When he stole down the steps in the darkness of the early night, triumph was in his heart. She was his when he chose to take her, her will as water, her resistance only words. A new world of love, liberty and riches lay before him. The bleak town and its bitter memories would soon be far behind, and June and he in a strange country and a new life would begin their dream of love. CHAPTER VII THE COLONEL COMES BACK Jerry’s plans had been laid with the utmost secrecy and care. It behooved him to be wary, for he knew that detection would mean death. Neither the Colonel nor Black Dan would have hesitated to shoot him like a dog if they had known what he contemplated, and working day by day in an office with these men, in a town the smallness and isolation of which rendered every human figure a segregated and important unit, it required all the shrewdness of which he was master to mature his design and arouse no suspicion. The time had now come when everything was suddenly propitious. Had the Prince of Darkness been giving Jerry’s affairs his particular attention, circumstances could not have fallen together more conveniently for the furthering of his purpose. In the office of the Cresta Plata it was arranged that every two weeks he should be given three or four days off to go to San Francisco and visit his wife. These holidays, which were grudgingly doled out by Black Dan, always included the Sunday, as the older man was determined his son-in-law should have as little immunity from work as possible. In the middle of the week Jerry was informed that he could leave for San Francisco on the following Saturday morning to report again at the office on Wednesday. The granting of this five days’ leave of absence made the elopement easy of accomplishment, robbing it of the danger of detection that Jerry realized and shrank from. He and June could leave on Friday night and take the overland train eastward. They would have five days’ start before discovery was made, and in five days they would be so far on their journey that it would be easy for them to conceal themselves in some of the larger towns along the route. Mercedes, who was a bad correspondent, could be trusted not to write to her father, and Allen, according to June’s artless revelations, was gone for a much longer time than he wanted known. Finally the last and most serious obstacle was removed in the shape of the Colonel. Jerry being in the office knew that his enemy would not be back before Tuesday or Wednesday, as the work of inspecting the pumps had been slower than was anticipated. Months of waiting and planning could not have arranged matters more satisfactorily. Luck, once again, was on his side, as it had been so often in the past.