"I know; that is why she married Weatherbee." Tisdale set his lips grimly; he swung around and strode across the floor. "You see, you can't tell me anything," he said. "I know all about it. Wait. Listen. I am going over the mountains and look up that land of Weatherbee's, and I shall probably buy it, but I want you to understand clearly it is only because I hope to carry his project through. Now go north, Foster; take a new grip on things; get to work and let your investments alone." After that, when Foster had gone, Tisdale spent a long interval tramping the floor of his breezy room. The furrows still divided his brows, his mouth was set, and a dark color burned and glowed through his tan. But deeper than his angry solicitude for Foster rankled his resentment against this woman. Who was she, he asked himself, that she should fix her hold on level-headed Foster? But he knew her kind. Feversham had called her a "typical American beauty," but there were many types, and he knew her kind. She was a brunette, of course, showing a swarthier trace of Mexican with the Spanish, and she would have a sort of personal magnetism. She might prove dramatic if roused, but those Spanish-California women were indolent, and they grew heavy early. Big, handsome, voluptuous; just a splendid animal without a spark of soul. He had stopped near the table, and his glance fell on the package in the ring of light from the shaded lamp. After a moment he lifted it and, drawing up a chair, seated himself and removed the wrapper. It covered a tin box such as he was accustomed to use in the wilderness for the protection and portage of field notes and maps. He raised the lid and took from the top a heavy paper, which he unfolded and spread before him. It was Weatherbee's landscape plan, traced with the skill of a draughtsman and showing plainly the contour of the tract in eastern Washington and his method of reclamation. The land included a deep pocket set between spurs of the Cascade Mountains. The ridges and peaks above it had an altitude of from one to six thousand feet. He found the spring, marked high in a depressed shoulder, and followed the line of flume drawn from it down to a natural dry basin at the top of the pocket. A dam was set in the lower rim of this reservoir and, reaching from it, a canal was sketched in, feeding cross ditches, distributing spillways to the orchards that covered the slopes and levels below. Finally he traced the roadway up through the avenues between the trees, over the bench, to the house that commanded the valley. The mission walls, the inside court, the roomy, vine-grown portico, all the detail of foliage here had been elaborated skilfully, with the touch of an artist. The habitation stood out the central feature of the picture and, as a good etching will, assumed a certain personality.