Smith made no comment, and Miss Richlander did not speak again until they were waiting in the women's lobby for the house porter to call a cab. Then, as if she had just remembered it: "Oh! I forgot to ask you: is the Eastern train in?" He nodded. "It was on time this evening--for a wonder." "And no Tucker yet! What in the world do you suppose could have happened to him, Montague?" The porter was announcing the theatre cab and Smith reserved his answer until the motor hackney was rolling jerkily away toward the opera-house. "Jibbey has probably got what was coming to him," he said grittingly. "I don't know whether you have ever remarked it or not, but the insect of the Jibbey breed usually finds somebody to come along and step on it, sooner or later." XXII The Megalomaniac On a day which was only sixty-odd hours short of the expiration of the time limit fixed by the charter conditions under which the original Timanyoni Ditch Company had obtained its franchise, Bartley Williams, lean and sombre-eyed from the strain he had been under for many days and nights, saw the president's gray roadster ploughing its way through the mesa sand on the approach to the construction camp, and was glad. "I've been trying all the morning to squeeze out time to get into town," he told Baldwin, when the roadster came to a stand in front of the shack commissary. "Where is Smith?" The colonel threw up his hand in a gesture expressive of complete detachment. "Don't ask me. John has gone plumb loco in these last two or three days. It's as much as your life's worth to ask him where he has been or where he is going or what he means to do next." "He hasn't stopped fighting?" said the engineer, half aghast at the bare possibility. "Oh, no; he's at it harder than ever--going it just a shaving too strong, is what I'd tell him, if he'd let me get near enough to shout at him. Last night, after the theatre, he went around to the _Herald_ office, and the way they're talking it on the street, he was aiming to shoot up the whole newspaper joint if Mark Allen, the editor, wouldn't take back a bunch of the lies he's been publishing about the High Line. It wound up in a scrap of some sort. I don't know who got the worst of it, but John isn't crippled up any, to speak of, this morning--only in his temper." "Smith puzzles me more than a little," was Williams's comment. "It's just as you say; for the last few days he's been acting as if he had a grouch a mile long. Is it the old sore threatening to break out again?--the 'lame duck' business?" "I shouldn't wonder," said the colonel evasively. Loyal to the last, he was not quite ready to share with Williams the half-confidence in which Smith had admitted, by implication at least, that the waiting young woman at the Hophra House held his future between her thumb and finger.