Again the gentleman with the sharp jaw took time for narrow-eyed reflection. "You'll have to switch over from the colonel to this fellow Smith for the present, Shaw," he decided, at length. "Lanterby is supposed to be on that part of the job, but he's altogether too coarse-handed. I want to know who Smith is, and where he hails from, and how he comes to be butting in. Lanterby said at first, and says yet, that he is just a common hobo tumbling in from the outside. It's pretty evident that Lanterby has another guess coming. You look him up and do it quick." The young man glanced up with a faint warming of avarice in his sleepy eyes. "It'll most likely run into money--for expenses," he suggested. "For graft, you mean," snapped Stanton. Then he had it out with this second subordinate in crisp English. "I'm onto you with both feet, Shaw; every crook and turn of you. More than that, I know why you were fired out of Maxwell's office; you've got sticky fingers. That's all right with me up to a certain point, but beyond that point you get off. Understand?" Shaw made no answer in direct terms, but if his employer had been watching the heavy-lidded eyes he might have seen in them the shadow of a thing much more dangerous than plain dishonesty: a passing shadow of the fear that makes for treachery when the sharp need for self-protection arises. "I'll try to find out about the hobo," he said, with fair enough lip-loyalty, and after he had rolled a fresh cigarette he went away to begin the mining operations which might promise to unearth Smith's record. It was ten o'clock when Shaw left the real-estate office in the Hophra House block. Half an hour earlier Smith had come to town with the colonel in the roadster, and the two had shut themselves up in the colonel's private room in the Timanyoni Ditch Company's town office in the Barker Building, which was two squares down the street from the Hophra House. Summoned promptly, Martin, the bookkeeper, had brought in his statements and balance-sheets, and the new officer, who was as yet without a title, had struck out his plan of campaign. "'Amortization' is the word, Colonel," was Smith's prompt verdict after he had gone over Martin's summaries. "The best way to get at it now is to wipe the slate clean and begin over again." The ranchman president was chuckling soberly. "Once more you'll have to show me, John," he said. "We folks out here in the hills are not up in all the Wall Street crinkles." "You don't know the word? It means to scrap the old machinery to make room for the new," Smith explained. "In modern business it is the process of extinguishing a corporation: closing it up and burying it in another and bigger one, usually. That is what we must do with Timanyoni Ditch."