It was needful that he should work while the day was his in which to work; and he did work. There was still much to be done. Williams was having a threat of labor troubles at the dam, and Stillings had unearthed another possible flaw in the land titles dating back to the promotion of a certain railroad which had never gotten far beyond the paper stage and the acquiring of some of its rights of way. Smith flung himself masterfully at the new difficulties as they arose, and earned his meed of praise from the men for whom he overcame them. But under the surface current of the hurrying business tide a bitter undertow was beginning to set in. In every characterizing change it is inevitable that there should be some loss in the scrapping of the old to make way for the new. Smith saw himself in two aspects. In one he stood as a man among men, with a promise of winning honors and wealth; with the still more ecstatic promise of being able, perhaps, to win the love of the vivifying young woman who had once touched the spring of sentiment in him--and was touching it again. In the other he was a fugitive and an outlaw, waiting only for some spreader of the net to come and tap him on the shoulder. He took his first decided backward step on the night when he went into a hardware store and bought a pistol. The free, fair-fighting spirit which had sent him barehanded against the three claim-jumpers was gone and in its place there was a fell determination, undefined as yet, but keying itself to the barbaric pitch. With the weapon in his pocket he could look back over the transforming interspaces with a steadier eye. Truly, he had come far since that night in the Lawrenceville Bank when a single fierce gust of passion had plucked him away from all the familiar landmarks. And as for Corona Baldwin, there were days in which he set his jaw and told himself that nothing, even if it were the shedding of blood, should stand in the way of winning her. It was his right as a man; he had done nothing to make himself the outlaw that the Lawrenceville indictment declared him to be; therefore he would fight for his chance--slay for it, if need be. But there were other days when the saner thought prevailed and he saw the pit of selfishness into which the new barbarisms were plunging him. The Baldwins were his friends, and they were accepting him in the full light of the inference that he was a man under a cloud. Could he take a further advantage of their generosity by involving them still more intimately in his own particular entanglement? He assured himself that he couldn't and wouldn't; that though he might, indeed, commit a murder when the pinch came, he was still man enough to stay away from Hillcrest.