look forward with increasing longing to the time when he should return. The rendezvous with the star was now faithfully kept. But that was only when he was alone: and he was alone very little. The rest of the time she lay deep in his heart, and everything he saw and did came through the medium of his love and was tinged by it to a wonderful rosiness; so that take it all in all he was getting through pretty well. The cough was certainly disappearing.
II
Now it happened that the very day after Kenneth had left Arguello, Patrick Boyd returned unexpectedly from the East. He had fully expected to be away for another month; but Bates had concluded arrangements much more quickly than he had anticipated. Boyd caught the first train. He might have telegraphed his arrival; but it hardly seemed important, and he would surprise Ken. Like most surprises, this one missed fire. From the Chinese he learned merely that the young man had gone pigeon shooting, to which Boyd mentally registered approval: Ken had earned a vacation. Then he turned his whole energies to getting action.
For Boyd had the thing sewed up in a gunnysack, as he phrased it. That is to say, Bates and his associates had found ample financial backing; the company had been incorporated under the laws of New Jersey; and Boyd himself stood in a very satisfactory relation to it all. There remained merely to go ahead with the physical details. The first of these was to acquire or tie up the most desirable irrigable property; the second to get rights of way; the third to develop the water rights Boyd had already taken up. After that would come such incidental matters as water power, electric power, municipal supply, and so forth. It looked big!
With at last something definite to which to apply his long-pent energies, Boyd went at things with a vim. The morning after his arrival he had called a special meeting of the First National's directors. He brought to their attention the Peyton loans. These mortgages had been renewed again and again; a further renewal would be asked. He then pointed out that
