She drew in her lips and gazed at him resentfully; then, sitting down at her typewriter, she thought for a minute and rattled off a single sentence. Rimrock took the paper and signed it blindly, then stopped and read what it was. "I, Henry (Rimrock) Jones, for value received, hereby agree to give to Mary Roget Fortune, one per cent. of the total capital stock of the Tecolote Mining Company." "Yes, all right," he said. "You'll get your stock just as soon as I get it from the East. And now I hope, by the Lord, you're satisfied." "Yes, I am," she answered and smiled cryptically. "Well, I pass!" he exploded and, struggling to his feet, he lurched out upon the street. CHAPTER VII BUT COMES BACK FOR MORE From the highest pinnacle of success to the black depths of despair is a long way to drop in one hour and if Rimrock Jones went the way of all flesh it is only another argument for prohibition. All the rest of the town had got a good start before he appeared on the scene and to drown that black thought--defeated by a woman--he drank deep with the crowd at the Alamo. At the end of the bout when, his thoughts coming haphazard, he philosophized on the disasters of the day, his brain slipped a cog and brought two ideas together that piled Pelion on the Ossa of his discontent. The first vision to rise was that of the lady typist, exacting her full pound of flesh; and then, groping back to that other catastrophe, his mind fetched up--Andrew McBain! And then he remembered. She worked for McBain. He straightened up in the bar-room chair and gusty curses swept from his lips. "You're stung, you sucker!" he cried in a fury. "You're sold out to Andrew McBain! Oh, you dad-burned idiot--you ignorant baboon--you were drunk, that's why you signed up!" Rimrock's pitiful rage at that other personality that had marred his fair hopes in his mine--that perverse, impulsive, overweening inner spirit that took the helm at each crisis of his life--was a rage to make the gods above weep if they did not laugh at the jest. And this blind, drunken self that rose up within him to sit leeringly in judgment on his acts, it judged not so ill, if the truth must be spoken. He had gone to Mary Fortune with the bouquet of Bourbon subtly blended with the aroma of his cigar and the fine edge of his reason had been dulled by so much when he matched his boy's wit against hers. His mind had not sought out the hidden motive that lay behind what she had said; he had followed where she led and, finding her logic impregnable, had yielded like a child, in a pique. Yes, yielded out of spite without ever once thinking that she worked, day by day, for McBain.