"Well, then, chase him out. We can't afford to be hung up this way indefinitely by every little amateur that happens to come along and sit in the game. Get action and do something. From what you say, this fellow is probably some piker who has left his country for his country's good. Get the detectives after him and run him down." "That will take time, and time is what we haven't got." The big man pulled himself up in his chair and glared savagely at the protester. "Stanton, you make me tired--very tired! You know what we have at stake in this deal, and thus far you're the only man in it who hasn't made good. You've had all the help you've asked for, and all the money you wanted to spend. If you've lost your grip, say so plainly, and get down and out. We don't want any 'has-been' on this job. If you are at the end of your resources----" The conductor's shout of "All aboard!" dominated the clamor of the station noises, and the air-brakes were singing as the engineer of the changed locomotives tested the connections. Stanton saw his chance to duck and took it. "I have been trying to stop short of anything that might make talk," he said. "This town might easily be made too hot to hold us, and----" "You're speaking for yourself, now," rapped out the tyrant. "What the devil do we care for the temperature of Brewster? I've only one word for you, Crawford: _you get busy and give us results_. Skip out, now, or you'll get carried by. And, say; let me have a wire at Los Angeles, not later than Thursday. Get that?" Stanton got it: also, he escaped, making a flying leap from the moving train. At the cab rank he found the motor-cab which he had hired for the drive down from the hotel. Climbing in, he gave a brittle order to the chauffeur. Simultaneously a man wearing the softest of Stetsons lounged away from his post of observation under a near-by electric pole and ran across the railroad plaza to unhitch and mount a wiry little cow-pony. Once in the saddle, however, the mounted man did not hurry his horse. Having overheard Stanton's order-giving, there was no need to keep the motor-cab in sight as it sputtered through the streets and out upon the backgrounding mesa, its ill-smelling course ending at a lonely road-house in the mesa hills on the Topaz trail. When the hired vehicle came to a stand in front of the lighted bar-room of the road-house, Stanton gave a waiting order to the driver and went in. Of the dog-faced barkeeper he asked an abrupt question, and at the man's jerk of a thumb toward the rear, the promoter passed on and entered the private room at the back. The private room had but one occupant--the man Lanterby, who was sitting behind a round card-table and vainly endeavoring to make one of the pair of empty whiskey-glasses spin in a complete circuit about a black bottle standing on the table.