Ridgway of Montana

W >> William MacLeod Raine >> Ridgway of Montana

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But Waring Ridgway was never more dangerous than in apparent defeat. If he
were hit hard by Eaton's treachery, no sign of it was apparent in the
jaunty insouciance of his manner. Those having business with him expected
to find him depressed and worried, but instead met a man the embodiment of
vigorous and confident activity. If the subject were broached, he was ready
to laugh with them at Eaton's folly in deserting at the hour when victory
was assured.

It was fortunate for Ridgway that the county elections came on early in the
spring and gave him a chance to show that his power was still intact. He
arranged to meet at once the political malcontents of the State who were
banded together against the growing influence of the Consolidated. He had a
few days before called together representative men from all parts of the
State to discuss a program of action against the enemy, and Ridgway gave a
dinner for them at the Quartzite, the evening of Eaton's defection.

He was at the critical moment when any obvious irresolution would have been
fatal. His allies were ready to concede his defeat if he would let them.
But he radiated such an assured atmosphere of power, such an unconquerable
current of vigor, that they could not escape his own conviction of
unassailability. He was at his genial, indomitable best, the magnetic charm
of fellowship putting into eclipse the selfishness of the man. He had been
known to boast of his political exploits, of how he had been the Warwick
that had made and unmade governors and United States senators; but the
fraternal "we" to-night replaced his usual first person singular.

The business interests of the Consolidated were supreme all over the State.
That corporation owned forests and mills and railroads and mines. It ran
sheep and cattle-ranches as well as stores and manufactories. Most of the
newspapers in the State were dominated by it. Of a population of two
hundred and fifty thousand, it controlled more than half directly by the
simple means of filling dinner-pails. That so powerful a corporation,
greedy for power and wealth, should create a strong but scattered hostility
in the course of its growth, became inevitable. This enmity Ridgway
proposed to consolidate into a political organization, with opposition to
the trust as its cohesive principle, that should hold the balance of power
in the State.

When he rose to explain his object in calling them together, Ridgway's
clear, strong presentment of the situation, backed by his splendid bulk and
powerful personality, always bold and dramatic, shocked dormant antagonisms
to activity as a live current does sluggish inertia. For he had eminently
the gift of moving speech. The issue was a simple one, he pointed out.
Reduced to ultimates, the question was whether the State should control the
Consolidated or the Consolildated the State. With simple, telling force he
faced the insidious growth of the big copper company, showing how every
independent in the State was fighting for his business life against its
encroachments, and was bound to lose unless the opposition was a united
one. Let the independents obtain and keep control of the State politically
and the trust might be curbed; not otherwise. In eternal vigilance and in
union lay safety.

He sat down in silence more impressive than any applause. But after the
silence came a deluge of cheers, the thunder of them sweeping up and down
the long table like a summer storm across a lake.

Presently the flood-gates of talk were unloosed, and the conservatives
began to be heard. Opposition was futile because it was too late, they
claimed. A young Irishman, primed for the occasion, jumped to his feet with
an impassioned harangue that pedestaled Ridgway as the Washington of the
West. He showed how one man, in coalition with the labor-unions, had
succeeded in carrying the State against the big copper company; how he had
elected senators and governors, and legislators and judges. If one man
could so cripple the octopus, what could the best blood of the State,
standing together, not accomplish? He flung Patrick Henry and Robert Emmet
and Daniel Webster at their devoted
heads, demanding liberty or death with the bridled eloquence of his race.

But Ridgway was not such a tyro at the game of politics as to depend upon
speeches for results. His fine hand had been working quietly for months to
bring the malcontents into one camp, shaping every passion to which men are
heir to serve his purpose. As he looked down the table he could read in the
faces before him hatred, revenge, envy, fear, hope, avarice, recklessness,
and even love, as the motives which he must fuse to one common end. His
vanity stood on tiptoe at his superb skill in playing on men's wills. He
knew he could mold these men to work his desire, and the sequel showed he
was right.

When the votes were counted at the end of the bitter campaign that
followed, Simon Harley's candidates went down to disastrous defeat all over
the State, though he had spent money with a lavish hand. In Mesa County,
Ridgway had elected every one of his judges and retired to private life
those he could not influence.

Harley's grim lips tightened when the news reached him. "Very well," he
said to Mott "We'll see if these patriots can't be reached through their
stomachs better than their brains. Order every mill and mine and smelter of
the Consolidated closed to-night. Our employees have voted for this man
Ridgway. Let him feed them or let them starve."

"But the cost to you--won't it be enormous?" asked Mott, startled at his
chief's drastic decision.

Harley bared his fangs with a wolfish smile. "We'll make the public pay.
Our store-houses are full of copper. Prices will jump when the supply is
reduced fifty per cent. We'll sell at an advance, and clean up a few
millions out of the shut-down. Meanwhile we'll starve this patriotic State
into submission."

It came to pass even as Harley had predicted. With the Consolidated mines
closed, copper, jumped up--up--up. The trust could sit still and coin money
without turning a hand, while its employees suffered in the long, bitter
Northern winter. All the troubles usually pursuant on a long strike began
to fall upon the families of the miners.

When a delegation from the miners' union came to discuss the situation with
Harley he met them blandly, with many platitudes of sympathy. He
regretted--he regretted exceedingly--the necessity that had been forced
upon him of closing the mines. He had delayed doing so in the hope that the
situation might be relieved. But it had grown worse, until he had been
forced to close. No, he was afraid he could not promise to reopen this
winter, unless something were done to ameliorate conditions in the court.
Work would begin at once, however, if the legislators would pass a bill
making it optional with any party to a suit to have the case transferred to
another judge in case he believed the bias of the presiding judge would be
prejudicial to an impartial hearing.

Ridgway was flung at once upon the defensive. His allies, the working men,
demanded of him that his legislature pass the bill wanted by Harley, in
order that work might recommence. He evaded their demands by proposing to
arbitrate his difficulties with the Consolidated, by offering to pay into
the union treasury hall a million dollars to help carry its members through
the winter. He argued to the committee that Harley was bluffing, that
within a few weeks the mines and smelters would again be running at their
full capacity; but when the pressure on the legislators he had elected
became so great that he feared they would be swept from their allegiance to
him, he was forced to yield to the clamor.

It was a great victory for Harley. Nobody recognized how great a one more
accurately than Waring Ridgway. The leader of the octopus had dogged him
over the shoulders of the people, had destroyed at a single blow one of his
two principal sources of power. He could no longer rely on the courts to
support him, regardless of justice.

Very well. If he could not play with cogged dice, he was gambler enough to
take the honest chances of the game without flinching. No despair rang in
his voice. The look in his eye was still warm and confident. Mesa
questioned him with glimpses friendly but critical. They found no fear in
his bearing, no hint of doubt in his indomitable assurance.

CHAPTER 22. "NOT GUILTY"--"GUILTY"

Ridgway's answer to the latest move of Simon Harley was to put him on trial
for his life to answer the charge of having plotted and instigated the
death of Vance Edwards. Not without reason, the defense had asked for a
change of venue, alleging the impossibility of securing a fair trial at
Mesa. The courts had granted the request and removed the case to Avalanche.

On the second day of the trial Aline sat beside her husband, a dainty
little figure of fear, shrinking from the observation focused upon her from
all sides. The sight of her forlorn sensitiveness so touched Ridgway's
heart that he telegraphed Virginia Balfour to come and help support her
through the ordeal.

Virginia came, and henceforth two women, both of them young
and unusually attractive, gave countenance to the man being tried for his
life. Not that he needed their support for himself, but for the effect they
might have on the jury. Harley had shrewdly guessed that the white-faced
child he had married, whose pathetic beauty was of so haunting a type, and
whose big eyes were so quick to reflect emotions, would be a valuable asset
to set against the black-clad widow of Vance Edwards.

For its effect upon himself, so far as the trial was concerned, Simon
Harley cared not a whit. He needed no bolstering. The old wrecker carried
an iron face to the ordeal. His leathern heart was as foreign to fear as to
pity. The trial was an unpleasant bore to him, but nothing worse. He had,
of course, cast an anchor of caution to windward by taking care to have the
jury fixed. For even though his array of lawyers was a formidably famous
one, he was no such child as to trust his case to a Western jury on its
merits while the undercurrent of popular opinion was setting so strongly
against him. Nor had he neglected to see that the court-room was packed
with detectives to safeguard him in the event that the sympathy of the
attending miners should at any time become demonstrative against him.

The most irritating feature of the trial to the defendant was the presence
of the little woman in black, whose burning eyes never left for long his
face. He feigned to be unconscious of her regard, but nobody in the
court-room was more sure of that look of enduring, passionate hatred than
its victim. He had made her a widow, and her heart cried for revenge. That
was the story the eyes told dumbly.

From first to last the case was bitterly contested, and always with the
realization among those present--except for that somber figure in black,
whose beady eyes gimleted the defendant--that it was another move in the
fight between the rival copper kings. The district attorney had worked up
his case very carefully, not with much hope of securing a conviction, but
to mass a total of evidence that would condemn the Consolidated
leader-before the world.

To this end, the foreman, Donleavy, had been driven by a process of
sweating to turn State's evidence against his master. His testimony made
things look black for Harley, but when Hobart took the stand, a palpably
unwilling witness, and supported his evidence, the Ridgway adherents were
openly jubilant. The lawyers for the defense made much of the fact that
Hobart had just left the Consolidated service after a disagreement with the
defendant and had been elected to the senate by his enemies, but the
impression made by his moderation and the fine restraint of his manner,
combined with his reputation for scrupulous honesty, was not to be shaken
by the subtle innuendos and blunt aspersions of the legal array he faced.

Nor did the young district attorney content himself with Hobart's
testimony. He put his successor, Mott, on the stand, and gave him a bad
hour while he tried to wring the admission out of him that Harley had
personally ordered the attack on the miners of the Taurus. But for the
almost constant objections of the opposing counsel, which gave him time to
recover himself, the prosecuting attorney would have succeeded.

Ridgway, meeting him by chance after luncheon at the foot of the hotel
elevator--for in a town the size of Avalanche, Waring had found it
necessary to put up at the same hotel as the enemy or take second best, an
alternative not to his fastidious taste--rallied him upon the predicament
in which he had found himself.

"It's pretty hard to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, without making indiscreet admissions about one's friends, isn't it?"
he asked, with his genial smile.

"Did I make any indiscreet admissions?"

"I don't say you did, though you didn't look as if you were enjoying
yourself. I picked up an impression that you had your back to the wall;
seemed to me the jury rather sized it up that way, Mott."

"We'll know what the jury thinks in a few days."

"Shall we?" the other laughed aloud. "Now, I'm wondering whether we shall
know what they really think."

"If you mean that the jury has been tampered with it is your duty to place
your evidence before the court, Mr. Ridgway."

"When I hear the verdict I'll tell you what I think about the jury,"
returned the president of the Ore-producing Company, with easy impudence as
he passed into the elevator.

At the second floor Waring left it and turned toward the ladies' parlor. It
had seemed to him that Aline had looked very tired and frail at the morning
session, and he wanted to see Virginia about arranging to have them take a
long drive into the country that afternoon. He had sent his card up with a
penciled note to the effect that he would wait for her in the parlor.

But when he stepped through the double doorway of the ornate room it was to
become aware of a prior occupant. She was reclining on a divan at the end
of the large public room. Neither lying nor sitting, but propped up among a
dozen pillows with head and limbs inert and the long lashes drooped on the
white cheeks, Aline looked the pathetic figure of a child fallen asleep
from sheer exhaustion after a long strain.

Since he was the man he was, unhampered by any too fine sense of what was
fitting, he could no more help approaching than he could help the
passionate pulse of pity that stirred in his heart at sight of her forlorn
weariness.

Her eyes opened to find his grave compassion looking down at her. She
showed no surprise at his presence, though she had not previously known of
it. Nor did she move by even so much as the stir of a limb.

"This is wearing you out," he said, after the long silence in which her
gaze was lost helplessly in his. "You must go home--away from it all. You
must forget it, and if it ever crosses your mind think of it as something
with which you have no concern."

"How can I do that--now."

The last word slipped out not of her will, but from an undisciplined heart.
It stood for the whole tangled story of her troubles: the unloved marriage
which had bereft her of her heritage of youth and joy, the love that had
found her too late and was so poignant a fount of distress to her, the web
of untoward circumstance in which she was so inextricably entangled.

"How did you ever come to do it?" he asked roughly, out of the bitter
impulse of his heart.

She knew that the harshness was not for her, as surely as she knew what he
meant by his words.

"I did wrong. I know that now, but I didn't know it then. Though even then
I felt troubled about it. But my guardian said it was best, and I knew so
little. Oh, so very, very little. Why was I not taught things, what every
girl has a right to know--until life teaches me--too late?"

Nothing he could say would comfort her. For the inexorable facts forbade
consolation. She had made shipwreck of her life before the frail raft of
her destiny had well pushed forth from harbor. He would have given much to
have been able to take the sadness out of her great childeyes, but he knew
that not even by the greatness of his desire could he take up her burden.
She must carry it alone or sink under it.

"You must go away from here back to your people. If not now, then as soon
as the trial is over. Make him take you to your friends for a time."

"I have no friends that can help me." She said it in an even little voice
of despair.

"You have many friends. You have made some here. Virginia is one." He would
not name himself as only a friend, though he had set his iron will to claim
no more.

"Yes, Virginia is my friend. She is good to me. But she is going to marry
you, and then you will both forget me."

"I shall never forget you." He cried it in a low, tense voice, his clenched
hands thrust into the pockets of his sack coat.

Her wan smile thanked him. It was the most he would let himself say. Though
her heart craved more, she knew she must make the most of this.

"I came up to see Virginia," he went on, with a change of manner. "I want
her to take you driving this afternoon. Forget about that wretched trial if
you can. Nothing of importance will take place to-day."

He turned at the sound of footsteps, and saw that Miss Balfour had come
into the room.

"I want you to take Mrs. Harley into the fresh sunshine and clear air this
afternoon. I have been telling her to forget this trial. It's a farce,
anyhow. Nothing will come of it. Take her out to the Homes--take and cheer
her up."

"Yes, my lord." Virginia curtseyed obediently.

"It will do you good, too."

She shot a mocking little smile at him. "It's very good of you to think of
me."

"Still, I do sometimes."

"Whenever it is convenient," she added.

But with Aline watching them the spirit of badinage in him was overmatched.
He gave it up and asked what kind of a rig he should send round. Virginia
furnished him the necessary specifications, and he turned to go.

As he left the room Simon Harley entered. They met face to face, and after
an instant's pause each drew aside to allow the other to pass. The New
Yorker inclined his head silently and moved forward toward his wife.
Ridgway passed down the corridor and into the elevator.

As the days of the trial passed excitement grew more tense. The lawyers for
the prosecution and the defense made their speeches to a crowded and
enthralled court-room. There was a feverish uncertainty in the air. It
reached a climax when the jury stayed out for eleven hours before coming to
a verdict. From the moment it filed back into the court-room with solemn
faces the dramatic tensity began to foreshadow the tragedy about to be
enacted. The woman Harley had made a widow sat erect and rigid in the seat
where she had been throughout the trial. Her eyes blazed with a hatred that
bordered madness. Ridgway had observed that neither Aline Harley nor
Virginia was present, and a note from the latter had just reached him to
the effect that Aline was ill with the strain of the long trial. Afterward
Ridgway could never thank his pagan gods enough that she was absent.

There was a moment of tense waiting before the judge asked:

"Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

The foreman rose. "We have, your honor."

A folded note was handed to the judge. He read it slowly, with an
inscrutable face.

"Is this your verdict, gentlemen of the jury?"

"It is, your honor."

Silence, full and rigid, held the room after the words "Not guilty" had
fallen from the lips of the judge. The stillness was broken by a shock as
of an electric bolt from heaven.

The exploding echoes of a pistol-shot reverberated. Men sprang wildly to
their feet, gazing at each other in the distrust that fear generates. But
one man was beyond being startled by any more earthly sounds. His head fell
forward on the table in front of him, and a thin stream of blood flowed
from his lips. It was Simon Harley, found guilty, sentenced, and executed
by the judge and jury sitting in the outraged, insane heart of the woman he
had made a widow.

Mrs. Edwards had shot him through the head with a revolver she had carried
in her shoppingbag to exact vengeance in the event of a miscarriage of
justice.

CHAPTER 23. ALINE TURNS A CORNER

Aline might have been completely prostrated by the news of her husband's
sudden end, coming as it did as the culmination of a week of strain and
horror. That she did not succumb was due, perhaps, to Ridgway's care for
her. When Harley's massive gray head had dropped forward to the table, his
enemy's first thought had been of her. As soon as he knew that death was
sure, he hurried to the hotel.

He sent his card up, and followed it so immediately that he found her
scarcely risen from the divan on which she had been lying in the
receiving-room of her apartments. The sleep was not yet shaken from her
lids, nor was the wrinkled flush smoothed from the soft cheek that had been
next the cushion. Even in his trouble for her he found time to be glad that
Virginia was not at the moment with her. It gave him the sense of another
bond between them that this tragic hour. should belong to him and her
alone--this hour of destiny when their lives swung round a corner beyond
which lay wonderful vistas of kindly sunbeat and dewy starlight stretching
to the horizon's edge of the long adventure.

She checked the rush of glad joy in her heart the sight of him always
brought, and came forward slowly. One glance at his face showed that he had
brought grave news.

"What is it? Why are you here?" she cried tensely.

"To bring you trouble, Aline."

"Trouble!" Her hand went to her heart quickly.

"It is about--Mr. Harley."

She questioned him with wide, startled eyes, words hesitating on her
trembling lips and flying unvoiced.

"Child--little partner--the orders are to be brave." He came forward and
took her hands in his, looking down at her with eyes she thought full of
infinitely kind pity.

"Is it--have they--do you mean the verdict?"

"Yes, the verdict; but not the verdict of which you are thinking."

She turned a quivering face to his. "Tell me. I shall be brave."

He told her the brutal fact as gently as he could, while he watched the
blood ebb from her face. As she swayed he caught her in his arms and
carried her to the divan. When, presently, her eyes fluttered open, it was
to look into his pitiful ones. He was kneeling beside her, and her head was
pillowed on his arm.

"Say it isn't true," she murmured.

"It is true, dear."

She moved her head restlessly, and he took away his arm, rising to draw a
chair close to the lounge. She slipped her two hands under her head,
letting them lie palm to palm on the sofapillow. The violet eyes looked
past him into space. Her tangled thoughts were in a chaos of disorder. Even
though she had known but a few months and loved not at all the grim,
gray-haired man she had called husband, the sense of wretched bereavement,
the nearness of death, was strong on her. He had been kind to her in his
way, and the inevitable closeness of their relationship, repugnant as it
had been to her, made its claims felt. An hour ago he had been standing
here, the strong and virile ruler over thousands. Now he lay stiff and
cold, all his power shorn from him without a second's warning. He had
kissed her good-by, solicitous for her welfare, and it had been he that had
been in need of care rather than she. Two big tears hung on her lids and
splashed to her cheeks. She began to sob, and half-turned on the divan,
burying her face in her hands.

Ridgway let her weep without interruption for a time, knowing that it would
be a relief to her surcharged heart and overwrought nerves. But when her
sobs began to abate she became aware of his hand resting on her shoulder.
She sat up, wiping her eyes, and turned to him a face sodden with grief.

"You are good to me," she said simply.

"If my goodness were only less futile! Heaven knows what I would give to
ward off trouble from you. But I can't, nor can I bear it for you."

"But it is a help to know you would if you could. He--I think he wanted to
ward off grief from me, but he could not, either. I was often lonely and
sad, even though he was kind to me. And now he has gone. I wish I had told
him how much I appreciated his goodness to me."

"Yes, we all feel that when we have lost some one we love. It is natural to
wish we had been better to them and showed them how much we cared. Let me
tell you about my mother. I was thirteen when she died. It was in summer.
She had not been well for a long time. The boys were going fishing that day
and she asked me to stay at home. I had set my heart on going, and I
thought it was only a fancy of hers. She did not insist on my staying, so I
went, but felt uncomfortable all day. When I came back in the evening they
told me she was dead. I felt as if some great icy hand were tightening, on
my heart. Somehow I couldn't break down and cry it out. I went around with
a white, set face and gave no sign. Even at the funeral it was the same.
The neighbors called me hard-hearted and pointed me out to their sons as a
terrible warning. And all the time I was torn with agony."

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