Company in his hearing. Do you blame him so very
much?"

"Not I. If I owned a home like that, in a wilderness that I had
discovered for myself, I'd fight for it to a finish. Last night when you
showed me the true inwardness of this mix-up, I was sick and sorry. If I
had known five days ago what I know now, you couldn't have pulled me
into it with a two-inch rope."

"On general principles?" queried Bromley curiously.

"Not altogether. Business is business; and you've intimated that the
colonel is not so badly overmatched in the money field--and when all is
said, it is a money fight with the long purse to win. But there is a
personal reason why I, of all men in the world, should have stayed out.
I did not know it when I accepted Mr. Pelham's offer, and now it is too
late to back down. I'm a thousand times sorrier for Colonel Craigmiles
than ever you can be, Loudon; but, as the chief engineer of the Arcadia
Company, I'm pledged to obliterate him."

"That is precisely what he declares he will do to the company," laughed
Bromley. "And there,"--pointing across the ravine to an iron-bound door
closing a tunnel entrance in the opposite hillside--"is his advanced
battery. That is the mine I was telling you about."

"H'm," said the new chief, measuring the distance with his eyes. "If
that mining-claim is the regulation size, it doesn't leave us much elbow
room over there."

"It doesn't leave us any--as I told you last night, the dam itself
stands upon a portion of the claim. In equity, if there were any equity
in a law fight against a corporation, the colonel could enjoin us right
now. He hasn't done it; he has contented himself with marking out that
dead-line you can see over there just above our spillway. The colonel
staked that out in Billy Sanderson's time, and courteously informed us
that trespassers would be potted from behind that barricade; that there
was a machine-gun mounted just inside of that door which commanded the
approaches. Just to see if he meant what he said, some of the boys
rigged up a scarecrow dummy, and carefully pushed it over the line one
evening after supper. I wasn't here, but Fitzpatrick says the colonel's
Mexican garrison in the tunnel fairly set the air afire with a volley
from the machine-gun."

Ballard said "H'm" again, and was silent what time they were climbing
the hill to the quarries on their own side of the ravine. When he spoke,
it was not of the stone the night shift had been getti