The Short Cut Part 25

"I mean brandy, if you've got any. It would do me a lot of good.

Wanda Leland just poured some tea down me and I didn't want to shock her."

Wayne stood frowning at her a moment, a question on his lips. Then he went to the kitchen and got a bottle and a gla.s.s. She had drawn a chair close up to the fire when he returned and was leaning back in it luxuriously, her feet thrust out to the blaze.

"Thanks," she said, taking the gla.s.s he handed her. "I am drinking to our better acquaintance."

She set the gla.s.s down upon the arm of her chair, half emptied, and smiled up at him.

"I want a good long talk if you can spare the time. Can you?"

"Of course," he said briefly.

"It is my particular desire that no one but yourself hears what I have to say."

"No one is here except Garth and myself. And Garth hasn't come in from the corrals yet."

"Excellent." Her black eyes flashed from him to the various rude appointments of the room, flashed back to him. "I am Helga Strawn,"

she said abruptly.

He repeated the name after her in surprise:

"Helga Strawn?"

"Yes. Perhaps you guess right away what has brought me West, to you first of all?"

"No," he said. "I don't think that I do."

"Then I'll tell you. That's what I am here for. Don't begin to think that I saw a picture of you somewhere and fell in love with it."

The finely chiselled lips, too faultlessly perfect at any time to be warmly womanly, were suddenly hard. Her eyes had become brilliant, twin spots of colour came into her cheeks.

"At least you remember my name?"

"Helga Strawn? Yes, I remember it. You learned from a mutual acquaintance that I was in New York some time ago. You wrote me then.

You are a cousin of Sledge Hume."

"Not exactly a cousin," she corrected him. "I am not so proud of the relations.h.i.+p as to wish to make it closer than it is. But that does not matter. You remember also why I wrote you?"

"Yes. You said that yourself and Hume had inherited equal interests in the Dry Lands. That through letters Hume had persuaded you to sell your interest to him. After you had sold you began to think that he had j.a.pped you. You wanted to know from me what the property was actually worth."

"I am glad that you remember. You answered my letter. You told me that you had always considered the land hardly worth paying taxes on."

"Yes."

"If I asked you now, that same question, what would you say?"

He hesitated. The Dry Lands were no whit more valuable to-day than they had been last year. But if the scheme Hume was engineering went through it would be a different matter.

"You have already sold your interest, given the deed, haven't you, Miss Strawn? What difference does it make?" he asked bluntly.

"What if I have?" she countered coolly. "I am not the sort of woman, Mr. Shandon, to sit with my hands in my lap when a man has done a piece of sharp business with me. I needed the money and like a fool I sold to Hume. And now I know as well as I know anything that he didn't pay me a tenth of what the property was worth. Yes, I have given the deed.

You think that I am a fool again to come clear across the continent upon a matter that went out of my hands a year ago!" She laughed, her laugh reminding him unpleasantly of the man of whom they were talking.

"You see, you don't know me yet."

"I don't see just how I can be of service to you," he suggested.

"I'll try to be explicit. I have never had the pleasure of meeting Mr.

Hume and yet I think that I could write a very correct character sketch of the gentleman. Egotism and selfishness, two things in most men, just one in Sledge Hume! He is shrewd and hard and his G.o.d is gold.

Am I right?"

"Hume is hardly an intimate acquaintance of mine."

She laughed softly, twisting the brandy gla.s.s slowly in her white fingers.

"I know enough of the Hume blood," she said presently, "to make a close guess at the man's character. We are not related, even distantly, for nothing, Mr. Shandon. My mother was a Hume," she added coolly, her manner again reminding the man strangely of Hume himself. "You see, he chose the wrong woman when he cheated me. It's going to be diamond cut diamond now."

Shandon looked at the girl curiously, falling to see what mad hope she could have of regaining rights that were deeded away a year ago, falling as well to find a reason for her coming all these miles to make a confidant of him.

"I usually go about things in my own way," she said after one of her brief pauses. "What I have to say I'll say as it comes to me. In case your cousin Garth returns before I have done you can send him away upon any pretext you choose. Tell him we want to talk privately; that will do as well as anything. Smoke, if you want to," as she saw his eyes go to the mantelpiece where an old black pipe lay. "Maybe it will make you patient during my harangue."

Wayne got his pipe and, lighting it, sat upon the edge of the table looking down at her through the smoke.

"Six months ago," she went on, "I realised that Hume had underpaid me.

Why?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I knew his breed. If he offers a dollar for a thing it's worth ten. I made investigations through an agent who came up to Dry Valley from San Francisco. He turned in his bill on time and that was about all. He was an ordinary man and consequently a fool. But, blind as a bat himself, he showed me a little light that set me thinking. A few days ago I came out myself."

She snapped her fingers. "It didn't take me that long to get to the bottom of the whole thing."

"What thing?"

"The scheme Hume is promoting on the quiet to put water on the Dry Lands. The water is to come from your river. Are you in on the deal too?"

Her question was as sudden as a sword thrust.

"No," he answered.

"Have they made you an offer for the water right?"

"No."

"That's funny." She frowned thoughtfully at him a moment, saying in a barely audible tone as though she were thinking aloud, "You don't look as though you were lying. Well, you expect an offer, don't you?"

"Yes."

"And when it comes, coming from Hume, you realise that he'll offer a very small fraction of what it is worth to him?"

"I suppose so. That's business."

"And, above all things in the world, Sledge Hume is a business man!

Well, I won't ask what you'd do when the offer came, as you'd say that it was none of my affair. I've seen Ruf Ettinger and learned all he knows."