"But you are, and it's no use bein' squeamish over somethin' that's none of your business. This is your bread and butter." It was the argument which has tied men's tongues since the world began and it never grows less effective. The shovel dropped from the grave-digger's shoulder. "Hop in here and help me roll him back." The grave-digger reluctantly obeyed. "This looks fierce to me." He wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead. "Take a rock and hammer in them shingle-nails and forget it!" When Dan Treu returned from his business trip to the County seat the undertaker met him smilingly. "I made a fine show for the money, Dan; you'd have been pleased. Everything was plain but good and went off without a slip. I handled him as I promised--like he was my own." The few in Crowheart who heard the story laughed openly at the statement which Giovanni Pelezzo made when he returned to camp one day and declared that while seated in the doorway of the operating room of the hospital he had turned in time to see Dr. Harpe take five dollars and some small change from the pocket of his cousin Antonio Pelezzo, whom she had etherized for a minor operation. Although Antonio turned his empty pockets inside out to verify Giovanni's stoutly reiterated assertion, the camp ridiculed their story and none laughed more heartily at the absurdity of the tale than Dr. Harpe herself. When she declared that it was only one illustration of the lengths to which ignorant and suspicious foreigners would go, her listeners agreed that she must indeed have much with which to contend in practising her profession among such a class of people as were employed upon the project. The only person who did not laugh, beside the countrymen of the two Italians, was Dan Treu. He made no comment when he heard the tale, but he sat for a long time on the corner of the White Elephant's billiard table, holding a cigarette which he forgot to smoke. XXI TURNING A CORNER Andy P. Symes was much occupied with his own thoughts, he was not sleeping well and all food tasted much alike, while the adulation of his fellow-townsmen did not afford him the usual pleasure. These symptoms are most frequently associated with lack of funds, and in this respect Mr. Symes's case was not a peculiar one, the fact being that the total of the month's payroll exceeded the amount in the treasury--with no relief in sight--interest in the great Symes Irrigation Project having seemed suddenly to lag in financial circles. "Maybe I imagine it," Mudge, the promoter, had written, "but it looks to me as though Capital was giving us the frosty mitt. They won't even listen. I can't raise a dollar among the stockholders or sell a bond. Could anybody have been knocking the proposition?" Symes had written back-- "Ridiculous! Who would knock? I have no enemies of sufficient importance to hurt me, and particularly back there. Do your utmost, for the situation is growing critical here--desperate, in fact."