s
a source of great edification and some amusement to the natives.

In the town he was a man of weight and influence, but the country Mexicans
hated him. Once when he was looking over some lands recently acquired by
the foreclosure of mortgages, a bullet had whistled close to his ear, and
another had punctured the hood of his car. He now hired a man to do his
"outside work."

Thus both MacDougall and his children had thrived and developed on their
wealth. Mrs. MacDougall, perhaps, had been the sacrifice. She remained a
tall, thin, pale, tired-looking woman with large hands that were a record
of toil. She laboured at her new social duties and "pleasures" in exactly
the same spirit that she had formerly laboured at the wash tub.

MacDougall's offices now occupied all of the ground floor of a large new
building which he had built. Like everything else of his authorship this
building represented a determined effort to lend the town an air of
Eastern elegance. It was finished in an imitation of white marble and the
offices had large plate glass windows which bore in gilt letters the
legend: "MacDougall Land and Cattle Company, Inc." Within, half a dozen
girls in glass cages could be seen working at typewriters and adding
machines, while a cashier occupied a little office of his own with a large
safe at his back, a little brass grating in front of him, and a revolver
visible not far from his right hand.

The creator of this magnificence sat behind a glasstop desk at the far end
of a large and sunny office with a bare and slippery floor. Many a Mexican
beggar for mercy, with a mortgage on his home, had walked across this
forbidding expanse of polished hardwood toward the big man with the
merciless eye, as fearfully as ever a _peon_, sentenced to forty lashes
and salt in his wounds, approached the seat of his owner to plead for a
whole skin. Truly, the weak can but change masters.

This morning MacDougall was all affability. As he stood up behind his
desk, clad in a light grey suit, large and ruddy, radiant of health and
prosperity, he was impressive, almost splendid. Only the eyes, small and
closeset, revealed the worried and calculating spirit of the man.

"Mr. Delcasar," he said when they had shaken hands and sat down, "I am
glad to welcome you to this office, and I hope to see you here many times
more. I will not waste time, for we are both busy men. I asked you to come
here because I want to suggest a sort of informal