To be sure, Joe, a man very profoundly bewildered, more dumfounded even than elated, took never a single step and said never a single word without going first to his friend "Señor Caballero." Before the end of that glorious day Joe was dead-drunk; didn't know "whether he was afoot or horseback." But in his crafty Latin way, he kept his mouth shut. And then Bruce Standing, with an eye not to further wealth, but toward the confounding of all hopes of such as Young Gallup and Jim Taggart and Babe Deveril ... _and a certain girl_ ... sprang his coup. With Ben Brewster guarding his rear in every advance, he "swallowed whole," as Brewster put it, every bit of available land above and below and on every side of Joe's claims. He recked neither of present difficulties and expenses nor of lawsuits to come. He wanted the land ... and he got it! And he issued his proclamation: "There's a _town_ there, on Light Ladies' Gulch. You don't see it? It's there!... _Graham, get busy!_ A contractor; lumber; building materials; carpenters! We build a town as big as Big Pine and we build it faster than ever a town grew before! A store, blacksmith shop, hotel. Shacks of all sorts. _Graham!_" Graham, like a man with an electric current shot through him, jumped out of his chair. "Send a man on the run to Big Pine with a message for Young Gallup! And the message is this: '_Bruce Standing promised to pull your damned town down about your ears ... and the pulling has begun!_'" "Yes, Mr. Standing," said Graham. And sent a man on a running horse. And then took swift dictation. Standing made a budget of fifty thousand dollars, as a "starter." Even Graham wondered what impulses were rioting in his mad heart! "We want scrapers and ploughs, a crew of road-makers! We build a new road ... _on this side of Light Ladies' Gulch_! Got the idea, Graham? We cut Big Pine out. We go by them, giving a shorter road to the outside, a better road. We boycott Gallup's dinky town! Keep in mind we'll double that first fifty thousand any time we need to. Get this word around: 'Any man who buys a nickel's worth of tobacco in Big Pine can't buy anything, even if he has his pockets full of clinking gold, in our town! No man, once seen setting his foot down in Gallup's town, is going to be tolerated two minutes in our town.' Get the idea, Graham?" "Yes, Mr. Standing!" Standing smote him then so mightily upon the shoulder that Graham, a small man, went pale, shot through with pain. "Raise your own salary, Graham. _And earn it now!_" CHAPTER XXV What Bruce Standing could not know was that those few words signed _Lynette_ and saying with such cruel curtness: "I have gone back to Babe Deveril," had been written not by Lynette, but by Deveril himself. Nor could he know that Lynette had not gone freely but under the harsh coercion of four men.