"No, indeed," she said, "I won't tell you anything--but after you lose, come around." "No, but look!" he urged. "If I lose, you lose. Come through and tell me now." "You called me a crook," she answered spitefully, "you said I had sold you out! Do you think I will tell you, after that? No, you're so smart, go ahead--Spend your money! Hire a lot of lawyers and experts! You think I sold you out to Stoddard? Well, go ahead--_you_ try to buy me! No, I'm going to show you, Mr. Rimrock Jones, that I have never sold out to anybody--that I can't be bought, nor sold. You need that lesson more than you need the money that you are wasting in vice and fraud." She ended, panting with the anger that swept over her, and Rimrock thrust out his chin. "Huh! Vice and fraud!" he repeated scornfully, "you certainly don't hunt for words. Is it vice and fraud to hire lawyers and experts and try to win back my own mine? What do you want me to do--go and kow-tow to Stoddard and ask him to please step on my neck?" "No, I want you to do what you're going to do--spend the Company's money, and lose. That money is part mine, but I'll be glad to part with it if it will cure you of being such a fool." They faced each other, each heated and angry, and then he showed his teeth in a smile. "I know what's the matter," he said at last, "you're jealous of Mrs. Hardesty!" She checked the denial that leapt to her lips to search for a more fitting retort. "You flatter yourself," she said, smiling thinly, "but you do not flatter me." "Yeah, 'vice and crime.' That shows where you good people fall down. I suppose you think that she was an _awful_ disreputable woman! Well, she wasn't; she was just another of Stoddard's stool-pigeons that he uses to work suckers like me. She got me back there and helped him bleed me and then she kissed me good-bye--so!" He made the motion of slamming a door and his eyes turned dark with fury. "She had a good line of talk herself," he sneered, "and her heart was as black as that book!" He pointed to a book that was black indeed but Mary said never a word. This was news to her, and perhaps it was balm that would in time cure a wound in her heart, but now it rankled deep. "I think," she said at last, "the most pitiable spectacle in the world is you, Mr. Rimrock Jones. You try to buy friends, as if they were commodities, and you try to buy them wholesale. You set up the drinks and try to buy the whole town, but what is the result of it all? Why, you simply attract a lot of leeches and bloodsuckers whose sole purpose is to get your money. And then, when you finally become disillusioned, you class them all together. You don't deserve any friends!" "Well, maybe not!" he answered truculently, "but who's got the most, right now? You or me? Look at Old Hassayamp Hicks, and Woo Chong--and L. W.!"