Ironheart

In the cool of the evening Justin Merrick drove down from the Sweetwater Dam to the Diamond Bar K ranch. It was characteristic of him that his runabout was up to date and in perfect condition. He had an expensive taste in the accessories of life, and he either got the best or did without.

Hands and face were tanned from exposure to the burning sun of the Rockies, but he was smooth-shaven and immaculate in the engineer’s suit which fitted his strong, heavy-set figure so snugly.

He drove with precision, as he did everything else in his well-ordered life. There was in his strength no quality of impatience or turbulence. He knew what he wanted and how to get it. That was why he had traveled so far on the road to success and would go a great way farther.

To-night he anticipated two pleasant hours with Betty Reed. He would tell her about the work and how it was getting along, his difficulties with the sand formation at the head gates and how he was surmounting them. Even before she spoke, he would know from her eager eyes that she was giving him the admiration due a successful man from his sweetheart.

Afterward he would pass to more direct and personal love-making, which she would evade if possible or accept shyly and reluctantly. She was wearing his ring, but he doubted whether he had really stormed the inner fortress of her heart. This uncertainty, and the assurance that went with it of a precious gift not for the first chance comer, appealed to his fastidious instinct, all the more that he was sure she would some day come to him with shining eyes and outstretched hands.

To-night Merrick found Betty distrait and troubled. Her attention to the recital of his problems was perfunctory. He was conscious of a slight annoyance. In spite of his force, Justin was a vain man, always ready to talk of himself and his achievements in a modest way to an interested and interesting young woman.

It appeared that her father had had a difficulty with some tramps, which had eventuated in insolence that had brought upon the vagrants summary physical punishment. From her account of it, Justin judged that Reed had not handled the matter very wisely. There was a way to do such things with a minimum of friction.

But he saw no need of worrying about it. The tramps had been given what they deserved and the affair was closed. It was like a woman to hold it heavily on her conscience because one of the ne’er-do-wells chanced to be young and good-looking.

“If you’d seen him,” Betty protested. “A gentleman by the look of him, or had been once, fine-grained, high-spirited, and yet so down-and-out.”

“If he’s down-and-out, it’s his own fault. A man’s never that so long as he holds to self-respect.”

This was incontrovertibly true, but Betty chose to be irritated. Justin was so obviously successful. He might have had a little sympathy for the underdog, she thought. Everybody did not have a square, salient jaw like his. Weakness was not necessarily a crime.

“He looks as though life had mauled him,” she said. “It’s taken something vital out of him. He doesn’t care what happens any more.”

“If he can only mooch his three meals a day and enough cash to keep him supplied with bootleg poison,” the engineer added.

They were walking up to the Three Pines, a rocky bluff from which they could in the daytime see far down the valley. She stopped abruptly. If she did not stamp her foot, at least the girl’s manner gave eloquently the effect of this indulgence.

“He’s not like that at all—not at all. Don’t you ever sympathize with any one that’s in hard luck?” she cried out, her cheeks glowing with a suffusion of underlying crimson.

“Not when he lies down under it.”

She flashed at him a look resentful of his complacency. It held, too, for the first time a critical doubt. There was plenty to like about Justin Merrick, and perhaps there was more to admire. He got things done because he was so virile, so dominant. To look at the lines and movements of his sturdy body, at the close-lipped mouth and resolute eyes, was to know him a leader of men. But now a treasonable thought had wirelessed itself into her brain. Had he a mind that never ranged out of well-defined pastures, that was quite content with the social and economic arrangement of the world? Did there move in it only a tight little set of orthodox ideas?

“How do you know he lies down under it?” she asked with spirit. “How do we know what he has to contend with? Or how he struggles against it?”

If his open smile was not an apology, it refused, anyhow, to be at variance with her. “Maybe so. As you say, I didn’t see him and you did. We’ll let it go at that and hope he’s all you think he is.”

Betty, a little ashamed of her vagrant thoughts, tried to find a common ground upon which they could stand. “Don’t you think that men are often the victims of circumstance—that they get caught in currents that kinda sweep them away?”

“‘I am the captain of my soul,’” he quoted sententiously.

“Yes, you are,” she admitted, after one swift glance that took in the dogged, flinty quality of him. “But most of us aren’t. Take Dad. He’s strong, and he’s four-square. But he wouldn’t have gone as far as he did with these tramps if he hadn’t got carried away. Well, don’t you think maybe this boy is a victim of ‘the bludgeonings of chance’? He looked like it to me.”

“We make ourselves,” he insisted. “If the things we buck up against break us, it’s because we’re weak.”

“Yes, but—” Betty’s protest died away. She was not convinced, and she made another start. “It seems to me that when I read the new novelists—Wells, Galsworthy, or Bennett, say—one of the things I get out of them is that we are modified by our environment, not only changed by it, but sometimes made the prey of it and destroyed by it.”

“Depends on how solid on our feet we are,” answered the engineer. “That’s the plea of the agitator, I know. He’s always wanting to do impossible things by law or by a social upheaval. There’s nothing to it. A man succeeds if he’s strong. He fails if he’s weak.”

This creed of the individualist was sometimes Betty’s own, but to-night she was not ready to accept it. “That would be all very well if we all started equal. But we don’t. What about a man who develops tuberculosis, say, just when he is getting going? He’s weak, but it’s no fault of his.”

“It may or may not be. Anyhow, it’s his misfortune. You can’t make the world over because he’s come a cropper. Take this young tramp of yours. I’d like to try him out and show you whether there’s anything to him. I’d put him on the work and let him find his level. Chances are he’d drift back to the road inside of a week. When a man’s down-and-out, it isn’t because he doesn’t get a chance, but because of some weakness in himself.”

Betty knew that in the case of many this was true. For a year or more she had been an employer of labor herself. One of the things that had impressed her among the young fellows who worked for her was that they did find their level. The unskilled, shiftless, and less reliable were dropped when work became slack. The intelligent and energetic won promotion for themselves.

But she did not believe that it was by any means a universal truth. Men were not machines, after all. They were human beings. However, she dropped the subject.

“He’s gone, so you won’t have a chance to prove your case,” she said. “Tell me about the work. How is it going?”

The Sweetwater Dam project had been initiated to water what was known as the Flat Tops, a mesa that stretched from the edge of the valley to the foothills. It had been and still was being bitterly opposed by some of the cattlemen of Paradise Valley because its purpose was to reclaim for farming a large territory over which cattle had hitherto ranged at will. Their contention held nothing of novelty. It had been argued all over the West ever since the first nesters came in to dispute with the cattle barons the possession of the grazing lands. A hundred districts in a dozen States had heard the claim that this was a cattle country, unfit for farming and intensive settlement. Many of them had seen it disproved.

The opposition of powerful ranching interests had not deterred Justin Merrick. Threats did not disturb him. He set his square jaw and pushed forward to the accomplishment of his purpose. As he rode or drove through the valley, he knew that he was watched with hostile eyes by reckless cowpunchers who knew that his success would put a period to the occupation they followed. Two of them had tried to pick a quarrel with him at Wild Horse on one occasion, and had weakened before his cool and impassive fearlessness.

But he did not deceive himself. At any hour the anger of these men might flare out against him in explosive action. For the first time in his life he was carrying a revolver.

Clint Reed was a stockholder and a backer of the irrigation project. He owned several thousand acres on the Flat Tops, and it was largely on account of his energy that capital had undertaken the reclamation of the dry mesa.

The head and front of the opposition was Jake Prowers, who had brought down from early days an unsavory reputation that rumor said he more than deserved. Strange stories were whispered about this mild-mannered little man with the falsetto voice and the skim-milk eyes. One of them was that he had murdered from ambush the successful wooer of the girl he wanted, that the whole countryside accepted the circumstantial evidence as true, and in spite of this he had married the young widow within a year and buried her inside of two. Nesters in the hills near his ranch had disappeared and never been seen again. Word passed as on the breath of the winds that Prowers had dry-gulched them. Old-timers still lived who had seen him fight a duel with two desperadoes on the main street of Wild Horse. He had been carried to the nearest house on a shutter with three bullets in him, but the two bad men had been buried next day.

The two most important ranchmen in the valley were Clint Reed and Jake Prowers. They never had been friendly. Usually they were opposed to each other on any public question that arose. Each was the leader of his faction. On politics they differed. Clint was a Republican, Jake a Democrat. There had been times when they had come close to open hostilities. The rivalry between them had deepened to hatred on the part of Prowers. When Reed announced through the local paper the inception of the Sweetwater Dam project, his enemy had sworn that it should never go through while he was alive.

Hitherto Prowers had made no move, but everybody in the district knew that he was biding his time. Competent engineers of the Government had passed adversely on this irrigation project. They had decided water could not be brought down from the hills to the Flat Tops. Jake had seen the surveys and believed them to be correct. He was willing that Reed and the capitalists he had interested should waste their money on a fool’s dream. If Justin Merrick was right—if he could bring water through Elk Creek Cañon to the Flat Tops—it would be time enough for Prowers to strike. Knowing the man as he did, Clint Reed had no doubt that, if it became necessary in order to defeat the project, his enemy would move ruthlessly and without scruple. It was by his advice that Justin Merrick kept the dam guarded at night and carried a revolver with him when he drove over or tramped across the hills.