His Little Partner

by William MacLeod Raine

 

HIS LITTLE PARTNER

By William MacLeod Raine

Mr. Ridgway, ma'am.”

The young woman who was giving the last touches to the very effective picture framed in her long looking-glass nodded almost imperceptibly.

She had come to the parting of the ways, and she knew it, with a shrewd suspicion as to which she should choose. She had asked for a week to decide, and her heart-searching had told her nothing new. It was characteristic of Virginia Balfour that she did not attempt to deceive herself. If she married Waring Ridgway it would be for what she considered good and sufficient reasons, but love would not be one of them. He was going to be a great man, for one thing, and probably a very rich one, which counted, though it would not be a determining factor. This she could find only in the man himself, in the masterful force that made him what he was. The sand-stings of life did not disturb his confidence in his victorious star, nor did he let fine-spun moral obligations hamper his predatory career. He had a genius for success in whatever he undertook, pushing his way to his end with a shrewd, direct energy that never faltered. She sometimes wondered whether she, too, like the men he used as tools, was merely a pawn in his game, and her consent an empty formality conceded to convention. Perhaps he would marry her even if she did not want to, she told herself, with the sudden illuminating smile that was one of her chief charms.

But Ridgway's wary eyes, appraising her mood as she came forward to meet him, read none of this doubt in her frank greeting. Anything more sure and exquisite than the cultivation Virginia Balfour breathed he would have been hard put to it to conceive. That her gown and its accessories seemed to him merely the extension of a dainty personality was the highest compliment he could pay her charm, and an entirely unconscious one.

“Have I kept you waiting?” she smiled, giving him her hand.

His answering smile, quite cool and unperturbed, gave the lie to his words. “For a year, though the almanac called it a week.”

“You must have suffered,” she told him ironically, with a glance at the clear color in his good-looking face.

“Repressed emotion,” he explained. “May I hope that my suffering has reached a period?”

They had been sauntering toward a little conservatory at the end of the large room, but she deflected and brought up at a table on which lay some books. One of these she picked up and looked at incuriously for a moment before sweeping them aside. She rested her hands on the table behind her and leaned back against it, her eyes meeting his fairly.

“You're still of the same mind, are you?” she demanded.

“Oh! very much.”

She lifted herself to the table, crossing her feet and dangling them irresponsibly. “We might as well be comfy while we talk;” and she indicated, by a nod, a chair.

“Thanks. If you don't mind, I think I'll take it standing.”

She did not seem in any hurry to begin, and Ridgway gave evidence of no desire to hasten her. But presently he said, with a little laugh that seemed to offer her inclusion in the joke:

“I'm on the anxious seat, you know—waiting to find out whether I'm to be the happiest man alive.”

“You know as much about it as I do.” She echoed his laugh ruefully. “I'm still as much at sea as I was last week. I couldn't tell then, and I can't now.”

“No news is good news, they say.”

“I don't want to marry you a bit, but you're a great catch, as you are very well aware.”

“I suppose I am rather a catch,” he agreed, the shadow of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

“It isn't only your money; though, of course, that's a temptation,” she admitted audaciously.

“I'm glad it's not only my money.” He could laugh with her about it because he was shrewd enough to understand that it was not at all his wealth. Her cool frankness might have frightened away another man. It merely served to interest Ridgway. For, with all his strength, he was a vain man, always ready to talk of himself.

Her gaze fastened on the tip of her suède toe, apparently studying it attentively. “It would be a gratification to my vanity to parade you as the captive of my bow and spear. You're such a magnificent specimen, such a berserk in broadcloth. Still, I sha'n't marry you if I can help it—but, then, I'm not sure that I can help it. Of course, I disapprove of you entirely, but you're rather fascinating, you know.” Her eye traveled slowly up to his, appraising the masterful lines of his square figure, the dominant strength of his close-shut mouth and resolute eyes. “Perhaps 'fascinating' isn't just the word, but I can't help being interested in you, whether I like you or not. I suppose you always get what you want very badly?” she flung out by way of question.

“That's what I'm trying to discover”—he smiled.

“There are things to be considered both ways,” she said, taking him into her confidence. “You trample on others. How do I know you wouldn't tread on me?”

“That would be one of the risks you would take,” he agreed impersonally.

“I shouldn't like that at all. If I married you it would be because as your wife I should have so many opportunities. I should expect to do exactly as I please. I shouldn't want you to interfere with me, though I should want to be able to influence you.”

“Nothing could be fairer than that,” was his amiably ironical comment.

“You see, I don't know you—not really—and they say all sorts of things about you.”

“They don't say I am a quitter, do they?”

She leaned forward, chin in hand and elbow on knee. It was a part of the accent of her distinction that as a rebel she was both demure and daring. “I wonder if I might ask you some questions—the intimate kind that people think but don't say—at least, they don't say them to you.”

“It would be a pleasure to me to be put on the witness-stand. I should probably pick up some interesting sidelights about myself.”

“Very well.” Her eyes danced with excitement. “You're what they call a buccaneer of business, aren't you?”

Here were certainly diverting pastures. “I believe I have been called that; but, then, I've had the hardest names in the dictionary thrown at me so often that I can't be sure.”

“I suppose you are perfectly unscrupulous in a business way—stop at nothing to gain your point?”

He took her impudence smilingly. “'Unscrupulous' isn't the word I use when I explain myself to myself, but as an unflattered description, such as one my enemies might use to describe me, I dare say it is fairly accurate.”

“I wonder why. Do you dispense with a conscience entirely?”

“Well, you see, Miss Balfour, if I nursed a New England conscience I could stand up to the attacks of the Consolidated about as long as a dove to a hawk. I meet fire with fire to avoid being wiped off the map of the mining world. I play the game. I can't afford to keep a button on my foil when my opponent doesn't.”

She nodded an admission of his point. “And yet there are rules of the game to be observed, aren't there? The Consolidated people claim you steal their ore, I believe.” Her slanted eyes studied the effect of her daring.

He laughed grimly. “Do they? I claim they steal mine. It's rather difficult to have an exact regard for mine and thine before the courts decide which is which.”

“And meanwhile, in order to forestall an adverse decision, you are working extra shifts to get all the ore out of the disputed veins.”

“Precisely, just as they are,” he admitted dryly. “Then the side that loses will not be so disappointed, since the value of the veins will be less. Besides, stealing ore openly doesn't count. It is really a moral obligation in a fight like this,” he explained.

“A moral obligation?”

“Exactly. You can't hit a trust over the head with the decalogue. Modern business is war. Somebody is bound to get hurt. If I win out it will be because I put up a better fight than the Consolidated and cripple it enough to make it let me alone. I'm looking out for myself, and I don't pretend to be any better than my neighbors. When you get down to bed-rock honesty, I've never seen it in business. We're all of us as honest as we think we can afford to be. I haven't noticed that there is any premium on it in Mesa. Might makes right. I'll win if I'm strong enough; I'll fail if I'm not. That's the law of life. I didn't make this strenuous little world, and I'm not responsible for it. If I play I have to take the rules the way they are, not the way I should like them to be. I'm not squeamish, and I'm not a hypocrite. Simon Harley isn't squeamish, either, but he happens to be a hypocrite. So there you have the difference between us.”

The president of the Mesa Ore-Producing Company set forth his creed jauntily, without the least consciousness for apology of the fact that it happened to be divorced from morality. Its frank disregard of ethical considerations startled Miss Balfour without shocking her. She liked his candor, even though it condemned him. It was really very nice of him to take her impudence so well. He certainly wasn't a prig, anyway.

“I should like to know whether it is true that you own the courts of Yuba County and have the decisions of the judges written at your lawyer's offices in cases between you and the Consolidated.”

“If I do,” he answered easily, “I am doing just what the Consolidated would do in case they had been so fortunate as to have won the last election and seated their judicial candidates. One expects a friendly leaning from the men one put in office.”

“Isn't the judiciary supposed to be the final, incorruptible bulwark of the nation?” she pretended to want to know.

“I believe it is supposed to be.”

“Isn't it rather—loading the dice, to interfere with the courts?”

“I find the dice already loaded. I merely substitute others of my own.”

“You don't seem a bit ashamed of yourself.”

“I'm ashamed of the Consolidated”—he smiled.

“That's a comfortable position to be able to take.” She fixed him for a moment with her charming frown of interrogation. “You won't mind my asking these questions? I'm trying to decide whether you are too much of a pirate for me. Perhaps when I've made up my mind you won't want me,” she added.

“Oh, I'll want you!” Then coolly: “Shall we wait till you make up your mind before announcing the engagement?”

“Don't be too sure,” she flashed at him.

“I'm horribly unsure.”

“Of course, you're laughing at me, just as you would”—she tilted a sudden sideways glance at him—“if I asked you why you wanted to marry me.”

“Oh, if you take me that way——”

She interrupted airily. “I'm trying to make up my mind whether to take you at all.”

“You certainly have a direct way of getting at things.” He studied appreciatively her piquant, tilted face; the long, graceful lines of her slender, perfect figure. “I take it you don't want the sentimental reason for my wishing to marry you, though I find that amply justified. But if you want another, you must still look to yourself for it. My business leads me to appreciate values correctly. When I desire you to sit at the head of my table, to order my house, my judgment justifies itself. I have a fancy always for the best. When I can't gratify it I do without.”

“Thank you.” She made him a gay little mock curtsy. “I had heard you were no carpet knight, Mr. Ridgway. But rumor is a lying jade, for I am being told—am I not?—that in case I don't take pity on you, the lone future of a celibate stretches drear before you.”

“Oh, certainly.”

Having come to the end of that passage, she tried another. “A young man told me yesterday you were a fighter. He said he guessed you would stand the acid. What did he mean?”

Ridgway was an egoist from head to heel. He could voice his own praises by the hour when necessary, but now he side-stepped her little trap to make him praise himself at second-hand. “Better ask him.”

“Are you a fighter, then?” Had he known her and her whimsies less well, he might have taken her audacity for innocence.

“One couldn't lie down, you know.”

Her eyes, glinting sparks of mischief, marveled at him with mock reverence, but she knew in her heart that her mockery was a fraud. She did admire him; admired him even while she disapproved the magnificent lawlessness of him.

For Waring Ridgway looked every inch the indomitable fighter he was. He stood six feet to the line, straight and strong, carrying just sufficient bulk to temper his restless energy without impairing its power. Nor did the face offer any shock of disappointment to the promise given by the splendid figure. Salient-jawed and forceful, set with cool, flinty, blue-gray eyes, no place for weakness could be found there. One might have read a moral callousness, a color-blindness in points of rectitude, but when the last word had been said, its masterful capability remained the outstanding impression.

“Am I out of the witness-box?” he presently asked, still leaning against the mantel from which he had been watching her impersonally as an intellectual entertainment.

“I think so.”

“And the verdict?”

“You know what it ought to be,” she accused.

“Fortunately, kisses go by favor, not by merit.”

“You don't even make a pretense of deserving.”

“Give me credit for being an honest rogue, at least.”

“But a rogue?” she insisted lightly.

“Oh, a question of definitions. I could make a very good case for myself as an honest man.”

“If you thought it worth while?”

“If I didn't happen to want to be square with you”—he smiled.

“You're so fond of me, I suppose, that you couldn't bear to have me think too well of you.”

“You know how fond of you I am.”

“Yes, it is a pity about you,” she scoffed.

“Believe me, yes,” he replied cheerfully.

She drummed with her pink finger-tips on her chin, studying him meditatively. To do him justice, she had to admit that he did not even pretend much. He wanted her because she was a step up in the social ladder, and, in his opinion, the most attractive girl he knew. That he was not in love with her relieved the situation, as Miss Balfour admitted to herself in impersonal moods. But there were times when she could have wished he were. She felt it to be really due her attractions that his pulses should quicken for her, and in the interests of experience she would have liked to see how he would make love if he really meant it from the heart and not the will.

“It's really an awful bother,” she sighed.

“Referring to the little problem of your future?”

“Can't make up your mind whether I come in?”

“No.” She looked up brightly, with an effect of impulsiveness. “I don't suppose you want to give me another week.”

“A reprieve! But why? You're going to marry me.”

“I suppose so.” She laughed. “I wish I could have my cake, and eat it, too.”

“It would be a moral iniquity to encourage such a system of ethics.”

“So you won't give me a week?” she sighed. “All sorts of things might have happened in that week. I shall always believe that the fairy prince would have come for me.”

“Believe that he has come,” he exclaimed.

“Oh, I didn't mean a prince of pirates, though there is a triumph, too, in having tamed a pirate chief to prosaic matrimony.”

“Am I being told that I am to be the happiest pirate alive?”

“I expect you are.”

His big hand gripped hers till it tingled. She caught his eye on a roving quest to the door.

“We don't have to do that,” she announced hurriedly, with an embarrassed flush.

“I don't do it because I have to,” he retorted, kissing her on the lips.

She fell back, protesting. “Under the circumstances——”

The butler, with a card on a tray, interrupted silently. She glanced at the card, devoutly grateful his impassive majesty's entrance had not been a moment earlier.

“Show him in here.”

“The fairy prince, five minutes too late?” asked Ridgway, when the man had gone.

For answer she handed him the card, yet he thought the pink that flushed her cheek was something more pronounced than usual. But he was willing to admit there might be a choice of reasons for that.

“Lyndon Hobart” was the name he read on the pasteboard.

“I think the Consolidated is going to have its innings. I should like to stay, of course, but I fear I must plead a subsequent engagement and leave the field to the enemy.”

Pronouncing “Mr. Hobart” impersonally, the butler vanished. The new-comer came forward with the quiet assurance of the born aristocrat. He was a slender, well-knit man, dressed fastidiously, with clear-cut, classical features; cool, keen eyes, and a gentle, you-be-damned manner to his inferiors. Beside him Ridgway bulked too large, too florid. His ease seemed a little obvious, his prosperity overemphasized. Even his voice, strong and reliant, lacked the tone of gentle blood that Hobart had inherited with his nice taste.

When Miss Balfour said: “I think you know each other,” the manager of the Consolidated bowed with stiff formality, but his rival laughed genially and said: “Oh, yes, I know Mr. Hobart.” The geniality was genuine enough, but through it ran a note of contempt. Hobart read in it a veiled taunt. To him it seemed to say: “Yes, I have met him, and beaten him at every turn of the road, though he has been backed by a power with resources a hundred times as great as mine.”

In his parting excuses to Miss Balfour, Ridgway's audacity crystallized in words that Hobart could only regard as a shameless challenge. “I regret that an appointment with Judge Purcell necessitates my leaving such good company,” he said urbanely.

Purcell was the judge before whom was pending a suit between the Consolidated and the Mesa Ore-Producing Company, to determine the ownership of the Never-Say-Die Mine; and it was current report that Ridgway owned him as absolutely as he did the automobile waiting for him now at the door.

If Ridgway expected his opponent to pay his flippant gibe the honor of repartee he was disappointed. To be sure, Hobart, admirably erect in his slender grace, was moved to a slight, disdainful smile, but it evidenced scarcely the appreciation that anybody less impervious to criticism than Ridgway would have cared to see.

II.

When next Virginia Balfour saw Waring Ridgway she was driving her trap down one of the hit-or-miss streets of Mesa, where derricks, shaft-houses, and gray slag dumps shoulder ornate mansions conglomerate of many unharmonious details of architecture. To Miss Balfour these composites and their owners would have been joys unalloyed except for the microbe of society ambition that was infecting the latter, and transforming them from simple, robust, self-reliant Westerners into a class of servile, nondescript newly-rich, that resembled their unfettered selves as much as tame bears do the grizzlies of their own Rockies. As she had once complained smilingly to Hobart, she had not come to Montana to study ragged edges of the social fringe. She might have done that in New York.

Virginia was still a block or two from the court-house on the hill when it emptied into the street a concourse of excited men. That this was an occasion of some sort it was easy to guess, and of what sort she began to have an inkling when Ridgway came out, the center of a circle of congratulating admirers. She was obliged to admit that he accepted their applause without in the least losing his head. Indeed, he took it as imperturbably as did Hobart, against whom a wave of the enthusiasm seemed to be directed in the form of a jeer, when he passed down the steps with Mott, one of the Consolidated lawyers. Miss Balfour timed her approach to meet Hobart at a right angle.

“What is it all about?” she asked, after he had reached her side.

“Judge Purcell has just decided the Never-Say-Die case in favor of Mr. Ridgway and against the Consolidated.”

“Is that a great victory for him?”

“Yes, it's a victory, though of course we appeal,” admitted Hobart. “But we can't say we didn't expect it,” he added cheerfully.

“Mayn't I give you a lift if you are going down-town?” she said quickly, for Ridgway, having detached himself from the group, was working toward her, and she felt an instinctive sympathy for the man who had lost. Furthermore, she had something she wanted to tell him before he heard it on the tongue of rumor.

“Since you are so kind;” and he climbed to the place beside her.

“Congratulate me, Miss Balfour,” demanded Ridgway, as he shook hands with her, nodding coolly at her companion. “I'm a million dollars richer than I was an hour ago. I have met the enemy and he is mine.”

Miss Balfour, resenting the bad taste of his jeer at the man who sat beside her, misunderstood him promptly. “Did you say you had met the enemy and won his mine?”

He laughed. “You're a good one!”

“Thank you very much for this unsolicited testimonial,” she said gravely. “In the meantime, to avoid a congestion of traffic, we'll be moving, if you will kindly give me back my front left wheel.”

He did not lift his foot from the spoke on which it rested. “My congratulations,” he reminded her.

“I wish you all the joy in your victory that you deserve, and I hope the supreme court will reaffirm the decision of Judge Purcell, if it is a just one,” was the form in which she acceded to his demand.

She flicked her whip, and Ridgway fell back, laughing. “You've been subsidized by the Consolidated,” he shouted after her.

Hobart watched silently the businesslike directness with which the girl handled the ribbons. She looked every inch the thoroughbred in her well made covert coat and dainty driving-gauntlets. The grace of the alert, slender figure, the perfect poise of the beautiful little tawny head, proclaimed her distinction no less certainly than the fine modeling of the mobile face. It was a distinction that stirred the pulse of his emotion and disarmed his keen, critical sense. Ridgway could study her with an amused, detached interest, but Hobart's admiration had traveled past that point. He found it as impossible to define her charm as to evade it. Her inheritance of blood and her environment should have made her a finished product of civilization, but her salty breeziness, her verve, vivid as a flame at times, disturbed delightfully the poise that held her when in repose.

When Miss Balfour spoke, it was to ask abruptly: “Is it really his mine?”

“Judge Purcell says so.”

“But do you think so—down in the bottom of your heart?”

“Wouldn't I naturally be prejudiced?”

“I suppose you would. Everybody in Mesa seems to have taken sides either with Mr. Ridgway or the Consolidated. Still, you have an opinion. Is he what his friends proclaim him—the generous-hearted independent fighting against trust domination? Or is he merely an audacious ore-thief, as his enemies say? The truth must be somewhere.”

“It seems to lie mostly in point of view here, the angle of observation being determined by interest,” he answered.

She liked it in him that he would not use the opportunity she had made to sneer at his adversary, none the less because she knew that Ridgway might not have been so scrupulous in his place. That Lyndon Hobart's fastidious instincts for fair play had stood in the way of his success in the fight to down Ridgway she had repeatedly heard. Of late, rumors had persisted in reporting dissatisfaction with his management of the Consolidated at the great financial center on Broadway which controlled the big copper company. Simon Harley, the dominating factor in the octopus whose tentacles reached out in every direction to monopolize the avenues of wealth, demanded of his subordinates results. Methods were no concern of his, and failure could not be explained to him. He wanted Ridgway crushed and the pulse of the copper production regulated by the Consolidated. Instead, he had seen Ridgway rise steadily to power and wealth despite his efforts to wipe him off the slate. Hobart was perfectly aware that his head was likely to fall when Harley heard of Purcell's decision in regard to the Never-Say-Die.

“He certainly is an amazing man,” Virginia mused, her fiancé in mind. “It would be interesting to discover what he can't do—along utilitarian lines, I mean. Is he as good a miner underground as he is in the courts?” she flung out.

“He is the shrewdest investor I know. Time and again he has leased or bought apparently worthless claims, and made them pay inside of a few weeks. Take the Taurus as a case in point. He struck rich ore in a fortnight. Other men had done development work for years and found nothing.”

“I'm naturally interested in knowing all about him, because I have just become engaged to him,” explained Miss Virginia, as calmly as if her pulse were not fluttering a hundred to the minute.

Virginia was essentially a sportsman and a gentleman. She did not flinch from the guns when the firing was heavy. It had been remarked of her even as a child that she liked to get unpleasant things over with as soon as possible, rather than postpone them. Once, ætat eight, she had marched in to her mother like a stoic and announced: “I've come to be whipped, momsie, 'cause I broke that horrid little Nellie Vaile's doll. I did it on purpose, cause I was mad at her. I'm glad I broke it, so there!”

Hobart paled slightly beneath his outdoors Western tan, but his eyes met hers very steadily and fairly. “I wish you happiness, Miss Balfour, from the bottom of my heart.”

She nodded a brisk “Thank you,” and directed her attention again to the horses.

“Take him by and large, Mr. Ridgway is the most capable, energetic, and far-sighted business man I have ever known. He has a bigger grasp of things than almost any financier in the country. I think you'll find he will go far,” he said, choosing his words with care to say as much for Waring Ridgway as he honestly could.

“I have always thought so,” agreed Virginia.

She had reason for thinking so in that young man's remarkable career. When Waring Ridgway had first come to Mesa he had been a draftsman for the Consolidated at five dollars a day. He was just out of Cornell, and his assets consisted mainly of a supreme confidence in himself and an imposing presence. He was a born leader, and he flung himself into the raw, turbid life of the mining town with a readiness that had not a little to do with his subsequent success.

That success began to take tangible form almost from the first. A small, independent smelter that had for long been working at a loss was about to fall into the hands of the Consolidated when Ridgway bought it on promises to pay, made good by raising money on a flying trip he took to the East. His father died about this time and left him fifty thousand dollars, with which he bought the Taurus, a mine in which several adventurous spirits had dropped small fortunes. He acquired other properties; a lease here, an interest there. It began to be observed that he bought always with judgment. He seemed to have the touch of Midas. Where other men had lost money he made it.

When the officers of the Consolidated woke up to the menace of his presence one of their lawyers called on him. The agent of the Consolidated smiled at his luxurious offices, which looked more like a woman's boudoir than the business place of a Western miner. But that was merely part of Ridgway's vanity, and did not in the least interfere with his predatory instincts. People who walked into that parlor to do business played fly to his spider.

The lawyer had been ready to patronize the upstart who had ventured so boldly into the territory of the great trust, but one glance at the clear-cut, resolute face of the young man changed his mind.

“I've come to make you an offer for your smelter, Mr. Ridgway,” he began. “We'll take it off your hands at the price it cost you.”

“Not for sale, Mr. Bartel.”

“Very well. We'll give you ten thousand more than you paid for it.”

“You misunderstood me. It is not for sale.”

“Oh, come! You bought it to sell to us. What can you do with it?”

“Run it,” suggested Ridgway.

“Without ore?”

“You forget that I own a few properties, and have leases on others. When the Taurus begins producing, I'll have enough to keep the smelter going.”

“When the Taurus begins producing?”—Bartel smiled skeptically. “Didn't Johnson and Leroy drop fortunes on that expectation?”

“I'll bet five thousand dollars we make a strike within two weeks.”

“Chimerical!” pronounced the gray-beard as he rose to go, with an air of finality. “Better sell the smelter while you have the chance.”

“Think not,” disagreed Ridgway.

At the door the lawyer turned. “Oh, there's another matter! It had slipped my mind.” He spoke with rather elaborate carelessness. “It seems that there is a little triangle—about ten feet long and four feet across—wedged in between the Mary K, the Diamond King, and the Marcus Daly. For some reason we accidentally omitted to file on it. Our chief engineer finds that you have taken it up, Mr. Ridgway. It is really of no value, but it is in the heart of our properties, and so it ought to belong to us. Of course, it is of no use to you. There isn't any possible room to sink a shaft. We'll take it from you if you like, and even pay you a nominal price. For what will you sell?”

Ridgway lit a cigar before he answered: “One million dollars.”

“What?” screamed Bartel.

“Not a cent less. I call it the Trust-Buster. Before I'm through, you'll find it is worth that to me.”

The lawyer reported him demented to the Consolidated officials, who declared war on him from that day.

They found the young adventurer more than prepared for them. He had already picked up an intimate knowledge of the hundreds of veins and cross-veins that traverse the Mesa copper-fields, and he had delved patiently into the tangled history of the litigation that the defective mining laws in pioneer days had made possible. When the Consolidated attempted to harass him by legal process, he countered by instituting a score of suits against the company within the week. These had to do with wills, insanity cases, extra lateral rights, mine titles, and land and water rights. Wherever Ridgway saw room for an entering wedge to dispute the title of the Consolidated, he drove a new suit home. To say the least, the trust found it annoying to be enjoined from working its mines, to be cited for contempt before judges employed in the interests of its opponent, to be served with restraining orders when clearly within its rights. But when these adverse legal decisions began to affect vital issues, the Consolidated looked for reasons why Ridgway should control the courts. It found them in politics.

For Ridgway was already dominating the politics of Yuba County, displaying an amazing acumen and a surprising ability as a stump-speaker. He posed as a friend of the people, an enemy of the trust. He declared an eight-hour day for his own miners, and called upon the Consolidated to do the same. Hobart refused, acting on orders from Broadway, and fifteen thousand Consolidated miners went to the polls and reelected Ridgway's corrupt judges, in spite of the fight the Consolidated was making against them.

Meanwhile, Ridgway's colossal audacity made the Consolidated's copper pay for the litigation with which he was harassing it. In following his ore-veins, or what he claimed to be his veins, he crossed boldly into the territory of the enemy. By the law of extra lateral rights, a man is entitled to mine within the lines of other property than his own provided he is following the dip of a vein which has its apex in his claim. Ridgway's experts were prepared to swear that all the best veins in the field apexed in his property. Pending decisions of the courts, they assumed it, tunneling through granite till they tapped the veins of the Consolidated mines, meanwhile enjoining that company from working the very ore of which Ridgway was robbing it.

More than once the great trust back of the Consolidated had him close to ruin, but Ridgway's alert brain and supreme audacity carried him through. From their mines or from his own he always succeeded in extracting enough ore to meet his obligations when they fell due. His powerful enemy found him most dangerous when it seemed to have him with his back to the wall. Then unexpectedly would fall some crushing blow that put the financial kings of Broadway on the defensive long enough for him to slip out of the corner into which they had driven him. Greatly daring, he had the successful cavalryman's instinct of risking much to gain much. A gambler, his enemies characterized him fitly enough. But it was also true, as Mesa phrased it, that he gambled “with the lid off,” playing for large stakes, neither asking nor giving quarter.

At the end of five years of desperate fighting, the freebooter was more strongly entrenched than he had been at any previous time. The railroads, pledged to give rebates to the Consolidated, had been forced by Ridgway, under menace of adverse legislation from the men he controlled at the State-house, to give him secretly a still better rate than the trust. He owned the county courts, he was supported by the people, and had become a political dictator, and the financial outlook for him grew brighter every day.

Such were the conditions when Judge Purcell handed down his Never-Say-Die decision. Within an hour Hobart was reading a telegram in cipher from the Broadway headquarters. It announced the immediate departure for Mesa of the great leader of the octopus. Simon Harley, the Napoleon of finance, was coming out to attend personally to the destruction of the buccaneer who had dared to fire on the trust flag.

Before night some one of his corps of spies in the employ of the enemy carried the news to Waring Ridgway. He smiled grimly, his blue-gray eyes hardening to the temper of steel. Here at last was a foeman worthy of his metal; one as lawless, unscrupulous, daring, and far-seeing as himself, with a hundred times his resources.

III.

The solitary rider stood for a moment in silhouette against the somber sky-line, his keen eyes searching the lowering clouds.

“Getting its back up for a blizzard,” he muttered to himself, as he touched his pony with the spur.

Dark, heavy billows banked in the west, piling over each other as they drove forward. Already the advance-guard had swept the sunlight from the earth, except for a flutter of it that still protested near the horizon. Scattering snowflakes were flying, and even in a few minutes the temperature had fallen many degrees.

The rider knew the signs of old. He recognized the sudden stealthy approach that transformed a sun-drenched, friendly plain into an unknown arctic waste. Not for nothing had he been last year one of a search-party to find the bodies of three miners frozen to death not fifty yards from their own cabin. He understood perfectly what it meant to be caught away from shelter when the driven white pall wiped out distance and direction, made long familiar landmarks strange, and numbed the will to a helpless surrender. The knowledge of it was spur enough to make him ride fast while he still retained the sense of direction.

But silently, steadily, the storm increased, and he was forced to slacken his pace. As the blinding snow grew thick, the sound of the wind deadened, unable to penetrate the dense white wall through which he forced his way. The world narrowed to a space whose boundaries he could touch with his extended hands. In this white mystery that wrapped him nothing was left but stinging snow, bitter cold, and the silence of the dead.

So he thought one moment, and the next was almost flung by his swerving horse into a vehicle that blocked the road. Its blurred outlines presently resolved themselves into an automobile, crouched in the bottom of which was an inert huddle of humanity.

He shouted, forgetting that no voice could carry through the muffled scream of the storm. When he got no answer he guided his horse close to the machine and reached down to snatch away the rug already heavy with snow. To his surprise, it was a girl's despairing face that looked up at him. She tried to rise, but fell back, her muscles too numb to serve.

“Don't leave me,” she implored, stretching her arms toward him.

He reached out and lifted her to his horse. “Are you alone?”

“Yes. He went for help when the machine broke down—before the storm,” she sobbed. He had to put his ear to her mouth to catch the words.

“Come, keep up your heart.” There was that in his voice pealed like a trumpet-call to her courage.

“I'm freezing to death,” she moaned.

She was exhausted and benumbed, her lips blue, her flesh gray. It was plain to him that she had reached the limit of endurance, that she was ready to sink into the last torpor. He ripped open his overcoat and shook the snow from it, them gathered her close so that she might get the warmth of his body. The rugs from the automobile he wrapped round them both.

“Courage!” he cried. “There's a miner's cabin near. Don't give up, child.”

But his own courage was of the heart and will, not of the head. He had small hope of reaching the deserted shack at the entrance of Dead Man's Gulch, or, if he could struggle so far, of finding it in the white swirl that clutched at them. Near and far are words not coined for a blizzard. He might stagger past with safety only a dozen feet from him. He might lie down and die at the very threshold of the door. Or he might wander in an opposite direction and miss the cabin by a mile.

Yet it was not in the man to give up. He must stagger on till he could no longer stand. He must fight so long as life was in him. He must crawl forward, though his forlorn hope had vanished. And he did. When the worn-out horse slipped down and could not be coaxed to its feet again, he picked up the bundle of rugs and plowed forward blindly, soul and body racked, but teeth still set fast with the primal instinct never to give up. The intense cold of the air, thick with gray sifted ice, searched the warmth from his body and sapped his vitality. His numbed legs doubled under him like springs. He was down and up again a dozen times, but always the call of life drove him on, dragging his helpless burden with him.

That he did find the safety of the cabin in the end was due to no wisdom on his part. He had followed unconsciously the dip of the ground that led him into the little draw where it had been built, and by sheer luck stumbled against it. His strength was gone, but the door gave to his weight, and he buckled across the threshold like a man helpless with drink. He dropped to the floor, ready to sink into a stupor, but he shook sleep from him and dragged himself to his feet. Presently his numb fingers found a match, a newspaper, and some wood. As soon as he had control over his hands he fell to chafing hers. He slipped off her dainty shoes, pathetically inadequate for such an experience, and rubbed her feet back to feeling. She had been torpid, but when the blood began to circulate she cried out in agony at the pain.

The childlike appeal of the flinching violet eyes in the tortured face moved him greatly. He was accredited a hard man, not without reason. His eyes were those of a gambler, cold and vigilant. It was said that he could follow an undeviating course without relenting at the ruin and misery wrought upon others by his operations. But the helpless loveliness of this exquisitely dainty child-woman, the sense of intimacy bred of a common peril endured, and of the strangeness of their environment, carried him out of himself and swept them away from convention. To neither of them did it seem fantastic that he should take her in his arms and cheer her while he walked the floor, just as if she had been the child they both for the moment conceived her, any more than that she should cling convulsively to him when the fierce pain tingled unbearably, or that, worn out with fatigue and pain, she should sob herself to sleep in his arms, her head on his shoulder and her dark hair brushing his cheek.

Troubled dreams pursued her in her sleep, making her live again the terrific struggle through which they had just passed. She clung close to him, her arm creeping round his neck for safety. He was a man not given to fine scruples, but all the best in him responded to her unconscious trust.

It was so she found herself when she awakened, stiff from her cramped position. She slipped at once to the floor and sat there drying her lace skirts, the sweet piquancy of her childish face set out by the leaping fire-glow that lit and shadowed her delicate coloring. Outside in the gray darkness raged the death from which he had snatched her by a miracle. Beyond—a million miles away—the world whose claim had loosened on them was going through its routine of lies and love, of hypocrisies and heroisms, But here were just they two, flung back to the primordial type by the fierce battle for existence that had encompassed then—Adam and Eve in the garden, one to one, all else forgot, all other ties and obligations for the moment obliterated. Had they not struggled, heart beating against heart, with the breath of death icing them, and come out alive? Was their world not contracted to a space ten feet by twelve, shut in from every other planet by an illimitable stretch of storm?

“Where should I have been if you had not found me?” she murmured, her haunting eyes fixed on the flames.

“But I should have found you—no matter where you had been, I should have found you.”

The words seemed to leap from him of themselves. He was sure he had not meant to speak them, to voice so soon the claim that seemed to him so natural and reasonable.

She considered his words and found delight in acquiescing at once. The unconscious demand for life, for love, of her starved soul had never been gratified. But he had come to her through that fearful valley of death, because he must, because it had always been meant he should.

Her lustrous eyes, big with faith, looked up and met his.

The far, wise voices of the world were storm-deadened. They cried no warning to these drifting hearts. How should they know in that moment when their souls reached toward each other that the wisdom of the ages had decreed their yearning futile?

IV.

She must have fallen asleep there, for when she opened her eyes it was day. Underneath her was a lot of sacking he had found in the cabin, and tucked about her were the automobile rugs. For a moment her brain, still sodden with sleep, struggled helplessly with her surroundings. She looked at the smoky rafters without understanding, and her eyes searched the cabin wonderingly for her maid. When she remembered, her first thought was to look for the man. That he had gone, she saw with instinctive terror.

But not without leaving a message. She found his penciled note, weighted for security by a dollar, at the edge of the hearth.

“Gone on a foraging expedition. Back in an hour, Little Partner,” was all it said. The other man also had promised to be back in an hour, and he had not come, but the strong chirography of the note, recalling the resolute strength of this man's face, brought content to her eyes. He had said he would come back. She rested secure in that pledge.

The fire had burned to a glow of red coals. She busied herself with renewing it, and afterward, finding a worn-out broom, she swept the rough floor. With a smiling heart she did her unaccustomed tasks, anticipating his commendation when he should return. To play at housekeeping for her new-found hero warmed her with a sense of childish pleasure. All her life her least whims had been ministered to; she was enjoying her first attempt at service.

When he came, it was with much feet stamping and shaking of snow. He was glowing with the heat of exercise, for he had tramped nearly two miles through drifts from three to five feet deep, carrying with him on the return trip a box of provisions. She fluttered about him, helping him out of his coat and dragging him to the fire.

His quick eyes noticed the swept floor. “I'm not the only member of the firm that has been working. Aren't you afraid of blistering these little hands?” he asked gaily, taking one of them in his and touching the soft palm gently with the tip of his finger.

“I should preserve those blisters in alcohol to show that I've really been of some use,” she answered, happy in his approval.

“I found the machine where we left it, buried in four feet of snow. You needn't be afraid that anybody will run away with it for a day or two. The pantry was cached pretty deep itself, but I dug it out.”

Her shy glance admired the sturdy lines of his powerful frame. “I am afraid it must have been a terrible task to get there through the blizzard.”

“Oh, the blizzard is past. You never saw a finer, more bracing morning. It's a day for the gods,” he laughed boyishly.

She could have conceived no Olympian more heroic than he, and certainly none with so compelling a vitality. “Such a warm, kind light in them!” she thought of the eyes others had found hard and calculating.

It was lucky that the lunch the automobilists had brought from Avalanche was ample and as yet untouched. The hotel waiter, who had attended to the packing of it, had fortunately been used to reckon with outdoor Montana appetites instead of cloyed New York ones. They unpacked the little hamper with much gaiety. Everything was frozen solid, and the wine had cracked its bottle.

“Shipped right through on our private refrigerator-car. That cold-storage chicken looks the finest that ever happened. What's this rolled up in tissue-paper? Deviled eggs and ham sandwiches and caviare, not to speak of claret frappé. I'm certainly grateful to the gentleman finished in ebony who provisioned us for this siege. He'll never know what a tip he missed by not being here to collect.”

“Here's jelly, too, and cake,” she said, exploring with him.

“Not to mention peaches and pears. Oh, this is luck of a special brand! I was expecting to put up at Starvation Camp. Now we may name it Point Plenty.”

“Or Fort Salvation,” she suggested shyly. “Because you brought me here to save my life.”

She was such a child, in spite of her charming grown-up airs, that he played make-believe with a zest that surprised himself when he came to think of it. She elected him captain of Fort Salvation, with full power of life and death over the garrison, and he appointed her second in command. His first general order was to put the garrison on two meals a day.

She clapped her little hands, eyes sparkling with excitement. “Are we really snow-bound? Must we go on half rations?”

“It is the part of wisdom, lieutenant,” he answered, smiling at her enthusiasm. “We don't know how long this siege is going to last. If it should set in to snow, we may be here several days before the relief-party reaches us.” But, though he spoke cheerfully, he was aware of sinister possibilities in the situation.

After breakfast he found a broken shovel, and with it cleaned a path to the grove of trees behind the house, where he laid in a supply of fuel. She came out and watched him, laughing at the bungling job he made of it with his makeshift tools. “Robinson Crusoe,” she called him, and presently insisted on helping. He let her draw wood to the cabin on the improvised sled he had constructed, but when her face began to show blue with the cold, he said she must go into the house.

“I don't want to,” she pouted. Whereupon he fell into a military attitude and said from his throat: “Commanding officer's orders, lieutenant.” At once she brought her heels together, saluted, and wheeled for the cabin.

From the grimy window she watched his broad-shouldered vigor, waving her hand whenever his face was turned her way. He worked like a Titan, reveling in the joy of physical labor, but it was long past noon before he finished and came striding to the hut.

They made a delightful afternoon of it, living in the land of Never Was. For one source of her charm lay in the gay, childlike whimsicality of her imagination. She believed in fairies and heroes with all her heart, which with her was an organ not located in her brain. The delicious gurgle of gaiety in her laugh was a new find to him in feminine attractions.

There had been many who thought the career of this pirate of industry beggared fiction, though few had found his flinty personality a radiator of romance. But this convent-nurtured child had made a discovery in men, one out of the rut of the tailor-made, convention-bound society youths to whom her experience for the most part had been limited. She delighted in his masterful strength, in the confidence of his careless dominance. She liked to see that look of power in his gray-blue eyes softened to the droll, half-tender expression with which he played the game of make-believe. There were no to-morrows; to-day marked the limit of time for them. By tacit consent they lived only in the present, shutting out deliberately from their knowledge of each other that past which was not common to both.

The long winter evening fell early, and they dined while it was still light, considering merrily how much they might with safety eat and yet leave enough for breakfast to-morrow. Afterward they sat before the fire, in the shadow and shine of the flickering logs, happy and content in each other's presence. She dreamed, and he, watching her, dreamed, too. The wild, sweet wonder of life surged through them, touching their squalid surroundings to the high mystery of things unreal.

The strangeness of it was that he was a man of large and not very creditable experience of women, yet her deep, limpid eyes, her sweet voice, the immature piquancy of her movements that was the expression of her, had stirred his imagination more potently than if he had been the veriest schoolboy nursing a downy lip. He could not keep his eyes from this slender, exquisite girl, so dainty and graceful in her mobile piquancy. Fire and passion were in his heart and soul, restraint and repression in his speech and manner. For the fire and passion in him were pure and clean as the winds that sweep the hills.

But for the girl—she was so little mistress of her heart that she had no prescience of the meaning of this sweet content that filled her. And the voices that should have warned her were silent, busy behind the purple hills with lies and love and laughter and tears.

Though he made light of his misgivings, the man lived an anxious hour next day when they ate the last fragments of their food for breakfast. He knew he must leave her, but he found it hard to break the word, and made excuses to himself for postponing it. But when his watch told him it lacked only one hour of noon, he brought himself up with a turn.

Her big eyes dilated when he had spoken. “And leave me here alone?”

“I must, dear.” The word fell from his lips quite naturally. “I must go to bring help.”

“Oh, no, no! Take me with you. I am strong. You don't know how strong I am. I should die if you left me here alone in all this snow.”

He shook his head. “I would take you if I could. You know that. But it's a man's fight, girl. I shall have to stand up and take it hour after hour till I reach the C. B. Ranch. I could never get you through.”

“I'm not afraid with you. But if you go away—oh, I can't stand it! You don't know—you don't know.” She buried her face in her hands.

“Yes, I know, dear. But you must be brave. I'll come back as soon as I can. You must think of every minute as being one nearer to the time of my return.”

“You will think me a dreadful coward, but I can't help it. I am afraid to stay alone. There's nothing in the world but mountains of snow. They are horrible—like death—except when you are here. I'm not afraid then.”

Her dear eyes coaxed him to stay. The mad longing was in him to kiss the rosy little mouth with the queer alluring droop to its corners. It was a strange thing how with that arched twist to her eyebrows and with that smile which came and went like sunshine in her eyes, she toppled his lifelong creed. The cardinal tenet of his faith had been a belief in strength. He had first been drawn to Virginia by reason of her pluck and her power. Yet this child's very weakness was her fountain of strength. She cried out with pain, and he counted it an asset of virtue in her. She acknowledged herself a coward, and his heart went out to her because of it. The battle assignments of life were not for the soft curves and shy winsomeness of this dainty lamb.

“You will be brave. I expect you to be brave, lieutenant.” Words of love and comfort were crowding to his brain, but he would not let them out.

“How long will you be gone?” she sobbed.

“I may possibly get back before midnight, but you mustn't begin to expect me until to-morrow morning, perhaps not till to-morrow afternoon.”

“Oh, I couldn't—I couldn't stay here at night alone. Don't go, please. I'll not get hungry, truly I won't, and to-morrow they will find us.”

He rose, his face working. “I must go, child. It's the thing to do. I wish to Heaven it weren't. You must think of yourself as quite safe here. You are safe. Don't make it hard for me to go, dear.”

“I am a coward. But I can't help it. There is so much snow—and the mountains are so big.” She tried valiantly to crush down her sobs. “But go. I'll—I'll not be afraid.”

He strode to the window, his teeth set. A moment later he was beside her again.

“Come—look here!”

Her eye followed his finger up the mountain-trail to a bend round which men and horses were coming.

“It's a relief-party,” he said, and caught up his field-glasses to look them over more certainly. Six men on horseback were breaking a way down the trail, black spots against the background of white. “I guess Fort Salvation's about to be relieved,” he added grimly, following the party through the glasses.

She touched the back of his hand with a finger. “Are you glad?” she asked softly.

“No, by Heaven!” he cried, lowering his glasses swiftly.

As he looked into her eyes the blood rushed to his brain with a surge. Her face turned to his unconsciously, and their lips met.

“And I don't even know your name,” she murmured.

“Waring Ridgway; and yours?”

“Aline Hope,” she said absently. Then a hot flush ran over, the girlish face. “No, no, I had forgotten. I was married last week.”

The gates of paradise, open for two days, clanged to on Ridgway. He stared out with unseeing eyes into the silent wastes of snow. The roaring in his ears and the mountainsides that churned before his eyes were reflections of the blizzard raging within him.

“I'll never forget—never,” he heard her falter, and her voice was a thousand miles away.

The first of the trail-breakers plowed his way to the cabin and dismounted hurriedly. He was a tall man, gray and seventy, of massive frame and gaunt, still straight and vigorous, with the hooked nose and piercing eyes of a hawk. At the first glance he always looked the bird of prey, but at the next as invariably the wolf, an effect produced by the salient reaching jaw and the glint of white teeth bared for a cruel smile. When he caught sight of the girl his hands trembled and an expression akin to emotion touched his eyes.

Ridgway presently heard himself, as in a haze, being introduced.

“Mr. Ridgway, I want you to meet my husband, Mr. Harley.”

The tilted mountains slipped back to their places. Ridgway turned to Simon Harley a face of hammered iron and bowed, putting his hands deliberately behind his back.

“I've been expecting you at Mesa, Mr. Harley,” he said rigidly. “I'll be glad to have the pleasure of welcoming you there.”

V.

Aline, once safe at Mesa, slept round the clock without waking, but Ridgway, man of iron that he was, took a cold bath and spent the night in looking over the developments that four days' absence had produced in his various mines. Back in his office, he put behind him the intoxicating madness of the past forty-eight hours. He felt that he had a grip on himself again, was once more sheathed in a cannon-proof plate armor of selfishness. No more magic nights of starshine, breathing fire and dew; no more lifted moments of exaltation stinging him to a pulsating wonder at life's wild delight. He was once more the inexorable driver of men, with no pity for their weaknesses any more than for his own.

The business that had accumulated during his absence at the neighboring mining-town of Alpine, to which he had been summoned by a matter connected with one of his mining properties, and while he was snowbound on his return trip, his keen, practical mind grasped and disposed of in crisp sentences. To his private secretary he rapped out orders sharply and decisively.

“Phone Ballard and Dalton I want to see them at once. Tell Murphy I won't talk with him. What I said before I left was final. Write Cadwallader we can't do business on the terms he proposes. Dictate a letter to Riley's lawyer, telling him that I can't afford to put a premium on incompetence and negligence; that if his client was injured in the Jack Pot explosion, he has nobody but himself to blame for it. Otherwise, of course, I should be glad to pension him. Let me see the letter before you send it. I don't want anything said that will offend the union. And, Smythe—ask Mr. Eaton to step this way.”

Stephen Eaton, an alert, clear-eyed young fellow who served as Man Friday to Ridgway and was the secretary and treasurer of the Mesa Ore-Producing Company, presently took the seat Smythe had vacated. He was good-looking, after an undistinguished fashion, but a shrewd observer might have thought his chin not definite enough. Ridgway had set the boy's feet in the way of fortune out of personal liking, and he was frankly devoted to his chief.

“Eaton, my opinion is that Alpine is a false alarm. Unless I guess wrong, it is merely a surface proposition, and low grade at that.”

“Miller says——”

“Yes, I know what Miller says. He's wrong.”

“Then you won't invest?”

“I have invested—bought the whole outfit—lock, stock, and barrel.”

“But why? What do you want with it if the proposition is no good?” asked Eaton, in surprise.

Ridgway laughed shortly. “I don't want it, but the Consolidated does. Two of their experts were up at Alpine last week, and both of them reported favorably. I thought it a pity they should not get the property, since they want it so badly, so I bought through a dummy, and to-day he sold out to the Consolidated at a profit of a hundred and fifty thousand.”

Eaton grinned appreciatively. “Hobart will be sick when he finds out.”

“I suppose it will irritate him a trifle, but that can't be helped.”

Smythe came into the room with a letter. “Messenger boy brought it—said it was important,” he explained.

Ridgway ripped the envelope open, ran through the letter, and tossed it to Eaton. His eyes had grown hard and narrow.

“Write to Mr. Hobart that I am sorry I haven't time to call on Mr. Harley at the Consolidated offices, as he suggests. Add that I shall be here all morning, and shall be glad to talk with Mr. Harley in my office, if he has any business with me that needs a personal interview.”

Smythe's face was an expressionless parchment, but Eaton gasped. The unparalleled audacity of flinging the billionaire's overture back in his face left him for the moment speechless. He knew that Ridgway had tempted Providence a hundred times without coming to disaster, but surely this was going too far. He had confidence in his chief to any point in reason, but he could not blind himself to the fact that the wonderful successes he had gained were provisional rather than final. In the end Harley would crush him, if he set the whole machinery of his limitless resources in motion. That was Eaton's private opinion, and he thought it about time to get in out of the rain.

But Eaton's astonishment changed to amazement when the great Harley, pocketing his pride, appeared at the offices of the Mesa Ore-Producing Company an hour later. That Ridgway should actually keep the most powerful man in the country waiting in an outer office while he finished his business with Dalton seemed to him insolence florescent.

“Whom the gods would destroy,” he murmured to himself as the only possible explanation.

Nor did his chief's conference with Dalton show any leaning toward compromise. Ridgway had sent for his engineer to outline a program in regard to some ore-veins in the Sherman Bell, that had for months been in litigation between the two big interests at Mesa. Neither party to the suit had waited for the legal decision, but each of them had put a large force at work stoping out the ore. Occasional conflicts had occurred when the men of the opposing factions came in touch, as they frequently did, since crews were at work below and above each other at every level. But none of these as yet had been serious.

“Dalton, I was down last night to see that lease of Heyburn's on the twelfth level of the Sherman Bell. The Consolidated will tap our workings about noon to-day, just below us. I want you to turn on them the air-drill pipe as soon as they break through. Have a lot of loose rock there mixed with a barrel of lime. Let loose the air pressure full on the pile and give it to their men straight. Follow them up to the end of their own tunnel when they retreat, and hold it against them. Get control of the levels above and below, too. Throw as many men as you can into their workings, and gut them till there is no ore left.”

Dalton had the fighting edge. “You'll stand by me, no matter what happens?”

“Nothing will happen. They're not expecting trouble. But if anything does I'll see you through. Eaton is your witness that I ordered it.”

“Then it's as good as done, Mr. Ridgway,” said Dalton, turning away.

“There may be bloodshed,” suggested Eaton dubiously, in a low voice.

Ridgway's laugh had a touch of affectionate contempt. “Don't cross bridges till you get to them, Steve. Haven't you discovered, man, that the bold course is always the safe one? It's the quitter that loses out every time. The strong man gets there; the weak one falls down. It's as invariable as the law of gravity.” He got up and stretched his broad shoulders in a deep breath. “Now for Mr. Harley. Send him in, Eaton.”

That morning Simon Harley had done two things for many years foreign to his experience. He had gone to meet another man instead of making the man come to him, and he had waited the other man's pleasure in an outer office. That he had done so implied a strong motive.

Ridgway waved Harley to a chair without rising to meet him. The eyes of the two men fastened, wary and unwavering. They might have been jungle beasts of prey crouching for the attack, so tense was their attention. The man from Broadway was the first to speak.

“I have called, Mr. Ridgway, to arrange, if possible, a compromise. I need hardly say this is not my usual method, but the circumstances are extremely unusual. I rest under so great a personal obligation to you that I am willing to overlook a certain amount of youthful presumption.” His teeth glittered behind a lip smile, intended to give the right accent to the paternal reproof. “My personal obligation——”

“You may eliminate that,” retorted the younger man curtly. “You are under no obligations whatever to me.”

“That is very generous of you, Mr. Ridgway, but——”

Ridgway met his eyes directly, cutting his sentence as with a knife. “'Generous' is the last word to use. It is not a question of generosity at all. What I mean is that the thing I did was done with no reference whatever to you. It is between me and her alone. I refuse to consider it as a service to you, as having anything at all to do with you.”

Harley's spirit winced. This bold claim to a bond with his wife that excluded him, the scornful thrust of his enemy—he was already beginning to consider him in that light rather than as a victim—had touched the one point of human weakness in this money-making Juggernaut. He saw himself for the moment without illusions, an old man and an unlovable one. He was bitterly aware that the child he had married had been sold to him by her guardian, under fear of imminent ruin, before her ignorance of the world had given her experience to judge for herself. The money and the hidden hunger of sentiment he wasted on her brought him only timid thanks and wan obedience. But for this man, with his hateful, confident youth, he had seen the warm smile touch her lips and the delicate color rose her cheeks. It was his resolve to wipe out by financial favors—he could ruin the fellow later if need be—any claims of Ridgway upon her gratitude or her foolish imagination. He did not want the man's appeal upon her to carry the similitude of martyrdom as well as heroism.

“Yet, the fact remains that it was a service”—his thin lips smiled. “I must be the best judge of that, I think. I want to be perfectly frank, Mr. Ridgway. I came to Montana to crush you. I have always regarded you as a menace to our legitimate interests, and I had quite determined to make an end of it. You are a good fighter, and you've been on the ground in person, which counts for a great deal. But you must know that if I give myself to it in earnest you are a ruined man.”

The Westerner laughed hardily. “I hear you say it.”

“But you don't believe,” added the other quietly. “Many men have heard and not believed. They have known when it was too late.”

“If you don't mind, I'll buy my experience instead of borrowing it,” Ridgway flung back flippantly.

“One moment, Mr. Ridgway. I have told you my purpose in coming to Montana. That purpose no longer exists. Circumstances have completely altered my intentions. I am convinced that it is a waste of good material to crush you; therefore I desire to effect a consolidation with you, buy all the other copper interests of any importance in the country, and put you at the head of the resulting combination.”

In spite of himself, Ridgway's face betrayed him. It was a magnificent opportunity, the thing he had dreamed of as the culmination of a lifetime of fighting. Nobody knew better than he on how precarious a footing he stood, on how slight a rock his fortunes might be wrecked. Here was his chance to enter that charmed, impregnable inner circle of finance that in effect ruled the nation. That Harley's suave friendliness would bear watching he did not doubt for a moment, but, once inside, so his vital youth told him proudly, he would see to it that the billionaire did not betray him. A week ago he could have asked nothing better than this chance to bloat himself into a some-day colossus. But now the thing stuck in his gorge. He understood the implied obligation. Payment for his service to Aline Harley was to be given, and the ledger balanced. Well, why not? Had he not spent the night in a chaotic agony of renunciation? But to renounce voluntarily was one thing, to be bought off another.

He looked up and met Harley's thin smile, the smile that on Wall Street was a synonym for rapacity and heartlessness, in the memory of which men had committed murder and suicide. On the instant there jumped between him and his ambition the face that had worked magic on him. What a God's pity that such a lamb should be cast to this ravenous wolf! He felt again her arms creeping round his neck, the divine trust of her lovely eyes. He had saved her when this man who called himself her husband had left her to perish in the storm. He had made her happy, as she had never been in all her starved life. Had she not promised never to forget, and was there not a deeper promise in her wistful eyes that the years could not wipe out? She was his by every right of natural law. By God! he would not sell his freedom of choice to this white-haired robber!

“I seldom make mistakes in my judgment of men, Mr. Ridgway,” the oily voice ran on. “No small share of such success as it has been given me to attain has been due to this instinct for putting my finger on the right man. I am assured that in you I find one competent for the great work lying before you. The opportunity is waiting; I furnish it, and you the untiring energy of youth to make the most of the chance.” His wolfish smile bared the tusks for a moment. “I find myself not so young as I was. The great work I have started is well under way. I must trust its completion to younger and stronger hands than mine. I intend to rest, to devote myself to my home.”

The Westerner gave him look for look, his eyes burning to get over the impasse of the expressionless mask no man had ever penetrated. He began to understand why nobody had ever understood Harley. He knew there would be no rest for that consuming energy this side of the grave. Yet the man talked as if he believed his own glib lies.

“Consolidation is the watchword of the age; it means elimination of ruinous competition, and consequent harmony and reduced expense in management. Mr. Ridgway, may I count you with us? Together we should go far. Do you say peace or war?”

The younger man rose, leaning forward with his strong, sinewy hands gripping the table. His face was pale with the repression of a rage that had been growing intense. “I say war, and without quarter. I don't believe you can beat me. I defy you to the test. And if you should—even then I had rather go down fighting you than win at your side.”

Simon Harley had counted acceptance a foregone conclusion, but he never winked a lash at the ringing challenge of his opponent. He met his defiance with an eye cold and steady as jade.

“As you please, Mr. Ridgway. I wash my hands of your ruin. You are one of those men, I see, that would rather be first in hell than second in heaven.” He rose and buttoned his overcoat.

“Say, rather, that I choose to go to hell my own master and not as the slave of Simon Harley,” retorted the Westerner bitterly.

Ridgway's eyes blazed, but those of the New Yorker were cool and fishy.

“There is no occasion for dramatics,” he said, the cruel, passionless smile at his thin lips. “I make you a business proposition and you decline it. That is all. I wish you good day.”

The other strode past him and flung the door open. He had never before known such a passion of hatred as raged within him. Throughout his life Simon Harley had left in his wake wreckage and despair. He was the best-hated man of his time, execrated by the working classes, despised by the country at large, and distrusted by his fellow exploiters. Yet, as a business opponent Ridgway had always taken him impersonally, had counted him for a condition rather than an individual. But with the new influence that had come into his life reason could not reckon, and when it was dominant with him Harley stood embodied as the wolf ready to devour his ewe lamb.

For he couldn't get away from her. Wherever he went he carried with him the picture of her sweet, shy smile, her sudden winsome moments, the deep light in her violet eyes; and in the background the sinister bared fangs of the wild beast logging her patiently.

VI.

After Ridgway's refusal to negotiate a peace treaty, Simon Harley and his body-guard walked back to the offices of the Consolidated, where they arrived at the same time as the news of the enemy's first blow since the renewed declaration of war.

Hobart was at his desk with his ear to the telephone when the great financier came into the inner office of the manager.

“Yes. When? Driven out, you say? Yes—yes. Anybody hurt? Followed our men through our tunnel? No; don't do anything till you hear from me. Send Rhys up to me at once. Let me know any further developments that occur.”

Hobart hung up the receiver and turned on his swivel-chair toward his chief. “Another outrage, sir, at the hands of Ridgway. It is in regard to those veins in the Sherman Bell that he claims. Dalton, who is his superintendent of the Nancy K. Robinson, drove a tunnel across our lateral side lines and began working them, though their own judge had not rendered a decision in their favor yet. Of course, I put a large force of men in them at once. To-day we tapped their workings. Miles, the foreman of the Sherman Bell, has just telephoned me that Dalton turned the air pressure on our men, blew out their candles, and flung a mixture of lime and rocks at them. Several of the men are hurt, though not badly. It seemed that Dalton threw a force into our tunnels, and is holding the entrance against us at the point where the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth levels touch the cage. It means that they will work these veins, and probably others that are acknowledged to be ours—unless we drive them out, which would probably be a difficult matter.”

Harley listened, with eyes glittering and lips pressed tightly against his teeth. “What do you propose to do?”

“I haven't decided. If we could get any justice in the courts——”

“We can't just now. Don't waste any time on that. Find his weakest spot, then hit hard and suddenly.” Harley's low, metallic voice was crisp and commanding.

“His weakest spot?”

“Exactly. Has he no mines upon which we can retaliate?”'

“There is the Taurus. It lies next to the Sherman Bell on the other side. He drove a tunnel into some of our workings a few months ago. That would give us a passageway to send our men through, if we decided to do so. Then there is his New York. Its workings connect with those of the Jim Hill.”

“Good! Send as many men through as is necessary. Capture the entire workings of both mines and begin taking ore out at once. Station armed guards at every point where it is necessary. Use a thousand men, if you need them. But don't fail. We'll give Mr. Ridgway a taste of his own medicine and teach him that for every vein of ours he steals we'll take ten of his.”

“He'll get an injunction from the courts.”

“We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Hobart rose from his seat, very pale and erect. His eyes met the great man's unflinchingly. “You realize that this may mean murder, Mr. Harley?”

“I realize that it is self-preservation,” he retorted coldly.

“Your intention to follow this course is irrevocable?”

“Absolutely.”

“In that case, I must offer my resignation as manager of the Consolidated.”

“It is accepted, Mr. Hobart. I can't have men working under me that are not loyal, body and soul, to the hand that feeds them. Frankly, I am dissatisfied with your management. You are an unusually good business man, but you have not a bold enough grasp of mind for the place you hold.”

“Why not say 'unscrupulous enough,' Mr. Harley?” amended the younger man.

“As you like. I don't juggle with words. The point is, you don't succeed. This adventurer Ridgway scores continually against you.”

“Because he does not hesitate to stoop to anything, because——”

The New Yorker waved a hand impatiently. “I don't care for excuses. I ask of my subordinates success. You do not get it for me. I must find a man who can.”

Hobart bowed with fine dignity. The touch of disdain in his slight smile marked his sense of the distance between them.

“Can you arrange to allow my resignation to take effect as soon as possible?” he asked.

“At once—to-day. It may be published in the Register this afternoon, and you will be acquitted of whatever may follow.”

“Thank you.” Hobart hesitated an instant before he said: “There is a point that I have already mentioned to you which, with your permission, I must advert to again. The temper of the miners has been very bitter toward you since your refusal to grant an eight-hour day. I would urge upon you to take greater precautions against a personal attack. You have many lawless men among your employees. It is only right you should know they execrate your name.”

The great man smiled blandly. “I have lived in the midst of alarms for years, Mr. Hobart. I am not foolhardy. What precautions I can take I do. For the rest, my confidence is in an all-wise Providence. It is written in Scripture that not a sparrow falls without His permission. In that promise I trust.”

The afternoon papers announced the resignation of Lyndon Hobart as manager of the Consolidated properties, and named as his successor R. K. Mott, one of the trust lawyers. The newspapers next morning were filled with accounts of a tragedy at the Taurus. The news was colored to harmorize with the policies of the different papers, but the facts that remained after all the wrappings of verbiage were removed were the same. Three leaders in the Taurus, resisting the rush of the Consolidated employees, had been killed by an explosion of powder, after they had been warned to leave and had refused to do so.

If Simon Harley did not know he had made an error of judgment when the news of the fatal collision came to him, he knew it before the day had ended. The foreman who had directed the attack upon the Taurus had to be brought from the shaft-house protected by a score of Pinkerton detectives to safeguard him from the swift vengeance of the miners, who needed but a word to fling themselves against the cordon of police and to tear the foreman from them. Harley himself kept his apartments, the hotel being heavily patrolled by guards on the lookout for suspicious characters. The current of public sentiment, never in his favor, now ran swiftly against him, and threats were made openly by the infuriated miners to kill him on sight.

Ridgway, seizing the psychological moment, secured an injunction, not only against the working, but even against the inspection of the Sherman Bell and the Jim Hill by the Consolidated. The result of Harley's move had been in effect to turn over his own mines temporarily to be looted by the pirate and to make Ridgway stronger than ever with his allies the workmen. By his own imprudence he had made a bad situation worse and delivered himself into the hands of his enemies.

In the days of turmoil that followed, Ridgway's telling blows scored once and again. The morning after the explosion he started in his paper a relief-fund for the families of the dead miners, contributing two thousand dollars himself. He also insisted that the Consolidated pay damages to the bereaved families to the extent of twenty thousand dollars for each man killed. The town rang with his praises. Mesa had always been proud of his success, had liked the democratic spirit in him that led him to mix on apparently equal terms with his working men, and had backed him in his opposition to the trust because his plucky fight had been, in a measure, its fight. But now it idolized him. He was the buffer between it and the trust, fighting the battles of labor against the great octopus of Broadway, and beating it to a standstill. He was the Moses destined to lead the working man out of the Egypt of his discontent. Had he not maintained the standard of wages and forced the Consolidated to do so? Had he not declared an eight-hour day, and was not the trust almost ready to do the same, forced by the impetus his example had given the union? So Ridgway's agents whispered, and the union leaders whom he had took up the burden of their tale.

Ridgway took advantage of this access of popularity to the full. He applied for and received from Judge Purcell an injunction against the Consolidated to keep that corporation from working or even from inspecting the Mary K., the Diamond King, and the Marcus Daly, alleging that the ore-veins of those wonderfully productive mines all apexed in his tiny fragment of a claim, the Trust-Buster. Three thousand Consolidated employees were thrown out of work by this arbitrary ruling. Ridgway employed them immediately, and sent them down his shaft to work the same veins they had previously been working for the trust. While Harley was morally certain that the ore from these properties was being taken, the order of the court against inspecting the mines restrained him from the examination that would have proved his contention. His lawyers might argue themselves black in the face without moving old Judge Purcell, whose principal rule of law was to hit a Consolidated head whenever it appeared. Nor did Harley dare, in the existing condition of public opinion, to violate the court order arbitrarily.

In an attempt to stem the rising tide of popular opinion that was beginning to spread from Mesa over the country at large, Harley announced an eight-hour day and an immense banquet to all the Consolidated employees in celebration of the occasion. Ten thousand men sat down to the long tables, but when one of the speakers injudiciously mentioned the name of Ridgway, they cheered for ten minutes steadily. It was quite apparent that the miners gave him the credit for having forced the Consolidated to an eight-hour day.

VII.

When Mrs. Mott, moved by a suggestion from her husband, proposed to Miss Balfour that they call on Mrs. Harley at the hotel, Virginia jumped at the chance.

“My dear, you have saved my life. I've been dying of curiosity, and I haven't been able to find a vestige of an excuse to hang my call on. I couldn't ask Mr. Ridgway to introduce me, could I?”

“No, I don't see that you could,” smiled Mrs. Mott, a motherly little woman with pleasant brown eyes. “I suppose Mr. Ridgway isn't exactly on calling terms with Mr. Harley's wife, even if he did save her life.”

“Oh, Mr. Ridgway isn't the man to let a little thing like a war à outrance stand in the way of his social duties. I understand he did call the evening of their arrival here.”

“He didn't!” screamed Mrs. Mott, who happened to possess a voice of the normal national register. “And what did Mr. Harley say?”

“Ah, that's what one would like to know. One may guess there must have been undercurrents of embarrassment almost as pronounced as if the mikado were to invite the czar to a pink tea. I can imagine Mr. Harley saying: 'Try the claret, Mr. Ridgway; it isn't poisoned;' and Mr. Ridgway answering: 'Thanks! After you, my dear Gaston.'”

Miss Balfour's anxiety to meet the young woman her fiancé had rescued from the blizzard was not unnatural. Her curiosity was tinged with frank envy, though jealousy did not enter into it at all. Virginia had come West explicitly to take the country as she found it, and she had found it unfortunately no more hazardous than little old New York. She did not know quite what she had expected to find. Certainly she knew that cowboys or Indians were no longer on the map, but she had supposed that they had left compensations in their wake. On the principle that adventures are to the adventurous, her life should have been a whirl of hair-breadth escapes.

But what happened? She took all sorts of chances without anything coming of it. Her pirate fiancé was the nearest approach to an adventure she had flushed, and this pink-and-white chit of a married schoolgirl had borrowed him for the most splendid bit of excitement that would happen in a hundred years. She had been spinning around the country in motor-cars for months without the sign of a blizzard, but the chit had hit one the first time. It wasn't fair. Virginia was quite sure that if she had seen Waring Ridgway at the inspired moment when he was plowing through the drifts with Mrs. Harley in his arms—only, of course, it would have been she instead of Mrs. Harley, and he would not have been carrying her so long as she could stand and take it—she would have fallen in love with him on the spot. And those two days in the cabin on half rations—they would have put an end forever to her doubts and to that vision of Lyndon Hobart that persisted in her mind. What luck glacé some people did have!

But Virginia discovered the chit to be rather a different personality than she had supposed. In truth, she lost her heart to her at once. She could have stood out against Aline's mere good looks and been the stiffer for them. She was no man, to be moved by the dark hair's dusky glory, the charm of soft girlish lines, the effect of shy unsophistication that might be merely the highest art of social experience. But back of the sweet, trembling mouth that seemed to be asking to be kissed, of the pathetic appeal for friendliness from the big, deep violet eyes, was a quality of soul not to be counterfeited. Miss Balfour had furbished up the distant hauteur of the society manner she had at times used effectively, but she found herself instead taking the beautiful, forlorn little creature in her arms.

“Oh, my dear; my dear, how glad I am that dreadful blizzard did not hurt you!”

Aline clung to this gracious young queen as if she had known her a lifetime. “You are so good to me—everybody is. You know how Mr. Ridgway saved me. If it had not been for him I should have died. I didn't care—I wanted to die in peace, I think—but he wouldn't let me.”

“I should think not.”

“His tenderness, his unselfishness, his consideration for others—did you ever know anybody like him for these things?”

“Never,” agreed Virginia, with the mental reservations that usually accompanied her skeptical smile. She was getting at her fiancé from a novel point of view.

“And so modest, with all his strength and courage.”

“It's almost a fault in him,” she murmured.

“The woman that marries him will be blessed among women.”

“I count it a great privilege,” said Miss Balfour absently, but she pulled up with a hurried addendum: “To have known him.”

“Indeed, yes. If one met more men like him this would be a better world.”

“It would certainly be a different world.”

It was a relief to Aline to talk, to put into words the external skeleton facts of the surging current that had engulfed her existence since she had turned a corner upon this unexpected consciousness of life running strong and deep. Harley was not a confidant she could have chosen under the most favorable circumstances, and her instinct told her that in this matter he was particularly impossible. But to Virginia Balfour—Mrs. Mott had to leave early to preside over the Mesa Woman's Club, and her friend allowed herself to be persuaded to stay longer she did not find it at all hard to talk. Indeed, she murmured into the sympathetic ear of this astute young searcher of hearts more than her words alone said, with the result that Virginia guessed what she herself had not yet found out, though her heart was hovering tremblingly on the brink of discovery.

But Virginia's sympathy for the trouble fate had in store for this helpless innocent consisted with an alert appreciation of its obvious relation to herself. What she meant to discover was the attitude toward the situation of one neither particularly innocent nor helpless. Was he, too, about to be “caught in the coil of a God's romances,” or was he merely playing on the vibrating strings of an untaught heart?

It was in part to satisfy this craving for knowledge that she wrote Ridgway a note as soon as she reached home. It said:

My Dear Recreant Laggard: If you are not too busy playing Sir Lancelot to fair dames in distress, or splintering lances with the doughty husbands of these same ladies, I pray you deign to allow your servant to feast her eyes upon her lord's face. Hopefully and gratefully yours, Virginia.

P. S.—Have you forgotten, sir, that I have not seen you since that terrible blizzard and your dreadful imprisonment in Fort Salvation?

P. P. S—I have seen somebody else, though. She's a dear, and full of your praises. I hardly blame you. V.

She thought that ought to bring him soon, and it did.

“I've been busy night and day,” he apologized when they met.

“I should think so, with all these dreadful things happening. Think of those poor men sacrificed, and their wives and babies left in poverty. One of them has eight children, I am told.”

“The families will be provided for, at least. Our paper has raised five thousand dollars already, and the Consolidated will be forced to pay heavily to avoid lawsuits, which just now it cannot afford.”

“Was it Mr. Harley's fault?” she demanded.

“I suppose so. The inquest will bring out the facts. Shall we talk of something else? This thing has been with me till my brain is fagged with it ”

Her inextinguishable gaiety brought back the smile he liked. “We'll talk of some one else—some one of interest to us both.”

“I am always ready to talk of Miss Virginia Balfour,” he said, misunderstanding promptly.

She smiled her disdain of his pretended obtuseness in an elaborately long survey of him.

“Well?” he wanted to know.

“That's how you look—very well, indeed. I believe the storm was greatly exaggerated,” she remarked.

“Isn't that rather a good definition for a blizzard—a greatly exaggerated storm?”

“You don't look the worse for wear—not the wreck I expected to behold.”

“Ah, you should have seen me before I saw you.”

“Thank you. I have no doubt you find the sight of my dear face as refreshing as your favorite cocktail. I suppose that is why it has taken you three days after your return to reach me—and then by special request.”

“A pleasure delayed is twice a pleasure—anticipation and realization.”

Miss Balfour made a different application of his text, her eyes trained on him with apparent indifference. “I've been enjoying a delayed pleasure myself. I went to see her this afternoon.”

He did not ask whom. “She's worth a good deal of seeing, don't you think?”

“Oh, I'm in love with her, but it doesn't follow you ought to be.”

“Am I?”—he smiled.

“You are either in love or else you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“An interesting thing about you is your point of view. Now, anybody else would tell me I ought to be ashamed if I am in love.”

“I'm not worried about your morals,” she scoffed. “It's that poor child I'm thinking of.”

“I think of her a good deal, too.”

“Ah! and does she think of you a good deal? That's what we must guard against.”

“Is it?”

“I think I'll tell her about you—just what a ruthless barbarian you are.”

His eyes gleamed. “I wish you would. I'd like to find out whether she would believe you. I have thought of telling her myself, but the honest truth is, I funk it.”

“You haven't any right to let her know you are interested in her.” She interrupted him before he could speak. “Don't trifle with her, Waring. She's not like other girls.”

He met her look gravely. “I wouldn't trifle with her for any reason.”

Her quick rejoinder overlapped his sentence. “Then you love her!”

“Is that an alternative?”

“With you—yes.”

“Faith, my lady, you're frank!”

“I'm not mealy-mouthed. You don't think yourself scrupulous, do you?”

“I'm afraid I am not.”

“I don't mind so much your being in love with her, though it's not flattering to my vanity, but——” She stopped, letting him make the inference.

“Do you think that likely?” he asked, the color flushing his face.

She compromised with her conscience. “I don't know. She is romantic—and Simon Harley isn't a very fertile field for romance, I suppose.”

“You would imply——?”

“Oh, you have points, and nobody knows them better than Waring Ridgway,” she told him jauntily. “But you needn't play that rôle to the address of Aline Harley. Try me. I'm immune to romance. Besides, I'm engaged to you,” she added, laughing at the inconsequence the fact seemed to have for both of them.

“I'm afraid I can't help the situation, for if I've been playing a part, it has been an unconscious one.”

“That's the worst of it. When you star as Waring Ridgway you are most dangerous. What I want is total abstinence.”

Virginia dimpled, a gleam of reminiscent laughter in her eyes. “When I was in Denver last month a Mrs. Smythe—it was Smith before her husband struck it rich last year—sent out cards for a bridge afternoon. A Mrs. Mahoney had just come to the metropolis from the wilds of Cripple Creek. Her husband had struck a gold-mine, too, and Mr. Smythe was under obligations to him. Anyhow, she was a stranger, and Mrs. Smythe took her in. It was Mrs. Mahoney's introduction to bridge, and she did not know she was playing for keeps. When the afternoon was over, Mrs. Smythe hovered about her with the sweetest sympathy. 'So sorry you had such a horrid run of cards, dear. Better luck next time.' It took Mrs. Mahoney some time to understand that her social afternoon had cost one hundred and twenty dollars, but next day her husband sent a check for one hundred and twenty-two dollars to Mrs. Smythe. The extra two dollars were for the refreshments, he naively explained, adding that since his wife was so poor a gambler as hardly to be able to keep professionals interested, he would not feel offended if Mrs. Smythe omitted her in future from her social functions.”

Ridgway took it with a smile. “Simon Harley brought his one hundred and twenty-two dollars in person.”

“He didn't! When?”

“Yesterday morning. He proposed benevolent assimilation as a solution of our troubles.”

“Just how?”

“He offered to consolidate all the copper interests of the country and put me at the head of the resulting combine.”

“If you wouldn't play bridge with Mrs. Harley?”

“Exactly.”

“And you——?”

“Declined to pledge myself.”

She clapped her hands softly. “Well done, Waring Ridgway! There are times when you are magnificent, when I could put you on a pedestal, you great big, unafraid man. But you mustn't play with her just the same.”

“Why mustn't I?”

“For her sake.”

He frowned past her into space, his tight-shut jaw standing out saliently. “You're right, Virginia. I've been thinking so myself. I'll keep off the grass,” he said, at last.

“You're a good fellow,” slipped out impulsively.

“Well, I know where there's another,” he said. “I ought to think myself a lucky dog.”

Virginia lifted quizzical eyebrows. “Ought to! That tastes of duty. Don't let it come to that. We'll take it off if you like.” She touched the solitaire he had given her.

“Ah, but I don't like”—he smiled.

VIII.

Aline pulled her horse to a walk. “You know Mr. Ridgway pretty well, don't you?”

Miss Balfour gently flicked her divided-skirt with a riding-whip, considering whether she might be said to know him well. “Yes, I think I do,” she ventured.

“Mrs. Mott says you and he are great friends, that you seem very fond of each other.”

“Goodness me! I hope I don't seem fond of him. I don't think 'fond' is exactly the word, anyway, though we are good friends.” Quickly, keenly, her covert glance swept Aline; then, withdrawing her eyes, she flung her little bomb. “I suppose we may be said to appreciate each other. At any rate, we are engaged.”'

Mrs. Harley's pony came to an abrupt halt. “I thought I had dropped my whip,” she explained, in a low voice not quite true.

Virginia, though she executed an elaborate survey of the scenery, could not help noticing that the color had washed from her friend's face. “I love this Western country—its big sweep of plains, of low, rolling hills, with a background of mountains. One can see how it gets into a man's blood so that the East seems insipid ever afterward,” discoursed Miss Balfour.

A question trembled on Aline's blanched lips.

“Say it,” permitted Virginia.

“Do you mean that you are engaged to him—that you are going to marry Mr. Ridgway—without caring for him?”

“I don't mean that at all. I like him immensely.”

“But—do you love him?” It was almost a cry—these low words wrung from the tortured heart.

“No fair,” warned her friend smilingly.

Aline rode in silence, her stricken face full of trouble. How could she, from her glass house, throw stones at a loveless marriage? But this was different from her own case! Nobody was worthy to marry her hero without giving the best a woman had to give. If she were a girl—a sudden tide of color swept her face; a wild, delirious tingle of joy flooded her veins—oh, if she were a girl, what a wealth of love could she give him! Clarity of vision had come to her in a blinding flash. Untutored of life, the knowledge of its meaning had struck home of the suddenest. She knew her heart now that it was too late; knew that she could never be indifferent to what concerned Waring Ridgway.

Aline caught at the courage behind her childishness, and accomplished her congratulations in a small, colorless voice. “You will be happy, I am sure. He is good.”

“Goodness does not impress me as his most outstanding quality,” smiled Miss Balfour.

“No, one never feels it emphasized. He is too free of selfishness to make much of his goodness. But one can't help feeling it in everything he does and says.”

“Does Mr. Harley agree with you? Does he feel it?”

“I don't think Mr. Harley understands him. I can't help thinking that he is prejudiced.” She was becoming mistress of her voice and color again.

“And you are not?”

“Perhaps I am. In my thought of him he would still be good, even if he had done all the bad things his enemies accuse him of.”

Virginia gave her up. This idealized interpretation of her betrothed was not the one she had, but for Aline it might be the true one. At least, she could not disparage him very consistently under the circumstances.

“Isn't there a philosophy current that we find in people what we look for in them? Perhaps that is why you and Mr. Harley read in Mr. Ridgway men so diverse as you do. It is impossible you are both right and both wrong. Heaven knows, I suppose. At least, we poor mortals fog around enough when we sit in judgment.” And Virginia shrugged the matter from her careless shoulders.

But Aline seemed to have a difficulty in getting away from the subject. “And you—what do you read?” she asked timidly.

“Sometimes one thing and sometimes another. To-day I see him as a living refutation of all the copy-book rules to success. He shatters the maxims with a touch-and-go manner that is fascinating in its immorality. A gambler, a plunger, an adventurer, he wins when a careful, honest business man would fail to a certainty.”

Aline was amazed. “You misjudge him. I am sure you do. But if you think this of him——”

“Why do I marry him? I have asked myself that a hundred times, my dear. I wish I knew. I have told you what I see in him to-day; but to-morrow—why, to-morrow I shall see him an altogether different man. He will be perhaps a radiating center of altruism, devoted to his friends, a level-headed protector of the working-classes, a patron of the arts in his own clear-minded, unlettered way. But whatever point of view one gets at him, he spares one dullness. Will you explain to me, my dear, why picturesque rascality is so much more likable than humdrum virtue?”

Mrs. Harley's eyes blazed. “And you can talk this way of the man you are going to marry, a man——” She broke off, her voice choked.

Miss Balfour was cool as a custard. “I can, my dear, and without the least disloyalty. In point of fact, he asked me to tell you the kind of man I think him. I'm trying to oblige him, you see.”

“He asked you—to tell me this about him?” Aline pulled in her pony in order to read with her astonished eyes the amused ones of her companion.

“Yes. He was afraid you were making too much of his saving you. He thinks he won't do to set on a pedestal.”

“Then I think all the more of him for his modesty.”

“Don't invest too heavily on his modesty, my dear. He wouldn't be the man he is if he owned much of that commodity.”

“The man he is?”

“Yes, the man born to win, the man certain of himself no matter what the odds against him. He knows he is a man of destiny; knows quite well that there is something big about him that dwarfs other men. I know it, too. Wherefore I seize my opportunity. It would be a sin to let a man like that get away from one. I could never forgive myself,” she concluded airily.

“Don't you see any human, lovable things in him?” Aline's voice was an accusation.

“He is the stanchest friend conceivable. No trouble is too great for him to take for one he likes, and where once he gives his trust he does not take it back. Oh, for all his force, he is intensely human! Take his vanity, my dear. It soars to heaven.”

“If I cared for him I couldn't dissect his qualities as you do.”

“That's because you are a triumph of the survival of nature and impulse over civilization, in spite of its attempts to sap your freshness. For me, I fear I'm a sophisticated daughter of a critical generation. If I weren't, I should not hold my judgment so safely in my own keeping, but would surrender it and my heart.”

“There is something about the way you look at him that shocks me. One ought not to let oneself believe all that seems easy to believe.”

“That is your faith, but mine is a different one. You see, I'm a Unitarian,” returned Virginia blithely.

“He will make you love him if you marry him,” sighed Aline, coming back to her obsession.

Virginia nodded eagerly. “In my secret heart that is what I am hoping for, my dear.”

“Unless there is another man,” added Aline, as if alone with her thoughts.

Virginia was irritably aware of a flood of color beating into her cheeks. “There isn't any other man,” she said impatiently.

She was thinking of Lyndon Hobart. Curiously enough, whenever she conceived herself as marrying Ridgway, the reflex of her brain carried to her a picture of Hobart, clean-handed, fine of instinct, with the inherited inflections of voice and unconscious pride of caste that come from breeding and not from cultivation. If he were not born to greatness, like his rival, at least he satisfied her critical judgment of what a gentleman should be; and she was quite sure that the potential capacity lay in her to care a good deal more for him than for anybody else she had met. Since it was not on the cards, as Miss Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry primarily for reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in her sophisticated hours.

But in the hours when she was a mere girl, when she was not so confidently the heir of all the feminine wisdom of the ages, her annoyance took another form. She had told Lyndon Hobart of her engagement because it was the honest thing to do; because she supposed she ought to discourage any hopes he might be entertaining. But it did not follow that he need have let these hopes be extinguished so summarily. She could have wished his scrupulous regard for the proper thing had not had the effect of taking him so completely out of her external life, while leaving him more insistently than ever the subject of her inner contemplation.

IX.

The verdict of the coroner's jury was that Vance Edwards and the other deceased miners had come to their death at the hands of the foreman, Michael Donleavy, through the instigation of Simon Harley. True bills were at once drawn up by the prosecuting attorney of Yuba County, an official elected by Ridgway, charging Donleavy and Harley with conspiracy resulting in the murder of Vance Edwards. The billionaire furnished bail for himself and his foreman, treating the indictments merely as an attack of Ridgway.

The tragedy in the Taurus brought to the surface a bitterness that had hitherto not been apparent in the contest between the rival copper interests. The lines of division became more sharply drawn, and every business man in Mesa was forced to declare himself either for or against the Consolidated. Harley scattered his detectives broadcast throughout the town, and imported five hundred Pinkertons to meet any emergency that might arise. The spies of the Consolidated were everywhere, gathering evidence against the Mesa Ore-Producing Company, its judges, and its supporters. Criminal indictments flew back and forth as thick as snowflakes in a winter storm. It began to be noticed that an occasional foreman, superintendent, or mining engineer was slipping from the employ of Ridgway to that of the Consolidated, carrying with him secrets and evidence that would later be invaluable in court. Everywhere the money of the Consolidated, scattered lavishly where it would do the most good, attempted to sap the loyalty of its enemy's followers. Even Eaton was approached with the offer of a bribe.

But Ridgway's potent personality had built up an esprit de corps not easily to be broken. The adventurers gathered to his side were, for the most part, bound to him by ties personal in their nature. They were financial filibusters, pledged to stand or fall together, with an interest in their predatory leader's success that was not entirely measurable in dollars and cents. Nor was that leader the man to allow the organization he had builded with such care to become disintegrated while he slept. His alert eye and cheery smile were everywhere, instilling confidence in such as faltered, and dread in those contemplating treachery.

He harassed his rival with an audacity that was almost devilish in its unexpected ingenuity. For the first time in his life Simon Harley, thrown back on the defensive by a combination of circumstances engineered by a master brain, knew what it was to be checkmated. He had not the least doubt of ultimate victory, hut the tentative successes of the brazen young adventurer were gall and wormwood to his soul. He had made money his god, had always believed it would buy anything worth while except life, but this Western buccaneer had taught him it could not purchase the love of a woman nor the immediate defeat of a man so well armed as Waring Ridgway. In truth, though Harley stuck at nothing, his success in accomplishing the destruction of this thorn in his side was no more appreciable than had been that of Hobart. The Westerner held his own and more, the while he robbed the great trust of its ore under cover of the courts.

In the flush of success, Ridgway, through his lieutenant, Eaton, came to Judge Purcell asking that a receiver be appointed for the Consolidated Supply Company, a subsidiary branch of the trust, on the ground that its affairs were not being properly administered. The Supply Company had paid dividends ranging from fifteen to twenty-five per cent. for many years, but Ridgway exercised his right as a stock-holder to ask for a receivership. In point of fact, he owned, in the name of Eaton, only one-tenth of one per cent. of the stock, but it was enough to serve. Purcell granted his application, as well as a restraining order against the payment of dividends until further notice, and appointed Eaton receiver over the protests of the Consolidated lawyers.

Ridgway and Eaton left the court-room together, jubilant over their success. They dined at a restaurant, and spent the evening at the ore-producing company's offices, discussing ways and means. When they had finished, his chief followed Eaton to the doors, an arm thrown affectionately round his shoulder.

“Steve, we're going to make a big killing. I never was so sure of anything in my life as that we shall beat Simon Harley at his own game. We're bound to win. We've got to win.”

“I wish I were as sure as you.”

“It's hard pounding does it, my boy. We'll drive him out of the Montana copper-fields yet. We'll show him there is one little corner of the U. S. where Simon Harley's orders don't go as the last word.”

“He has a hundred dollars to your one.”

“And I have youth and mining experience and the inside track, as well as stancher friends than he ever dreamed of,” laughed Ridgway, clapping the other on the back. “Well, good night, Steve. Pleasant dreams, old man.”

The boyish secretary shook hands warmly. “You're a man, chief. If anybody can pull us through it will be you?”

Triumphant confidence rang in the other's answering laugh. “You bet I can, Steve.”

X.

Eaton, standing on the street curb at the corner of the Ridgway Building, lit a cigar while he hesitated between his rooms and the club. He decided for the latter, and was just turning up the hill, when a hand covered his mouth and an arm was flung round his neck in a strangle-hold. He felt himself lifted like a child, and presently discovered that he was being whirled along the street in a closed carriage.

“You needn't be alarmed, Mr. Eaton. We're not going to injure you in the least,” a low voice explained in his ear. “If you'll give me your word not to cry out, I'll release your throat.”

Eaton nodded a promise, and, when he could find his voice, demanded: “Where are you taking me?”

“You'll see in a minute, sir. It's all right.”

The carriage turned into an alley and stopped. Eaton was led to a ladder that hung suspended from the fire-escape, and was bidden to mount. He did so, following his guide to the second story, and being in turn followed by the other man. He was taken along a corridor and into the first of a suite of rooms opening into it. He knew he was in the Kennington Hotel, and suspected at once that he was in the apartments of Simon Harley.

His suspicion ripened to conviction when his captors led him through two more rooms, into one fitted as an office. The billionaire sat at a desk, busy over some legal papers he was reading, but he rose at once and came forward with hand extended, to meet Eaton. The young man took his hand mechanically.

“Glad to have the pleasure of talking with you, Mr. Eaton. You must accept my apologies for my methods of securing a meeting. They are rather primitive, but since you declined to call and see me, I can hold only you to blame.” An acid smile touched his lips for a moment, though his eyes were expressionless as a wall. “Mr. Eaton, I have brought you here in this way to have a confidential talk with you, in order that it might not in any way reflect upon you in case we do not come to an arrangement satisfactory to both of us. Your friends cannot justly blame you for this conference, since you could not avoid it. Mr. Eaton, take a chair.”

The wills of the two men flashed into each other's eyes like rapiers. The weaker man knew what was before him, and braced himself to meet it. He would not sit down. He would not discuss anything. So he told himself once and again to hold himself steady against the impulse to give way to those imperious eyes behind which was the impassive, compelling will.

“Sit down, Mr. Eaton.”

“I'll stand, Mr. Harley.”

“Sit down.”

The cold jade eyes were not to be denied. Eaton's gaze fell sullenly, and he slid into a chair.

“I'll discuss no business except in the presence of Mr. Ridgway,” he said doggedly, falling back to his second line of defenses.

“To the contrary, my business is with you and not with Mr. Ridgway.”

“I know of no business you can have with me.”

“Wherefore I have brought you here to acquaint you with it.”

The young man lifted his head reluctantly and waited. If he had been willing to confess it to himself, he feared greatly this ruthless spoiler who had built up the greatest fortune in the world from thousands of wrecked lives. He felt himself choking, just as if those skeleton fingers had been at his throat, but he promised himself never to yield.

The fathomless, dominant gaze caught and held his eyes. “Mr. Eaton, I came here to crush Ridgway. I am going to stay here till I do. I'm going to wipe him from the map of Montana—ruin him so utterly that he can never recover. It has been my painful duty to do this with a hundred men as strong and as confident as he is. After undertaking such an enterprise, I have never faltered and never relented. The men I have ruined were ruined beyond hope of recovery. None of them have ever struggled to their feet again. I intend to make Waring Ridgway a pauper.”

Stephen Eaton could have conceived nothing more merciless than this man's callous pronouncement, than the calm certainty of his unemphasized words. He started to reply, but Harley took the words out of his mouth.

“Don't make a mistake. Don't tie to the paltry successes he has gained. I have not really begun to fight yet.”

The young man had nothing to say. His heart was water. He accepted Harley's words as true, for he had told himself the same thing a hundred times. Why had Ridgway rejected the overtures of this Colossus of finance? It had been the sheerest folly born of madness to suppose that anybody could stand against him.

“For Ridgway, the die is cast,” the iron voice went on. “He is doomed beyond hope. But there is still a chance for you. What do you consider your interest in the Mesa Ore-Producing Company worth, Mr. Eaton?”

The sudden question caught Eaton with the force of a surprise. “About a million dollars,” he heard himself say; and it seemed to him that his voice was speaking the words without his volition.

“I'm going to buy you out for twice that sum. Furthermore, I'm going to take care of your future—going to see that you have a chance to rise.”

The waverer's will was in flux, but the loyalty in him still protested. “I can't desert my chief, Mr. Harley.”

“Do you call it desertion to leave a raging madman in a sinking boat after you have urged him to seek the safety of another ship?”

“He made me what I am.”

“And I will make you ten times what you are. With Ridgway you have no chance to be anything but a subordinate. He is the Mesa Ore-Producing Company, and you are merely a cipher. I offer your individuality a chance. I believe in you, and know you to be a strong man.” No ironic smile touched Harley's face at this statement. “You need a chance, and I offer it to you. For your own sake take it.”

Every grievance Eaton had ever felt against his chief came trooping to his mind. He was domineering. He did ride rough-shod over his allies' opinions and follow the course he had himself mapped out. All the glory of the victory he absorbed as his due. In the popular opinion, Eaton was as a farthing candle to a great electric searchlight in comparison with Ridgway.

“He trusts me,” the tempted man urged weakly. He was slipping, and he knew it, even while he assured himself he would never betray his chief.

“He would sell you out to-morrow if it paid him. And what is he but a robber? Every dollar of his holdings is stolen from me. I ask only restitution of you—and I propose to buy at twice the value of your stolen property. You owe that freebooter no loyalty.”

“I can't do it. I can't do it.”

“You shall do it.” Harley dominated him as a bullying schoolmaster does a cringing boy under the lash.

“I can't do it,” the young man replied, all his weak will flung into the denial.

“Would you choose ruin?”

“Perhaps. I don't know,” he faltered miserably.

“It's merely a business proposition, young man. The stock you have to sell is valuable to-day. Reject my offer, and a month from now it will be quoted on the market at half its present figure, and go begging at that. It will be absolutely worthless before I finish. You are not selling out Ridgway. He is a ruined man, anyway. But you—I am going to save you in spite of yourself. I am going to shake you from that robber's clutches.”

Eaton got to his feet, pallid and limp as a rag. “Don't tempt me,” he cried hoarsely. “I tell you I can't do it, sir.”

Harley's cold eye did not release him for an instant. “Two million dollars and an assured future, or—absolute, utter ruin, complete and final.”

“He would murder me—and he ought to,” groaned the writhing victim.

“No fear of that. I'll put you where he can't reach you. Just sign your name to this paper, Mr. Eaton.”

“I didn't agree. I didn't say I would.”

“Sign here. Or, wait one moment, till I get witnesses.” Harley touched a bell, and his secretary appeared in the doorway. “Ask Mr. Mott and young Jarvis to step this way.”

Harley held out the pen toward Eaton, looking steadily at him. In a strong man the human eye is a sword among weapons. Eaton quailed. The fingers of the unhappy wretch went out mechanically for the pen. He was sweating terror and remorse, but the essential weakness of the man could not stand out unbacked against the masterful force of this man's imperious will. He wrote his name in the places directed, and flung down the pen like a child in a rage.

“Now get me out of Montana before Ridgway knows,” he cried brokenly.

“You may leave to-morrow night, Mr. Eaton. You'll only have to appear in court once personally. We'll arrange it quietly for to-morrow afternoon. Ridgway won't know until it is done and you are gone.”

XI.

It chanced that Ridgway, through the swinging door of a department store, caught a glimpse of Miss Balfour as he was striding along the street. He bethought him that it was the hour of luncheon, and that she was no end better company than the revamped noon edition of the morning paper. Wherefore he wheeled into the store and interrupted her inspection of gloves.

“I know the bulliest little French restaurant tucked away in a side street just three blocks from here. The happiness disseminated in this world by that chef's salads will some day carry him past St. Peter with no questions asked.”

“You believe in salvation by works?” she parried, while she considered his invitation.

“So will you after a trial of Alphonse's salad.”

“Am I to understand that I am being invited to a theological discussion of a heavenly salad concocted by Father Alphonse?”

“That is about the specifications.”

“Then I accept. For a week my conscience has condemned me for excess of frivolity. You offer me a chance to expiate without discomfort. That is my idea of heaven. I have always believed it a place where one pastures in rich meadows of pleasure, with penalties and consciences all excluded from its domains.”;

“You should start a church,” he laughed. “It would have a great following—especially if you could operate your heaven this side of the Styx.”

She found his restaurant all he had claimed, and more. The little corner of old Paris set her eyes shining. The fittings were Parisian to the least detail. Even the waiter spoke no English.

“But I don't see how they make it pay. How did he happen to come here? Are there enough people that appreciate this kind of thing in Mesa to support it?”

He smiled at her enthusiasm. “Hardly. The place has a scarce dozen of regular patrons. Hobart comes here a good deal. So does Eaton. But it doesn't pay financially. You see, I know because I happen to own it. I used to eat at Alphonse's restaurant in Paris. So I sent for him. It doesn't follow that one has to be less a slave to the artificial comforts of a super-civilized world because one lives at Mesa.”

“I see it doesn't. You are certainly a wonderful man.”

“Name anything you like. I'll warrant Alphonse can make good if it is not outside of his national cuisine,” he boasted.

She did not try his capacity to the limit, but the oysters, the salad, the chicken soufflé, were delicious, with the ultimate perfection that comes only out of Gaul.

They made a delightfully gay and intimate hour of it, and were still lingering over their demti-tasse when Alphonse called Ridgway to the telephone.

“You can't get away from business even for an hour, can you?” she rallied. “My heaven wouldn't suit you at all, unless I smuggled in a trust for you to fight.”

“I expect it is Eaton,” he explained. “Steve phoned down to the office that he isn't feeling well to-day. I asked him to have me called up here. If he isn't better, I'm going to drop round and see him.”

But when she caught sight of his face as he returned she knew it was serious.

“What's the matter? Is it Mr. Eaton? Is he very ill?” she cried.

His face was set like broken ice refrozen. “Yes, it's Eaton. They say—but it can't be true!”

She had never seen him so moved. “What is it, Waring?”

“The boy has sold me out. He is at the court-house now, undoing my work—the Judas!”

The angry blood swept imperiously into her cheeks. “Don't waste any more time with me, Waring. Go—go and save yourself from the traitor. Perhaps it is not too late yet.”

He flung her a grateful look. “You're true blue, Virginia. Come! I'll leave you at the store as we pass.”

The defection of Eaton bit his chief to the quick. The force of the blow itself was heavy—how heavy he could not tell till he could take stock of the situation. He could see that he would be thrown out of court in the matter of the Consolidated Supply Company receivership, since Eaton's stock would now be in the hands of the enemy. But what was of more importance was the fact that Eaton's interest in the Mesa Ore-Producing Company now belonged to Harley, who could work any amount of mischief with it as a lever for litigation.

The effect, too, of the man's desertion upon the morale of the M. O. P. forces must be considered and counteracted, if possible. He fancied he could see his subordinates looking shifty-eyed at each other and wondering who would slip away next.

If it had been anybody but Steve! He would as soon have distrusted his right hand as Steve Eaton. Why, he had made the man, had picked him out when he was a mere clerk, and tied him to himself by a hundred favors. Up on the Snake River he had saved Steve's life once when he was drowning. The boy had always been as close to him as a brother. That Steve should turn traitor was not conceivable. He knew all his intimate plans, stood second to himself in the company. Oh, it was a numbing blow! Ridgway's sense of personal loss and outrage almost obliterated for the moment his appreciation of the business loss.

The motion to revoke the receivership of the Supply Company was being argued when Ridgway entered the court-room. Within a few minutes the news had spread like wild-fire that Eaton was lined up with the Consolidated, and already the paltry dozen of loafers in the court-room had swelled into hundreds, all of them eager for any sensation that might develop.

Ridgway's broad shoulders flung aside the crowd and opened a way to the vacant chair waiting for him. One of his lawyers had the floor and was flaying Eaton with a vitriolic tongue, the while men craned forward all over the room to get a glimpse of the traitor's face.

Eaton sat beside Mott, dry-lipped and pallid, his set eyes staring vacantly into space. Once or twice he flung a furtive glance about him. His stripped and naked soul was enduring a foretaste of the Judgment Day. The whip of scorn with which the lawyer lashed him cut into his shrinking sensibilities, and left him a welter of raw and livid wales. Good God! why had he not known it would be like this? He was paying for his treachery and usury, and it was being burnt into him that as the years passed he must continue to pay in self-contempt and the distrust of his fellows.

The case had come to a hearing before Judge Hughes, who was not one of Ridgway's creatures. That on its merits it would be decided in favor of the Consolidated was a foregone conclusion. It was after the judge had rendered the expected decision that the dramatic moment of the day came to gratify the seasoned court frequenters.

Eaton, trying to slip as quietly as possible from the room, came face to face with his former chief. For an interminable instant the man he had betrayed, blocking the way squarely, held the trembling wretch in the blaze of his scorn. Ridgway's contemptuous eyes sifted to the ingrate's soul until it shriveled. Then he stood disdainfully to one side so that the man might not touch him as he passed.

Some one in the back of the room broke the tense silence and hissed: “The damned Judas!” Instantly echoes of “Judas! Judas!” filled the room, and pursued Eaton to his cab. It would be many years before he could recall without scalding shame that moment when the finger of public scorn was pointed at him in execration.

XII.

What Harley had sought in the subornation of Eaton had been as much the moral effect of his defection as the tangible results themselves. If he could shake the confidence of the city and State in the freebooter's victorious star, he would have done a good day's work. He wanted the impression to spread that Ridgway's success had passed its meridian.

Nor did he fail of his purpose by more than a hair's breadth. The talk of the street saw the beginning of the end. The common voice ran: “It's 'God help Ridgway' now. He's down and out.”

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 he had a chance 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 Montana to discuss a program of action against the enemy, and Ridgway gave a dinner for them that evening at the Mesa Hotel.

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 Montana should control the Consolidated or the Consolidated Montana. With simple, telling force he traced 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 Montana. 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 unbridled 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.

His 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 storehouses 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 million 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 ended their demands by proposing to arbitrate his difficulties with the Consolidated, by offering to pay into the union treasury half 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 flogged 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.

XIII.

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, Simon Harley cared not a whit. He needed no bolstering. The old wrecker carried an iron face to the ordeal. His leather 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 Montana 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, 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.

As the days passed excitement grew more tense. It reached a climax when the jury stayed out for eleven hours before coming to a verdict. From the moment the jury filed in to 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 silence 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 shopping-bag to exact vengeance in the event of a miscarriage of justice.

XIV.

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 first thought had been of her. As soon as he knew that death was sure, he hurried to the hotel where she was staying.

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 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 up 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 sofa-pillow. 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.”

“Who wouldn't be good to you, child?”

“You would, anyhow. You are good to me,” she repeated.

“I am good to myself,” he said, love shining uncontrollably in his eyes.

His meaning came to her with a kind of sweet shame. “No, no, no—not now!” she cried.

“Dear,” he answered, taking her little hand in his big one, “only this now: that my heart aches to see you in trouble, because I love you. For everything else, I am content to wait.”

“And I love you,” the child widow answered, a flush dyeing her cheeks. “But I ought not to tell you yet, ought I?”

There was that in her radiant, tear-dewed eyes that demanded the truth, and Ridgway's finer instincts, vandal and pagan though he was, responded to it.

“It is right that you should tell me, since it is true, but it is right, too, that we should wait.”

“Now that I am in trouble, it is so sweet to know that you love me. There are so many things I don't understand. You must help me. You are so strong and so sure, and I am so—helpless.”

“You dear innocent, so strong in your weakness,” he murmured to himself.

“You must be a guide to me and a teacher.”

“And you a conscience to me”—he smiled happily.

“But I can't. You know so much better than I do what is right.”

“Yet I often do wrong. At least, it would seem to most people wrong. I sometimes know it is myself.”

“I cannot judge you, since I love you. I shall always believe what you do right. Perhaps I can't really be a help to you. Now, Virginia——” She stopped, the color washing from her face. “I had forgotten. You have no right to love me—nor I you,” she faltered.

“Girl of mine, we have every right in the world. Love is never wrong unless it is a theft or a robbery. There is nothing between me and Virginia that is not artificial and conventional, no tie that ought not to be broken, none that should ever of right have existed. Love has the right of way before mere convention a hundredfold.”

“Ah! If I were sure!”

“But I was to be a teacher to you and a judge for you.”

“And I was to be a conscience to you”—she smiled wanly.

“But on this I am quite clear. I can be a conscience to myself. But there is no hurry. We may let that wait. Time is a great solvent.”

The door opened, and Virginia came in, flushed with rapid walking. She had heard the news on the street, and had hurried back to the hotel.

Her eyes asked of Ridgway: “Does she know?” and his answered in the affirmative. Straight to Aline she went and wrapped her in her arms, the latent maternal instinct that is in every woman aroused and dominant.

Ridgway slipped quietly out of the room and left them together.

XV.

Miss Balfour's glass made her irritably aware of cheeks unduly flushed and eyes unusually bright. Since she prided herself on being sufficient for the emergencies of life, she cast about in her mind to determine which of the interviews that lay before her was responsible for her excitement. It was, to be sure, an unusual experience for a young woman to be sold that her fiancé would be unable to marry her, owing to a subsequent engagement, but she looked forward to it with keen anticipation, and would not have missed it for the world. Since she pushed the thought of the other interview into the background of her mind and refused to contemplate it at all, she did not see how that could lend any impetus to her pulse.

But though she was pleasantly excited as she swept into the reception-room, Ridgway was unable to detect the fact in her cool little nod and frank, careless handshake. Indeed, she looked so entirely mistress of herself, so much the perfectly gowned exquisite, that he began to dread anew the task he had set himself. It is not a pleasant thing under the most favorable circumstances to beg off from marrying a young woman one has engaged oneself to, and Ridgway did not find it easier because the young woman looked every inch a queen, and was so manifestly far from suspecting the object of his call.

“I haven't had a chance to congratulate you personally yet,” she said, after they had drifted to chairs. “I've been immensely proud of you.”

“I got your note. It was good of you to write as soon as you heard.”

She swept him with one of her smile-lit side glances. “Though, of course, in a way, I was felicitating myself when I congratulated you.”

“You mean?”

She laughed with velvet maliciousness. “Oh, well, I'm dragged into the orbit of your greatness, am I not? As the wife of the president of the Greater Consolidated Copper Company—the immense combine that takes in practically all of the larger copper properties in the country—I should come in for a share of reflected glory, you know.”

Ridgway bit his lip and took a deep breath, but before he had found words she was off again. She had no intention of letting him descend from the rack yet.

“How did you do it? By what magic did you bring it about? Of course, I've read the newspapers' accounts, seen your features and your history butchered in a dozen Sunday horrors, and thanked Heaven no enterprising reporter guessed enough to use me as a copy. Every paper I have picked up for weeks has been full of you and the story of how you took Wall Street by the throat. But I suspect they were all guesses, merely superficial rumors except as to the main facts. What I want to know is the inside story—the lever by means of which you pried open the door leading to the inner circle of financial magnates. You have often told me how tightly barred that door is. What was the open-sesame you used as a countersign to make the keeper of the gate unbolt?”

He thought he saw his chance. “The countersign was 'Aline Harley,'” he said, and looked her straight in the face. He wished he could find some way of telling her without making him feel so like a cad.

She clapped her hands. “I thought so. She backed you with that uncounted fortune her husband left her. Is that it?”

“That is it exactly. She gave me a free hand, and the immense fortune she inherited from Harley put me in a position to force recognition from the leaders. After that it was only a question of time till I had convinced them my plan was good.” He threw back his shoulders and tried to take the fence again. “Would you like to know why Mrs. Harley put her fortune at my command?”

“I suppose because she is interested in us and our little affair. Doesn't all the world love a lover?” she asked, with a disarming candor.

“She had a better reason,” he said, meeting her eyes gravely.

“You must tell me it—but not just yet. I have something to tell you first.” She held out her little clenched hand. “Here is something that belongs to you. Can you open it?”

He straightened her fingers one by one, and took from her palm the engagement-ring he had given her. Instantly he looked up, doubt and relief sweeping his face.

“Am I to understand that you terminate our engagement?”

She nodded.

“May I ask why?”

“I couldn't bring myself to it, Waring. I honestly tried, but I couldn't do it.”

“When did you find this out?”

“I began to find it out when you kissed me that first day—the only time you ever did. I've been in a process of learning it ever since. It wouldn't be fair to you for me to marry you.”

“You're a brick, Virginia!” he cried jubilantly.

“No, I'm not. That is a minor reason. The really important one is that it wouldn't be fair to me.”

“No, it would not,” he admitted, with an air of candor.

“Because, you see, I happen to care for another man,” she purred.

His vanity leaped up fully armed. “Another man! Who?”

“That's my secret,” she answered, smiling at his chagrin.

“And his?”

“I said mine. At any rate, if three knew, it wouldn't be a secret,” was her quick retort.

“Do you think you have been quite fair to me, Virginia?' he asked, with gloomy dignity.

“I think so,” she answered, and touched him with the ripost: “I'm ready now to have you tell me when you expect to marry Aline Harley.”

His dignity collapsed like a pricked bladder. “How did you know?” he demanded, in astonishment.

“Oh, well, I have eyes.”

“But I didn't know—I thought——”

“Oh, you thought! You are a pair of children at the game,” this thousand-year-old young woman scoffed. “I have known for months that you worshiped each other.”

“If you mean to imply——” he began severely.

“Hit somebody of your size, Warry,” she interrupted cheerfully, as to an infant. “If you suppose I am so guileless as not to know that you were coming here this afternoon to tell me you were regretfully compelled to give me up on account of a more important engagement, then you conspicuously fail to guess right. I read it in your note.”

He gave up attempting to reprove her. It did not seem feasible, under the circumstances. Instead, he held out the hand of peace, and she took it with a laugh of gay camaraderie.

“Well,” he smiled, “it seems possible that we may both soon be subjects for congratulation. That just shows how things work around right. We never would have suited each other, you know.”

“I'm quite sure we shouldn't,” agreed Virginia promptly. “But I don't think I'll trouble you to congratulate me till you see me wearing another solitaire.”

“We'll hope for the best,” he said cheerfully.

She settled herself back in the low easy chair, with her hands clasped behind her head.

“And now I'd like to know why you prefer her to me,” she demanded saucily. “Do you think her handsomer?”

He looked her over from the rippling brown hair to the trim suède shoes. “No,” he smiled; “they don't make them handsomer.”'

“More intellectual?”

“No,”

“Of a better disposition?”

“I like yours, too.”

“More charming?”

“I find her so, saving your presence.”

“Please justify yourself in detail.”

He shook his head, still smiling. “My justification is not to be itemized. It lies deeper—in destiny, or fate, or whatever one calls it.”

“I see.” She offered Markham's verses as an explanation.

“Perhaps we are led and our loves are fated,
And our steps are counted one by one;
Perhaps we shall meet and our souls be mated,
After the burnt-out sun.”

“I like that. Who did you say wrote it?”

The immobile butler, as once before, presented a card for her inspection. Ridgway, with recollections of the previous occasion, ventured to murmur again: “The fairy prince.”

Virginia blushed to her hair, and this time did not offer the card for his disapproval.

“Shall I congratulate him?” he wanted to know.

The imperious blood came to her cheeks on the instant. The sudden storm in her eyes warned him better than words.

“I'll be good,” he murmured, as Lyndon Hobart came into the room,

His goodness took the form of a speedy departure. She followed him to the door for a parting fling at him.

“In your automobile you should reach her in about ten minutes. With luck you may be engaged inside of a quarter of an hour.”

“You have the advantage of me by just ten minutes,” he flung back.

“You ought to thank me on your knees for having saved you a wretched scene this afternoon,” was the best she could say to cover her discomfiture.

“I do. I do. My thanks are taking the form of leaving you with the prince.”

“That's very crude, sir—and I'm not sure it isn't impertinent.”

Miss Balfour was blushing when she returned to Hobart. He mistook the reason, and she could not very well explain that her blushes were due to the last wordless retort of the retiring “old love,” whose hand had gone up in a ridiculous bless-you-my-children attitude just before he left her.

Their conversation started stiffly. He had come, he explained, to say good-by. He was leaving Montana to take charge of some large mining properties in Colorado.

Miss Balfour expressed regret that he was going, though she did not suppose she would see any less of him than she had during the past two months.

He did not take advantage of her little fling to make the talk less formal, and Virginia, provoked at his aloofness, offered no more chances.

Things went very badly indeed for ten minutes, at the end of which time Hobart rose to go. Virginia was miserably aware of being wretched despite the cool hauteur of her seeming indifference.

But he was too good a sportsman to go without letting her know he held no grudge.

“I hope you will be very happy with Mr. Ridgway. Believe me, there is nobody whose happiness I would so rejoice at as yours.”

“Thank you,” she smiled coolly, and her heart raced. “May I hope that your good wishes still obtain even though I must seek my happiness apart from Mr. Ridgway?”

He held her for an instant's grave, astonished questioning, before which her eyes fell. Her thoughts side-tracked swiftly to long for and to dread what was coming.

“If you don't mind, I'll sit down again,” he said, and the quaver in his voice was audible.

Her racing heart assured her fearfully, delightfully, that she did not mind at all.

“I have no time and no compass to take my bearings. You will pardon me if what I say seems presumptuous?”

Silence, which is not always golden, oppressed her. Why could she not make light talk as she had been wont to do with Waring Ridgway?

“But if I ask too much, I shall not be hurt if you deny me,” he continued. “For how long has your engagement with Mr. Ridgway been broken, may I ask?”

“Between fifteen and twenty minutes.”

“A lovers' quarrel, perhaps?” he hazarded timidly.

“On the contrary, quite final and irrevocable. Mr. Ridgway and I have never been lovers.” She was not sure whether this last were meant as a confession or a justification.

“Not lovers?” He waited for her to explain.

Her proud eyes faced him. “We became engaged for other reasons. I thought that did not matter. But I find my other reasons were not sufficient. To-day I terminated the engagement. But it is only fair to say that Mr. Ridgway had come here for that purpose. I merely anticipated him.” Her self-contempt would not let her abate one jot of the humiliating truth. She flayed herself with a whip of scorn quite lost on Hobart.

A wave of surging hope was flushing his heart, but he held himself well in hand.

“I must be presumptuous still,” he said. “I must find out if you broke the engagement because you care for another man.”

She tried to meet his shining eyes and could not. “You have no right to ask that.”

“Perhaps not till I have asked something else. I wonder if I should have any chance if I were to tell you that I love you.”

Her glance swept him shyly with a delicious little laugh. “You never can tell till you try.”