memory of her foolishness. But when he thought of baby Mary, his heart failed him. Beginning to toddle now, she was. And squinting her nose at him and laughing, and hiding her head in a cushion when he went down on his hands and knees and boo-ooed at her. Holding out her little arms to him and pleading "Take!" when the nurse came to carry her off to bed.

She must be in her little white nightgown now, with pink toes wriggling, little white teeth flashing when she laughed. He wondered, hungrily, if she missed her daddy,—wanted him to come and play little-pigs-going-to-market.

Bill couldn't stand it. He put on his hat and went out, locking the gate after him and steeling himself against Luella's protestations. He would go back to the big house on the hill. He couldn't leave his baby girl to go "bye-bye" without kissing her daddy good night.

But when he had walked to where the house stood revealed to him, bold against the starry sky, his steps slowed, faltered, stopped altogether. All the big rooms were lighted brilliantly, as if there were a party in the house. He knew the look,—having had his fill of that mockery of hospitality which Doris called entertaining. It would be like her, he told himself between clenched teeth. With Parowan fortunes sliding into the abyss of cataclysmic failure, it would be like Doris to throw wide her doors to merrymaking, to fling her defiance into the face of the town over which disaster hovered vulturelike, waiting to feed upon the broken fortunes left in the wake of the boom.

He looked for what seemed a long while at the window upstairs, where a dim light was burning in the corner room. He knew well the meaning of that light also. It meant that baby Mary was in her bed, tucked in by the nurse, while her mother laughed and talked and "entertained" in the drawing-rooms below.

Bill muttered a great oath, turned and went back to his dingy little board-and-canvas camp.