through. From their mines or from his own he always succeeded in
extracting enough ore to meet his obligations when they fell due. His
powerful enemy, as Hobart had told Miss Balfour, found him most
dangerous when it seemed to have him with his back to the wall. Then
unexpectedly would fall some crushing blow that put the financial kings
of Broadway on the defensive long enough for him to slip out of the
corner into which they had driven him. Greatly daring, he had the
successful cavalryman's instinct of risking much to gain much. A
gambler, his enemies characterized him fitly enough. But it was also
true, as Mesa phrased it, that he gambled "with the lid off," playing
for large stakes, neither asking nor giving quarter.

At the end of five years of desperate fighting, the freebooter was more
strongly entrenched than he had been at any previous time. The
railroads, pledged to give rebates to the Consolidated, had been forced
by Ridgway, under menace of adverse legislation from the men he
controlled at the State-house, to give him secretly a still better rate
than the trust. He owned the county courts, he was supported by the
people, and had become a political dictator, and the financial outlook
for him grew brighter every day.

Such were the conditions when Judge Purcell handed down his Never Say
Die decision. Within an hour Hobart was reading a telegram in cipher
from the Broadway headquarters. It announced the immediate departure
for Mesa of the great leader of the octopus. Simon Harley, the Napoleon
of finance, was coming out to attend personally to the destruction of
the buccaneer who had dared to fire on the trust flag.

Before night some one of his corps of spies in the employ of the enemy
carried the news to Waring Ridgway. He smiled grimly, his bluegray eyes
hardening to the temper of steel. Here at last was a foeman worthy of
his metal; one as lawless, unscrupulous, daring, and far-seeing as
himself, with a hundred times his resources.

CHAPTER 3. ONE TO ONE

The solitary rider stood for a moment in silhouette against the somber
sky-line, his keen eyes searching the lowering clouds.

"Getting its back up for a blizzard," he muttered to himself, as he
touched his pony with the spur.

Dark, heavy billows banked in the west, piling over each other as they
drove forward. Already the advance-guard had swept the sunlight from
the earth, except for a flutter of it that still protested near the
horizon. Sca