“Of course. You and I are the only men who know it isn’t worth a damn. Dickover hates me now, hates me bad enough to ruin himself to get my pelt. He’s trying to smash Apex Crown as flat as a pancake, and he’ll do it before noon to-day! He figures that I’ll get scared. He’s dead sure that I’ve got a yellow streak. He’s gambling that when Apex Crown gets away down, I’ll grow scared and unload to save something from the wreck. See?” “Uhuh! But what _will_ you do? What’s your game? How the devil do we make a killing out of this?” “We bought our stock at two to five cents, didn’t we?” Henderson laughed. “About noon Apex Crown will be flat. When it is, then I dump over a hundred thousand shares in small lots. Dickover thinks I’ve fully unloaded; he steps in to grab the stock. I help him by grabbing back my hundred thousand shares, and the price goes up. Worse than that, it skyrockets! When it gets to a dollar, which is about the limit, we’ll unload for good. We’ll get rid of the whole thing at between a dollar and fifty—and clean up a hundred thousand odd dollars!” “Whew!” Cheadle’s whistle of admiration changed and died suddenly. “But say! Ain’t that stock juggling illegal? Ain’t the gov’ment going to investigate?” “Let ’em!” Henderson laughed scornfully. “If they can ever prove anything on Dickover or me, either, let ’em! Think we are fools? With that hundred thousand, and the low-grade properties I’ve already got, I’ll be fixed for life when news of that chemical process gets into print! And I’ll see that it does get into print before many more days.” Again the telephone jingled. “Some boob is buying,” snarled Henderson, reporting to his partner in rascality. “But the price is going down just the same. Four here and two and a half in Los Angeles.” The voices dropped beyond the hearing of Bowen. But he had heard enough. The irony of the situation was that Henderson did not in the least realize that his clever scheme was utterly ruining the man he hated, Bob Bowen, of Tonopah! “And he sha’n’t know it if I can help it,” grimly reflected Bowen. He fought down the panic that gripped him. He felt no satisfaction at having correctly guessed Dickover’s plan of campaign. He felt no delight at having correctly guessed that a chemical process _had_ been perfected. All this was lost in the thought that he had ruined Alice Ferguson. For himself he did not greatly care. He had been broke before, and would be broke again! But the thought of the girl who had believed in him, hurt and rankled. It must now be getting on toward noon, he concluded. By this time Gus Saunders, through scattered agents, was buying Apex Crown here and in Los Angeles; buying it for Bowen and Ferguson! Dickover was grimly hammering down the stock. Saunders’s buying would be too carefully handled to send it shooting up in a hurry. And when Saunders got all through, according to the orders the partners had given him, they would own a mine that was absolutely worthless!