you
first. You can't fool us for one minute, I repeat! We'll have our last
wiggle right here. Will you take your hands off our affairs?"

"I haven't put my hands _on_ your affairs," shouted Colonel Dodd,
furious at being baited in this amazing manner. Never before had any
visitor dared to raise his voice in that office. "You're crazy."

"You're right--we are--pretty nearly so. Myself and these two neighbors
of mine have tied up every dollar we can rake and scrape to build a
water-plant for our little village and give our folks clean water from a
lake, not the rotten poison you would pump out of our millstream for
us. We have tried to do this for our town and make an honest dollar for
ourselves. Now you have got us lashed to the mast, financially, so
you think, and you propose to step in and gobble our franchise. That's
enough to make men crazy."

"Get out of my office!"

"You grabbed the franchise and common stock of Westham that way,"
declared Davis. "You scooped in Durham and Newry and a lot of others.
But I'm here to warn you, Colonel Dodd. Danburg is going to choke you if
you try to swallow it. We are only countrymen, and we know it. You have
always done all the bossing and threatening in this state up to now. But
I tell you, Colonel Dodd, there comes a time when the rabbit will spit
in the bulldog's eye. If we three go out of this room in the same spirit
in which we came into it something will drop in this state. We shall
have a story to tell."

Colonel Dodd swung his chair around and faced his desk.

"Gentlemen, let's not get excited," he appealed. Ostensibly he reached
for a pencil. He also pushed a button he had not touched before that
day. Then he came around slowly on the swivel of his chair. "You have
mentioned certain towns, Davis. Those towns have water systems that are
a part of the Consolidated, to be sure. But the men who promoted those
plants and were unable to complete them came to us and begged us to step
in and take the burden off their hands." While Colonel Dodd talked he
kept glancing, but in an extremely unobtrusive manner, at a huge and
magnificent Japanese screen that occupied one corner of his office.
"It is easy enough to start ventures in this world, Mr. Davis. An
inexperienced man can do that. But it most often takes experience and a
lot of money to install a successful water plant."

"We want to get down to cases, Colonel Dodd," insisted the spokesman.
"We haven't come here without