s' tone.
"Decided you would go back to the old job selling pots and pans?"

"No," and Bob's brown eyes, almost black now, looked straight into
Reedy's flushed, insolent face, "I'm going across the line to _raise
cotton_."

Reedy's wide mouth opened in a contemptuous sneer.

"It's rather hot over there for rabbits."

"Yes," Bob's lips closed warningly, "and it may become oppressive for
wolves."

Their eyes met defiantly for a moment, and each knew the other
understood--and it meant a fight.

CHAPTER V

Bob had never known a resolution before. He thought he had, but he
knew now that all the rest compared to what he felt as he left Reedy
Jenkins' office were as dead cornstalks to iron rods.

One night nearly nine years ago, when returning through the hills with
his fiddle under his arm, he had stopped at the door of his cabin and
looked up at the stars. The boisterous fun of an hour ago had all
faded out, leaving him dissatisfied and lonesome. He was shabbily
dressed, not a dollar in his pocket--not a thing in the world his own
but that fiddle--and he knew he was no genius with that. He was not
getting on in the world; he was not making anything of himself. It was
then that the first big resolution came to him: He would quit this
fooling and go to work; he would win in this game of life. Since then
in the main he had stuck to that resolution. He had not knowingly
passed any opportunity by; certainly he had dodged nothing because it
was hard. He had won a little here, and lost there, always hoping,
always tackling the new job with new pluck. Yet these efforts had been
simple; somebody had offered him a job and he tried to make good at
it--and usually had. But to win now, and win big as he was determined
to do, he must have a job of his own; and he would have to create that
job, organize it, equip it.

"What I'll make it with--or just how--I don't know. But by all the
gods of the desert I'm going to win right here--in spite of the
thermometer, the devil, and Reedy Jenkins."

To raise cotton one must have a lease, tools, teams, provisions--all of
which costs money; and he had just $167.35. But if that girl and her
Sanskrit father could get in a cotton crop, he could. It was not too
late. Cotton might be planted in the Imperial Valley even up to the
last of May. He would get a field already prepared if he could; if
not, then he would prepare it.

And a man with a good lease and a good reputa