He returned to Circle-G, told Mr. Griffiths that he had found no float, but nevertheless liked the neighbourhood and was inclined to buy the ranch and sell it in small farms to settlers. He would return to Butte and think it over. If he concluded to buy he would pay a half million dollars in cash, and, if Mr. Griffiths were agreeable borrow back $300,000, for improvements, giving a mortgage at seven per cent. on the forty thousand acres he proposed to make attractive for settlers. He gave no hint of his irrigation project. Griffiths had known of this body of water, but it had never occurred to him nor to anyone else to divert it. He was a stock-grower, pure and simple, with no “modern notions”, and Gregory had no intention of enlarging his vision. He would pay the man his price, but he had the ruthlessness of his type. He had more than one motive for offering to borrow back $300,000 of the payment money; not only should he need it at once, but he feared, after Mr. Griffiths’ confidence, and knowing his kind, that the old man would withdraw in terror at the last moment, preferring the safe monotonies of his ranch to the unknown responsibilities of a capitalist; like others he had heard that it is sometimes easier to get money than to invest it. Gregory told him to think it over and write to the Daly and Clark Banks in Butte, and to the National Bank of Montana, in Helena, for information regarding his own standing and financial condition. He left the entire family in as hopeful a frame of mind as himself. On confirmation of the report that forty thousand acres could be put under water by gravity, he should close the deal at once, file a notice of appropriation for forty thousand miner’s inches of water, and begin work on the first tunnel. He then intended to lay the matter before one of the great land selling organisations of Chicago or New York, proposing that he be paid $1,400,000 for the forty thousand acres of irrigated land, subject to mortgage; demonstrating that the land so purchased for thirty-five dollars an acre (or forty-three and a half dollars including the mortgage) could readily be sold to settlers for one hundred, if railroad facilities were provided. As a further inducement, to cover the cost of railroad construction, he would execute a deed and place it in escrow, as a guarantee and evidence of good faith, and accompanied by a contract authorising the land selling company to dispose of the remaining thirty-five thousand acres at ten dollars an acre. The construction of the railroad would add materially to the value of the unirrigated land also, and a pledge of this portion of the property as security that the railroad would be built would be acceptable, because the estimated cost, with liberal allowances, was under $350,000.