"I hope you won't have to. But to a man up a tree it looks very much like a dead cock in the pit. As I have said, if there is any backing to do, I'm with you, first, last, and all the time, merely from a sportsman's interest in the game. But is there any use in a little handful of us trying to buck up against a whole state government?" The coffee had been served, and Kent dropped a lump of sugar into his cup. "Ormsby, I'll never let go while I'm alive enough to fight," he said slowly. "One decent quality I have--and the only one, perhaps: I don't know when I'm beaten. And I'll down this crowd of political plunderers yet, if Bucks doesn't get me sand-bagged." His listener pushed back his chair. "If you stood to lose anything more than your job I could understand it," he commented. "As it is, I can't. Any way you look at it, your stake in the game isn't worth the time and effort it will take to play the string out. And I happen to know you're ambitious to do things--things that count." "What is it you don't understand--the motive?" "That's it." Kent laughed. "You are not as astute as Miss Van Brock. She pointed it out to me last night--or thought she did--in two words." Ormsby's eyes darkened, and he did not affect to misunderstand. "It would be a grand-stand play," he said half-musingly, "if you should happen to worry it through, I mean. I believe Mrs. Hepzibah would be ready to fall on your neck and forgive you, and turn me down." Then, half-jestingly: "Kent, what will you take to drop this thing permanently and go away?" David Kent's smile showed his teeth. "The one thing you wouldn't be willing to give. You asked me once when we had fallen over the fence upon this forbidden ground if I were satisfied, and I told you I wasn't. Do we understand each other?" "I guess so," said Ormsby. "But--Say, Kent, I like you too well to see you go up against a stone fence blindfolded. I'm like Guilford: I am the man in possession. And possession is nine points of the law." Kent rose and took the proffered cigar from Ormsby's case. "It depends a good bit upon how the possession is gained--and held--doesn't it?" he rejoined coolly. "And your figure is unfortunate in its other half. I am going to beat Guilford." XIII THE WRECKERS Just why Receiver Guilford, an officer of the court who was supposed to be nursing an insolvent railroad to the end that its creditors might not lose all, should begin by declaring war on the road's revenue, was a question which the managers of competing lines strove vainly to answer. But when, in defiance of all precedent, he made the cut rates effective to and from all local stations on the Trans-Western, giving the shippers at intermediate and non-competitive points the full benefit of the reductions, the railroad colony denounced him as a madman and gave him a month in which to find the bottom of a presumably empty treasury.