He expounded his easy philosophy with airy candor. “After all, laws are made for man, not man for the laws. Mr. Gray is a capitalist, and he can tell you that laws are to be obeyed with discretion. There would not be any use in having them if somebody did not break them occasionally. Well, this is my day off. I’m playing ping-pong with the statutes of Colorado” “But why?” I demanded. “What good does it do you?” “Oh come, Damron! Mayn’t I have a secret or two of my own? I don’t suppose you ever explained publicly just why you happen to be spending your vacation in Colorado instead of Timbuctoo.” I fear I blushed. Glancing covertly at my reason, I found it the fairest under the sun, but too present to admit of discussion. Suddenly Simon Gray cut crisply into the talk for the first time. “Of course I understand why you are holding me here, Halloway. You are working under instructions from your father to keep me until after the election this afternoon. But the thing is too barefaced. It won’t hold in law. It’s a conspiracy.” Halloway’s masterful eves looked straight at him. “I have not seen or heard from my father in two years, Mr. Gray. He does not have anything to do with his scalawag son. You do not need to look beyond me to place the responsibility for this. But you’re right in one thing. I intend that you shall not reach Denver in time for the Copper Consolidated meeting.” They were both dominant men, and their eyes met like the flash of steel. “No? Why not?” asked Gray quietly, his lids narrowing to long watchful slits. “Because you are going there to take what doesn’t belong to you—to vote away from my father and his associates the control of a business which they have given twenty years of their lives to build. Theirs is a legitimate business enterprise. They developed and extended it gradually. It grew to be a big thing. Then you took a fancy for copper. You——” “You don’t know what you are talking about young man. I am going there to take what the law allows me—what I have bought and paid for in the open market,” broke in Gray harshly. “Yes, the law allows it to you, and it doesn’t allow me to interfere. That is where the law is defective. It is true, too, that you have manipulated the market in such a way as to get temporary control of a majority of the stock. But that does not affect the fact that my father and his friends have the moral right to direct the affairs of the Consolidated. Their whole life is bound up in it. You are interested simply for speculative purposes. They have earned the right to direct its affairs. You haven’t.” “Such talk is sheer folly. You do not understand finance, sir. You have been living outside of the currents of business. The matter is a plain business one, not an ethical or sentimental affair at all.” Halloway’s daring eyes swept whimsically across the table and rested momentarily on Katherine. “I am trying to keep it on a business basis so that sentiment may not interfere, sir.”