ce, blushing slightly.

Jim Duff continued calmly puffing at the cigar that rested between his
teeth. They were handsome teeth, though, in some way, they made one
think of the teeth of a vicious dog.

"Coming over to the hotel this afternoon?" continued Duff.

"I--I--" hesitated Clarence.

"Coming, did you say?" persisted Duff gently.

"I shall have to see my mail first. There may be letters--"

"Oh," nodded Duff, with just a trace of irony as the younger man again
hesitated.

"Life is not all playtime for me, you know," Farnsworth continued,
looking rather shame-faced. "I--er--have some business affairs
attention at times."

"Oh, don't try to join me at the hotel this if you have more interesting
matters in prospect," smiled the gambler.

Again Clarence flushed. He looked up to Jim Duff as a thorough "man
of the world," and wanted to stand well in the gambler's good opinion.
Clarence Farnsworth was, as yet, too green to know that, too often, the
man who has seen much of the world has seen only its seamy and worthless
side. Possibly Farnsworth was destined to learn this later on--after the
gambler had coolly fleeced him.

"Before long," Farnsworth went on, changing the subject, "I must get out
on the desert and take a look at the quicksand that the railroad folks
are trying to cross."

"The railroad people will probably never cross that quicksand," remarked
Jim Duff, the lids closing over his eyes for a moment.

"Oh, I don't know about that," continued Farnsworth argumentatively.

"I think I do," declared Jim Duff easily. "My belief, Farnsworth, is
that the railroad people might dig up the whole of New Mexico, transport
the dirt here and dump it on top of that quicksand, and still the
quicksand would settle lower and lower and the tracks would still break
up and disappear. There's no bottom to that quicksand."

"Of course you ought to know all about it, Duff," Clarence made haste
to answer. "You've lived here for years, and you know all about this
section of the country."

That didn't quite suit the gambler. What he sought to do was to raise an
argument with the young man--who still had some money left.

"What makes you think, Farnsworth, that the railroad can win out with
the desert and lay tracks across the quicksand? That's a bad quicksand,
you know. It has been called the 'Man-killer.' Many a prospector or
cow-puncher has lost his life in trying to get over that sand."

"The real Man-killer quic