pe, came forward
again. Absorbed only in his own distress, he ignored the editor and the
cow-puncher.

"Say," he hazarded, "how about this? I make out----

"We've told you what our rates are, Mr. Dyke," exclaimed the clerk
angrily. "That's all the arrangement we will make. Take it or leave it."
He turned again to Genslinger, giving the ex-engineer his back.

Dyke moved away and stood for a moment in the centre of the room,
staring at the figures on the envelope.

"I don't see," he muttered, "just what I'm going to do. No, I don't see
what I'm going to do at all."

Ruggles came in, bringing with him two other men in whom Dyke recognised
dummy buyers of the Los Muertos and Osterman ranchos. They brushed by
him, jostling his elbow, and as he went out of the door he heard them
exchange jovial greetings with Delaney, Genslinger, and S. Behrman.

Dyke went down the stairs to the street and proceeded onward aimlessly
in the direction of the Yosemite House, fingering the yellow envelope
and looking vacantly at the sidewalk.

There was a stoop to his massive shoulders. His great arms dangled
loosely at his sides, the palms of his hands open.

As he went along, a certain feeling of shame touched him. Surely his
predicament must be apparent to every passer-by. No doubt, every one
recognised the unsuccessful man in the very way he slouched along. The
young girls in lawns, muslins, and garden hats, returning from the Post
Office, their hands full of letters, must surely see in him the type of
the failure, the bankrupt.

Then brusquely his tardy rage flamed up. By God, NO, it was not his
fault; he had made no mistake. His energy, industry, and foresight had
been sound. He had been merely the object of a colossal trick, a sordid
injustice, a victim of the insatiate greed of the monster, caught and
choked by one of those millions of tentacles suddenly reaching up from
below, from out the dark beneath his feet, coiling around his throat,
throttling him, strangling him, sucking his blood. For a moment he
thought of the courts, but instantly laughed at the idea. What court was
immune from the power of the monster? Ah, the rage of helplessness, the
fury of impotence! No help, no hope,--ruined in a brief instant--he a
veritable giant, built of great sinews, powerful, in the full tide of
his manhood, having all his health, all his wits. How could he now
face his home? How could he tell his mother of this catastrophe?
And Sidney--t