t a trick
here, a trick there. A man counts upon that sort of thing. That
little shrimp Conway is scared of his life and is for pulling out. I'm
glad of it. He'll sell to me before he'll go to Shandon. Let Leland
pull out, too. We'll take him over. I'm going to win, I tell you,
Claire Hazleton! We're going to win, you and I. Win big!"

There was no change in her cool eyes. She swept by him, not turning
out an inch to pass, her skirts brushing him, and dropped idly into her
chair. He followed, and stood over her again.

"Shandon is going to be acquitted," she said. "You know that. He'll
be set free in ten days. Then what?"

"Then we'll take him in with us. We'll get the water and that's all we
want any way you put it. Inside six months we'll be subdividing and
getting our money back."

She laughed.

"So you think that Shandon will jump at the chance to go into any sort
of partnership with you?"

"We'll make him," crisply. "He has retained Brisbane, the biggest,
highest priced criminal lawyer this side the Rockies. He has cleared
up his mortgage but he's had to mortgage again to do it. He's in debt
up to his eyes. We'll make him a proposition that will show him the
way to clear himself. I tell you, Claire, he'll have to do it."

"You say _we_," she reminded him, lifting her white shoulders.

"And I mean you and I," he returned bluntly. "I've come here to do
some straight talking." There leaped up into his eyes a light she had
never seen there until now, a quick colour ran into his cheeks. "I
want you to marry me, Claire."

Perhaps the woman's pulse quickened. Certainly no change in her
expression, no quiver of a muscle, no deepened breathing told that a
supreme moment had come into her life, a moment she had long and
unceasingly striven for.

"Do you?" she asked indifferently. "Why?"

"Because," he cried, "you are like no other woman in all the world.
Because the things that I want are the things that you want. Because
we should be a man and a woman, mated, to take our places in the world
and hold them. Where there is man's work I can do it; where there is
woman's work you can do it. We are young; in ten years' time we can
rise to whatever we care to set our eyes upon. Why do I want you?
Just because in brain and in body you are the woman in the world fitted
to occupy the place that shall be my wife's."

"Other men have asked me to marry them," she said coolly. "I think
that