Flowing Gold Part 17

"Very well! Details later. Now, I shall give myself the pleasure of calling upon my man and telling him exactly what I intend doing." The speaker rose and shook hands with the three precious scoundrels. When the door had closed behind him McWade inquired: "Now what do you make of that? Going to serve notice on his bird!"

"Say! He's the hardest guy I ever saw," Stoner declared, admiringly.

Mallow spoke last, but he spoke with conviction. "You said it, Brick. I had his number from the start. He's a master crook, and--it'll pay us all to string with him."

Henry Nelson's activities in the oil fields did not leave him much time in which to attend to his duties as vice-president of his father's bank, for what success he and Old Bell Nelson had had since the boom started was the direct result of the younger man's personal attention to their joint operations. That attention was close; their success, already considerable, promised to be enormous.

But of late things had not been going well. The turn had come with the loss of the Evans lease, and that misfortune had been followed by others. Contrary to custom, it was Henry, and not Bell, who had flown into a rage at receipt of Gus Briskow's telegram announcing a slip-up in the deal--a sale to Calvin Gray; that message, in fact, had affected the son in a most peculiar manner. For days thereafter he had been nervous, almost apprehensive, and his nervousness had increased when he secured the back files of the Dallas papers and read those issues which he had missed while out of town. Since that time he had made excuses to avoid trips into the Ranger field and had conducted much of his work over the telephone. Perhaps for that reason it was that trouble with drilling crews had arisen, and that one well had been "jimmed"; perhaps that explained why a deal as good as closed had gotten away, why a certain lease had cost fully double what it should have cost, and why the sale of another tract had not gone through.

Be that as it may, it was this generally unsatisfactory state of affairs that accounted for the junior Nelson's presence in Wichita Falls at this time. He and Bell had spent a stormy forenoon together; he was in an irritable mood when, early in the afternoon, a card was brought into his office.

Nelson could not restrain a start at sight of the name engraved thereon; his impulse was to leap to his feet. But the part.i.tion separating him from the bank lobby was of gla.s.s, and he knew his every action to be visible. He allowed himself a moment in which to collect his wits, then he opened slightly the desk drawer in which he kept his revolver and gave instructions to admit the caller.

Nelson revolved slowly in his chair; he stared curiously at the newcomer, and his voice was cold, unfriendly, as he said:

"This is quite a surprise, Gray."

"Not wholly unexpected, I hope."

"Entirely! I knew you were in Texas, but I hardly expected you to present yourself here."

Gray seated himself. For a moment the two men eyed each other, the one stony, forbidding, suspicious, the other smiling, suave, apparently frank.

"To what am I indebted for this--_honor?_" Nelson inquired, with a lift of his lip.

"My dear Colonel, would you expect me to come to Wichita Falls without paying my respects to my ranking officer, my immediate superior?"

"Bos.h.!.+ All that is over, forgotten."

"Forgotten?" The caller's brows arched incredulously. "You are a busy and a successful man; the late war lives in your mind only as a disagreeable memory to be banished as quickly as possible, but--"

Henry Nelson stirred impatiently. "Come! Come! Don't let's waste time."

"--but I retain distinct recollections of our Great Adventure, and always shall."

"That means, I infer, that you refuse to close the chapter?"

As if he had not heard this last remark, Gray continued easily: "It is a selfish motive that brings me here. I come to crow. It is my peculiar weakness that I demand an audience for what I do; I must share my triumphs with some one, else they taste flat, and since you are perhaps the one man in Texas who knows me best, or has the slightest interest in my doings, it is natural that I come to you."

This guileless confession evoked a positive scowl. "What have you done," the banker sneered, "except get your name in the papers?"

"I have made a large amount of money, for one thing, and I am having a glorious time. Now that Evans lease, for instance--"

"Oh! You've come to crow about that."

"Not loudly, but a little. I turned the greater part of that land for as much as five thousand dollars an acre. Odd that we should have come into compet.i.tion with each other on my very first undertaking, isn't it? Fascinating business, this oil. All one needs, to succeed, is experience and capital."

"What do you know about the business?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But I am learning. Luck, I find, is a good subst.i.tute for experience, and I certainly am lucky. As for capital--of course I was blessed in having unlimited money with which to operate. You inferred as much, I take it. Of course! Yes, Colonel, I have the money touch and everything I have put my hand to has turned out well."

Nelson burst forth in sudden irritation. "What are you getting at? You know I don't care a d.a.m.n what you're doing, how much money you're making--"

"Strange! Inasmuch as practically every dollar I have made has come out of you, indirectly."

For a moment Nelson said nothing; then, "Just what do you mean by that?"

"Exactly what I said. I've cut under you wherever possible. When you wanted acreage, I bid against you and ran the price up until you paid more than it was worth. That which I secured I managed--"

"_You!_ So--_you're_ the one back of that!" Nelson's amazement destroyed the insecure hold he had thus far maintained upon himself.

Furiously he cried: "You're out to get me! That's it, eh?"

"I am, indeed. And half my satisfaction in doing so will be in knowing that you know what I'm up to. One needs steady nerves and a sure touch in any speculative enterprise; he daren't wabble. I'm going to get your nerve, Nelson. I'm going to make you wabble. You're going to think twice and doubt your own hunches, and make mistakes, and I--I shall take advantage of them. Of course I shall do more than merely--"

"Well, by G.o.d! I knew you had the gall of the devil, but--See here, Gray, don't you understand what I can do to you? I don't want any trouble with you, but one word from me and--"

"Of course you want no trouble with me; but, alas! my dear Colonel, you are going to have it. Oh, a great deal of trouble. More trouble than you ever had in all your life. Either you are going broke, or I am. You see, I have all the advantage in this little game, for I will pay a dollar for every dollar I can cause you to lose, and that is too high a price for you to meet. If I should go bankrupt, which of course I sha'n't, it would mean nothing to me, while to you--" The speaker shrugged. "You haven't my temperament. No, the advantage is all mine."

Gray's tone changed abruptly. "For your own good remove your hand from the neighborhood of that drawer. I am too close to you for a gun-play.

Good! Now about that one word from you. You won't speak it, for that would force me to utter nasty truths about you, and you would suffer more than I, this being your home town where you are respected. And the truth is nasty, isn't it?"

Colonel Nelson had grown very white during this long speech. He rose to his feet and laid one shaking hand upon his desk as if to steady himself; his tongue was thick in his mouth as he said, hoa.r.s.ely:

"I'd like to think you are crazy, but--you're not."

"Almost a compliment, coming from you!"

"You think you can beat me--Want to make it a money fight, do you?

Well, I'll give you a bellyful. Every dollar I've got will go to smash you--smash you!"

"Splendid!" Gray was on his feet now and he was smiling icily. "One or the other of us will be ruined, and then perhaps we can resort to those methods which both of us would enjoy using. Of the two, I believe I am the more primitive, for the mere act of killing does not satisfy me.

I've come a long way to sink my teeth into you. Now that they're in, they'll stay. So long as you're willing to fight clean, I'll--"

"Are you gentlemen going to talk forever?" The inquiry came in a woman's voice. Both Nelson and Gray turned to behold a smiling, animated face framed in a crack of the door.

"Miss Good!" Calvin Gray strode forward, took the girl's hands in his and drew her over the threshold. "My dear Miss Good, I have rummaged half the state, looking for you."

"I hope I'm not interrupting.--I recognized you and--" The girl turned her eyes to Henry Nelson, but at sight of his face her smile vanished.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" she cried. "Let me run out--"

Gray held her hands more firmly. "Never. Do you think I shall risk losing you again? Colonel Nelson and I had finished our chat and were merely exchanging pleasantries."

"Cross your heart?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die." Gray laughed joyously and again shook the girl's hands.

"Yes. Colonel Gray was just leaving," Nelson managed to say.

"Colonel? Are you a colonel, too?" the girl inquired, and Gray bowed.