On the day following the hindering concrete failure at the dam, Smith gave still more color to the charges of his detractors in the business field. Those whose affairs brought them in contact with him found a man suddenly grown years older and harder, moody and harshly dictatorial, not to say quarrelsome; a man who seemed to have parted, in the short space of a single night, with all of the humanizing affabilities which he had shown to such a marked degree in the re-organizing and refinancing of the irrigation project. "We've got our young Napoleon of finance on the toboggan-slide, at last," was the way in which Mr. Crawford Stanton phrased it for the bejewelled lady at their luncheon in the Hophra café. "Kinzie is about to throw him over, and all this talk about botch work on the dam is getting his goat. They're telling it around town this morning that you can't get near him without risking a fight. Old Man Backus went up to his office in behalf of a bunch of the scared stockholders, and Smith abused him first and then threw him out bodily--hurt him pretty savagely, they say." The large lady's accurately pencilled eyebrows went up in mild surprise. "Bad temper?" she queried. "Bad temper, or an acute attack of 'rattle-itis'; you can take your choice. I suppose he hasn't, by any chance, quarrelled with Miss Richlander overnight?--or has he?" The fat lady shook her diamonds. "I should say not. They were at luncheon together in the ladies' ordinary as I came down a few minutes ago." Thus the partner of Crawford Stanton's joys and sorrows. But an invisible onlooker in the small dining-room above-stairs might have drawn other conclusions. Smith and the daughter of the Lawrenceville magnate had a small table to themselves, and if the talk were not precisely quarrelsome, it leaned that way at times. "I have never seen you quite so brutal and impossible as you are to-day, Montague. You don't seem like the same man. Was it something the little ranch girl said to you last night when she calmly walked away from us and went back to you at the autos?" "No; she said nothing that she hadn't a perfect right to say." "But it, or something else, has changed you--very much for the worse. Are you going to reconsider and take me out to the Baldwin ranch this afternoon?" "And let you parade me there as your latest acquisition?--never in this world!" "More of the brutality. Positively, you are getting me into a frame of mind in which Tucker Jibbey will seem like a blessed relief. Whatever do you suppose has become of Tucker?" "How should I know?" "If he had come in last night, and you had met him--as I asked you to--in any such heavenly temper as you are indulging now, I might think you had murdered him."