ssioned you to come here?"

"I'll not claim that I have any powers delegated to me, sir."

"How did you dare to force your way in here?"

"Considering what kind of a man I was a few weeks ago, I'm having pretty
hard work to explain to myself what I'm doing, sir."

The colonel knotted bushy brows. This person seemed to be playing with
him. "Who told you to come here?"

"The soul of a little girl who was named Rosemarie."

Colonel Dodd came out of his chair, thoroughly angry--and yet he
repressed his anger. This person, more than ever, seemed to him to be a
crank with vagaries.

Farr put up a protesting palm. His tones trembled, and into them he put
all the appeal a human voice can compass.

"I know I astonish you, Colonel," he added. "I astonish myself. I'm not
much on self-analysis. I don't know just what has come over me the last
few weeks. But they do say the Deity picks out queer instruments when He
wants things done. Man to man, now, forgetting you're a mighty man and
I'm a small one, won't you say you'll give the people of this state pure
water instead of poison?"

"You don't think you can stroll in here and coax me to build over the
whole Consolidated system, do you?"

"That isn't the idea at all, sir. Treat me simply as a voice--a jog
of your conscience--a reminder. I'll go away and you'll never see me
again."

"If you think the cranks in this state can influence me in the least
item about running my own business you're the worst lunatic outside the
state asylum," declared the colonel, with passion.

"You mean that what I have asked on behalf of women and children hasn't
had any effect on you?"

"Not the slightest. Get out!" In his present mood Colonel Dodd would not
admit to this interloper that he planned reforms, and in that moment he
unwittingly created his Frankenstein's monster.

Farr retreated a couple of steps and bowed. "Colonel Dodd, in my part of
the West we fellows had a little code: help a woman, always, everywhere;
tote a tired child in our arms; and, in the case of a man who announced
himself an enemy, give him fair notice when it came time to pull guns.
Better get your weapon loose on your hip."

He bowed again and went out.

Briggs rose from his knees and his master snapped an angry stare from
the door that the young man had closed softly behind himself.

"What kind of a resort is my office getting to be? Do you know who that
devilish fool is, Briggs?"

"No, sir. He has bee