“He never came nearer a licking in his life and missed it, Pat. But I had another scheme, and I didn’t want to gum it up by letting on I knew you. I had to sit pretty and let him brag, and register admiration for the rotter. He’s gone now--it worked. But he’ll come back--to-morrow, when the sun is shining and his blood thaws out again. I may have to lick him yet. If he were a white man, with the intelligence of a hen turkey, I could play the joker and make him lay down his hand. But I’ll probably have to take a few falls out of him before I can convince him he’s whipped from the start. “You know, Pat, you’ve made an ungodly mess of things. In the whole sorry assortment of blunders you did just one thing that gives me a chance to save you. Before I left the city I made it a point to find out what kind of power runs a Power of Attorney, anyway. I happen to know a darned good lawyer, and I had a talk with him. “Pat, you did something when you gave me that Power of Attorney. You gave me more right over the disposal of this place than if I were your husband. I came over here to use this right and sell Johnnywater. I think even James Blaine Hawkins will stop, look and listen when I tell him how come to-morrow. “He’ll come back. A good, strong dose of sunlight will bring him back--on the rampage, I’m guessing--mad to think how scared he was when he left. I played a dirty trick on him, Pat. I made him think the psychic cat was a spook. “He thought it all right! But you see, I didn’t know. “I wonder if he really did see something. I think he did--or at any rate he kidded himself into thinking he did. I never dreamed he’d see. “Pat, you called me flabby souled. That hurt--and it wasn’t my vanity you hit. I’ve wanted you to respect me, Pat, in spite of my profession. And when you flung that at me, I saw you didn’t understand. Lord knows I hate a whiner, and I won’t try to explain just why I called you unjust. “But after I got over here, Pat, I began to see the way I must have looked to you. You took at face value all the slams you’ve heard about the movies. You lumped us all together and called us cheap and weak and vain. Just puppets strutting around before the camera like damned peacocks. You couldn’t see that maybe it takes quite as much character for a man to make good in the movies and live clean and honest, as it does to drive cows to water. “But after all these hills and the desert out here beyond the cañon are mighty big and clean--my God, Pat, they’d shame the biggest man that ever lived! When you get out here and measure yourself alongside them you feel like a buffalo gnat on an elephant. And there’s things in this cañon it takes a man to meet.