Part 14 (2/2)

”Huh!” says I. ”Then you're some wizard. It often bothers me to dope out just what I need myself; and when it comes to decidin' for other folks---- Say, have you tackled envelope No. 4 on Pyramid's list yet?”

”I have,” says J. Bayard, smilin' confident. ”Peculiar case too. A month or so ago I should have been puzzled. Now it seems very simple. I've done all my investigating, made my plans, and if you will run downtown to a lawyer's office with me after luncheon we shall meet the beneficiaries-to-be and fix up the details of a nice little deed of kindness of which I am the proud author.”

”Fat commission in it for you, eh?” says I.

J. Bayard looks pained and hurt. ”Really,” says he, ”I hadn't thought of that. No, the outlay will be slight. In fact, it's merely a matter of launching a young man in society.”

”Well, well!” says I. ”That's a husky job for a couple of grown men like us, ain't it? Who's the young gent--Clarence what?”

”Ever hear of Hungry Jim Hammond?” says he.

I had, but couldn't quite place him; so J. Bayard supplies the description. He'd started out as a railroad man, Hammond had, back in the days when Pyramid Gordon was first beginnin' to discover that swappin' hot air for votin' shares was perfectly good business so long as you could get away with the goods. Only Hammond was the real thing.

He was a construction expert.

Mr. Gordon had found him on the payroll of a line he'd annexed by a midnight deal; concluded he knew too much about the job to be a safe man to have around; so he transfers him to the Far West and sets him to work on a scheme to lay out a road parallelin' the Southern Pacific. Hammond couldn't tell it was a stall. He blazes merrily ahead surveyin' a right of way across three States, and had got as far as Death Valley when the rumor comes to camp that this new line is all a fake.

Hammond had a gang of twenty-five or thirty men with him, and his weekly pay check hadn't shown up for about a month. But he couldn't believe that Pyramid had laid down on him. He'd got mighty int'rested in buildin' that road across the desert, and had dreamed some rosy dreams about it. But his men felt diff'rent. They wanted action on the cas.h.i.+er's part, or they'd quit. Hammond begged 'em to stay. He even blew in his own bank account settlin' part of the back wages. But inside of three days his crew had dwindled to a Chinese cook and a Greaser mule driver. Took him a couple of weeks more to get wise to the fact that he was stranded there in the sand, six miles from a water hole, with a few cases of canned beef and a sack of corn meal.

Even then he didn't give up for good. He made his way back to a stage station and sent through a wire to Pyramid askin' for instructions. More than a month he waited, with no word from Gordon. Seems that by then Pyramid was too busy with other things. He'd cashed in on his bluff and was sortin' a new hand. And maybe he wa'n't anxious to have Hammond come East again. Anyway, he let him s.h.i.+ft.

That was when Hammond came so near starvin'. But he didn't--quite. For a year or more he managed to live somehow. Then one day he drove a team of boneyard mules into Blue Dog with a wagonload of stuff that the natives stared at. It was white, s.h.i.+ny stuff. Hammond said it was borax.

He'd discovered a big deposit of it out there in the blisterin' sand. He was goin' to s.h.i.+p it back East and sell it. They thought he was nutty.

He wasn't, though. On East they was usin' a lot of borax and demandin'

more.

With a few thousand back of him Hammond might have got to be the Borax King right then; but as it was he held onto an interest big enough to make him quite a plute, and inside of a year he was located in Denver and earnin' his nickname of Hungry Jim. His desert appet.i.te had stayed with him, you see, and such little whims as orderin' a three-inch tenderloin steak frescoed with a pound of mushrooms and swimmin' in the juice squeezed from a pair of canvasback ducks got to be a reg'lar thing for him.

It was there he met and married the husky built head waitress and moved into a double-breasted mansion up on Capitol Hill. Also he begun wearin'

diamond s.h.i.+rtstuds and givin' wine dinners.

”But, like others of his kind,” goes on J. Bayard, ”his luck didn't last. Because he'd made one big strike, he thought he knew the mining game from top to bottom. He lost hundreds of thousands on wild ventures.

His long drawn out suit against Pyramid was another expensive luxury; for in the end Gordon beat him.

”It was Hammond's big appet.i.te that finished him off, though,--acute indigestion. So that is why Pyramid leaves us this item in his list: 'The widow or other survivor of James R. Hammond.' Well, I've found them both, Mrs. Hammond and her son Royce. I haven't actually seen either of 'em as yet; but I have located Mrs. Hammond's attorney and had several conferences with him. And what do you think? She won't take a dollar of Gordon's money for herself; nor will Royce directly. There's one thing, however, that she will probably not refuse,--any social a.s.sistance we may give to her son. That's her chief ambition, it seems,--to see Royce get into what she considers smart society. Well, what do you say, McCabe? Can't we help?”

”Depends a good deal on Royce,” says I. ”Course, if he's too raw a roughneck----”

”Precisely!” breaks in J. Bayard. ”And as the son of such a man we must look for rather a crude youth, I suppose. But in order to carry out the terms of Gordon's will we must do some kind and generous act for these people. This seems to be our only chance. Now here is my plan.”

And he's comin' on, J. Bayard is! He proposes that we use our combined pull with Mr. Twombley-Crane to land Royce--for one consecutive night, anyway--plunk in the middle of the younger set. He's leased a nice furnished cottage from one of the Meadowbrook bunch, not more'n a mile from the Twombley-Crane estate, got the promise of havin' the youngster's name put up at the Hunt Club for the summer privileges, and has arranged to have mother and son move in right in the height of the season.

”In time for the Twombley-Cranes' big costume ball?” I suggests.

”Nothing less,” says he. ”And if we could manage to have them invited to that--well, what more could a fond parent ask?”

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