"I think you've got it all now, Smith, every last crook and turn of it, and I reckon you're tired enough to run away to bed. You see just where we stand, and how little we've got to go on. If I've about talked an arm off of you, it's for your own good. I don't know how you've made up your mind, or if you've made it up at all; but it was only fair to show you how little chance we've got on anything short of a miracle. I wouldn't want to see you butt your head against a stone wall, and that's about what it looks like to me." Smith took a turn up and down the stone-flagged floor of the portico with his hands behind him. Truly, the case of Timanyoni Ditch was desperate; even more desperate than he had supposed. Figuring as the level-headed bank cashier of the former days, he told himself soberly that no man in his senses would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Then the laughing gibes of the hundredth woman--gibes which had cut far deeper than she had imagined--came back to send the blood surging through his veins. It would be worth something to be able to work the miracle the colonel had spoken of; and afterward.... Colonel Dexter Baldwin was still tapping his palm absently with the pipe when Smith came back and said abruptly: "I have decided, Colonel. I'll start in with you to-morrow morning, and we'll pull this mired scheme of yours out of the mud, or break a leg trying to. But you mustn't forget what I told you out at the camp. Right in the middle of things I may go rotten on you and drop out." X The Sick Project Brewster, owing its beginnings to the completion of the Nevada Short Line, and the fact that the railroad builders designated it as a division headquarters, had grown into city-charter size and importance with the opening of the gold-mines in the Gloria district, and the transformation of the surrounding park grass-lands into cultivated ranches. To the growth and prosperity of the intermountain city a summer hotel on the shore of Lake Topaz--reached only by stage from Brewster--had added its influence; and since the hotel brought people with well-lined pocketbooks, there was a field for the enthusiastic real-estate promoters whose offices filled all the odd corners in the Hophra House block. In one of these offices, on the morning following Smith's first dinner at Hillcrest, a rather caustic colloquy was in progress between the man whose name appeared in gilt lettering on the front windows and one of his unofficial assistants. Crawford Stanton, he of the window name, was a man of many personalities. To summer visitors with money to invest, he was the genial promoter, and if there were suggestions of iron hardness in the sharp jaw and in the smoothly shaven face and flinty eyes, there was also a pleasant reminder of Eastern business methods and alertness in the promoter's manner. But Lanterby, tilting uneasily in the "confidential" chair at the desk-end, knew another and more biting side of Mr. Stanton, as a hired man will.