ave lost more, only Carter--Kitty's
father--persuaded me--he's an awful clever old fellow--into turning it
into a kind of branch hotel of Boomville, while using it as a hotel to
take poor chaps who couldn't pay, at half prices, or quarter prices,
PRIVATELY, don't you see, so as to spare their pride,--awfully pretty,
wasn't it?--and make the hotel profit by it."

"Well?" said Stacy as Barker paused.

"They didn't come," said Barker.

"But," he added eagerly, "it shows that things were better than I had
imagined. Only the others did not come, either."

"And you lost your twenty thousand dollars," said Stacy curtly.

"FIFTY thousand," said Barker, "for of course it had to be a larger
hotel than the other. And I think that Carter wouldn't have gone into it
except to save me from losing money."

"And yet made you lose fifty thousand instead of twenty. For I don't
suppose HE advanced anything."

"He gave his time and experience," said Barker simply.

"I don't think it worth thirty thousand dollars," said Stacy dryly. "But
all this doesn't tell me what your business is with me to-day."

"No," said Barker, brightening up, "but it is business, you know.
Something in the old style--as between partner and partner--and that's
why I came to YOU, and not to the 'banker.' And it all comes out of
something that Demorest once told us; so you see it's all us three
again! Well, you know, of course, that the Excelsior Ditch Company have
abandoned the Bar and Heavy Tree Hill. It didn't pay."

"Yes; nor does the company pay any dividends now. You ought to know,
with fifty thousand of their stock on your hands."

Barker laughed. "But listen. I found that I could buy up their whole
plant and all the ditching along the Black Spur Range for ten thousand
dollars."

"And Great Scott! you don't think of taking up their business?" said
Stacy, aghast.

Barker laughed more heartily. "No. Not their business. But I remember
that once Demorest told us, in the dear old days, that it cost nearly
as much to make a water ditch as a railroad, in the way of surveying and
engineering and levels, you know. And here's the plant for a railroad.
Don't you see?"

"But a railroad from Black Spur to Heavy Tree Hill--what's the good of
that?"

"Why, Black Spur will be in the line of the new Divide Railroad they're
trying to get a bill for in the legislature."

"An infamous piece of wildcat jobbing that will never pass," said Stacy
decisively.

"T