aring
out of the window as though he had forgotten Conniston's presence.

"What sort of a time-limit? I thought that Mr. Crawford was alone in
this thing, that he had the rest of his lifetime to finish it in if he
wanted to take that long."

Garton snorted.

"He's got until just exactly twelve o'clock, noon, on the first day of
October. If he is five minutes late--yes, five minutes!--there'll be
men right here holding stop-watches on the thing like it was a
blooming foot-race!--he'll be busted, ruined, smashed, and the whole
project a miserable abortion!" He paused a moment, biting the end of
his pencil. And before he went on he had turned his eyes steadily upon
Conniston's face, studying him. "If you're going to work with us, to
get into it with your sleeves rolled up like Bat Truxton and Billy
there and me and a few others of us, you might as well know in the
beginning what's what in this scrap. For it is a scrap--the biggest
scrap you ever saw, a fight to the finish, with one man lined up
against--do you have any idea what John Crawford is bucking?"

Conniston shook his head. "I know virtually nothing of this thing,
Garton."

"Well, I'll tell you. Single-handed that man is fighting the desert!
And he'd beat it back, too, and conquer it and muzzle it and make it
eat out of his hand if they'd only let him alone. But they won't, the
cold-blooded highway robbers! He's got them to fight with his left
hand while he hammers away at the face of the desert with his right!
Who are 'they'? 'They' are a syndicate; organized capital. 'They'
spell many millions of dollars ready to be spent to defeat John
Crawford."

He stopped suddenly, frowning and gnawing at his pencil. Conniston was
about to ask a question when Garton went on rapidly, such hot
indignation in his tones that Billy Jordan dropped his hands from the
keys of his machine to listen to what he had heard many a time before.

"You know already how Mr. Crawford built the town which is named after
him? He made that town just as a man takes clay into his hands and
makes a modeled figure out of it. And when the job was done he went to
the Pacific Central & Western and showed them why it would pay them to
build a narrow-gage railroad from Bolton, on the other side of the
ridge, thirty miles through mountainous country. He had that planned
out long before the first shack was put up in Crawfordsville. And he
knew what he was doing. The P. C. & W. built the road and hav