Once more Gregory Compton had scored. Scientific men are normally honest, although the great fees offered to geologists frequently infuse their judgment with that malleable quality peculiar to the lawyer under the subtle influence of his brief. But these men, all of high repute, would be too afraid of one another, and of the merciless newspaper men that would accompany them, to deliver aught but a just verdict. Gregory knew that Amalgamated was profoundly disconcerted, and that in the face of public opinion it was improbable that the suit ever would be brought into court. But they could devil him meanwhile, and he was enjoined from working on the recovered vein until the case should be decided. He accepted the injunction without protest and transferred the miners, whom he had kept hard at work blocking out until the last minute, down to the second level of the mine. “They’ll get a jolt from that quarter, too,” said Gregory to Ora, and he was not referring to the miners. “They’ll go on fighting me for years, no doubt, but I’ll spring some sort of a facer on them every time. They may have more money, but I have enough.” “You never feel afraid they may beat you in the end?” “Beat me?” Gregory’s eyes glittered. “Not unless they bore a hole in my skull and introduce a microbe that will devour my brains. I can get ahead of them in more ways than one. Long before all the ore on the second level is stoped out I shall be in a position to put up my own reduction works if they freeze me out of Anaconda or Great Falls. If I ever go into politics it will be to fight for a state smelter.” Ora looked at him speculatively. He was walking up and down her living-room with a swift gliding motion peculiar to him in certain moods; his head was a little bent as if his narrow concentrated gaze were following a trail. “I believe you love the fight as much as any part of it,” she said. “I do. And as soon as I’ve taken out money enough I’m going to buy a big tract of land, irrigate it, plant it in beets, put up a sugar refinery and fight the Havemeyer trust.” “Why don’t you form a company, buy your beet land, and put up the factory now? You could raise all the money you wanted.” “No companies or partners for me,” he said curtly. “What I’ll do I’ll do alone. I want no man’s help and no man’s money. And I certainly want no other man’s ideas interfering with mine.”