“And you’re sure that you’re on the road to true success?” she asked lightly. “Now, you have heaven in the back of your mind.” “Not exactly,” she laughed. “But I didn’t expect you to understand.” “Then I won’t disappoint you,” he said cheerfully. She came back to the concrete. “I should like to know whether it is true that you own the courts of Yuba County and have the decisions of the judges written at your lawyer’s offices in cases between you and the Consolidated.” “If I do,” he answered easily, “I am doing just what the Consolidated would do in case they had been so fortunate as to have won the last election and seated their judicial candidates. One expects a friendly leaning from the men one put in office.” “Isn’t the judiciary supposed to be the final, incorruptible bulwark of the nation?” she pretended to want to know. “I believe it is supposed to be.” “Isn’t it rather—loading the dice, to interfere with the courts?” “I find the dice already loaded. I merely substitute others of my own.” “You don’t seem a bit ashamed of yourself.” “I’m ashamed of the Consolidated”—he smiled. “That’s a comfortable position to be able to take.” She fixed him for a moment with her charming frown of interrogation. “You won’t mind my asking these questions? I’m trying to decide whether you are too much of a pirate for me. Perhaps when I’ve made up my mind you won’t want me,” she added. “Oh, I’ll want you!” Then coolly: “Shall we wait till you make up your mind before announcing the engagement?” “Don’t be too sure,” she flashed at him. “I’m horribly unsure.” “Of course, you’re laughing at me, just as you would”—she tilted a sudden sideways glance at him—“if I asked you WHY you wanted to marry me.” “Oh, if you take me that way——” She interrupted airily. “I’m trying to make up my mind whether to take you at all.” “You certainly have a direct way of getting at things.” He studied appreciatively her piquant, tilted face; the long, graceful lines of her slender, perfect figure. “I take it you don’t want the sentimental reason for my wishing to marry you, though I find that amply justified. But if you want another, you must still look to yourself for it. My business leads me to appreciate values correctly. When I desire you to sit at the head of my table, to order my house, my judgment justifies itself. I have a fancy always for the best. When I can’t gratify it I do without.” “Thank you.” She made him a gay little mock curtsy “I had heard you were no carpet-knight, Mr. Ridgway. But rumor is a lying jade, for I am being told—am I not?—that in case I don’t take pity on you, the lone future of a celibate stretches drear before you.” “Oh, certainly.” Having come to the end of that passage, she tried another. “A young man told me yesterday you were a fighter. He said he guessed you would stand the acid. What did he mean?”