longer needed to stare out at the white iron fountain of which
he was so proud.

"I've sent for the prairie-schooner," I told him.

His flush of anger rather startled me.

"Doesn't that impress you as rather cheaply theatrical?" he demanded.

"I fancy it will be very comfortable," I told him, without looking up.
I'd apparently been attributing to him feelings which, after all, were
not so desolating as I might have wished.

"Every one to his own taste," he observed as he called rather sharply
to Tokudo to bring him his humidor. Then he took out a cigar and
lighted it and ordered the car. And that was the lee and the long of
it. That was the way we faced our Great Divide, our forked trail that
veered off East and West into infinity!

_Thursday the Eleventh_

The trek is over. And it was not one of triumph. For we find
ourselves, sometimes, in deeper water than we imagine. Then we have to
choke and gasp for a while before we can get our breath back.

Peter, in the first place, didn't appear with the prairie-schooner. He
left that to come later in the day, with Whinnie and Struthers. He
appeared quite early Monday morning, with fire in his eye, and with a
demand to see the master of the house. Heaven knows what he had heard,
or how he had heard it. But the two men were having it hot and heavy
when I felt it was about time for me to step into the room. To be
quite frank, I had not expected any such outburst from Duncan. I knew
his feelings were not involved, and where you have a vacuum it is
impossible, of course, to have an explosion. I interpreted his
resentment as a show of opposition to save his face. But I was wrong.
And I was wrong about Peter. That mild-eyed man is no plaster saint.
He can fight, if he's goaded into it, and fight like a bulldog. He
was saying a few plain truths to Duncan, when I stepped into the room,
a few plain truths which took the color out of the Dour Man's face and
made him shake with anger.

"For two cents," Duncan was rather childishly shouting at him, "I'd
fill you full of lead!"

"Try it!" said Peter, who wasn't any too steady himself. "Try it, and
you'd at least end up with doing something in the open!"

Duncan studied him, like a prize-fighter studying his waiting
opponent.

"You're a cheap actor," he finally announced. "This sort of thing
isn't settled that way, and you know it."

"And it's not going to be settled the way you intended," announced
Peter Ketley.