his arm! It would
be a blessing for them both if Stoddard should jump the mine and put
them back where they were before--he a hardy prospector; and she a poor
typist, with a dream! But the dream was gone, destroyed forever, and
all she could do was to fight on.

As she waited for his letter from day to day, Mary Fortune thought
incessantly of Rimrock. She went out to the mine and gazed at the
great workings where men appeared no larger than ants. She watched the
ore being scooped up with steam shovels and dropped load by load into
cars; she saw it crushed and pulverized and washed and the concentrates
dumped into more cars; and then the endless chain of copper going out
and the trainloads of supplies coming in. It was his, if he would come
to it; every man would obey him; his orders would tear down a mountain;
and yet he chose to grow fat and sordid, he preferred that woman to her!

She fought against it, but the anger still raged that had driven her
fleeing from New York. How could she endure it, to meet him again?
And yet she hoped he would come. She hated him, but still she waited
and at last his letter came. She tore it open and drew out his proxy;
and then in the quiet of her office she sat silent, while the letter
lay trembling in her hands. This was his answer to her, who had
endured so much for him, his answer to her invitation to come. He
enclosed his proxy for L. W.

She began on a letter, full of passionate reproaches, and tore it up in
a rage. Then she wrote another, and tore it up, and burst into a storm
of tears. She rose up at last and, dry-eyed and quiet, typed a note
and sent it away. It was a formal receipt for his proxy for Lockhart
and was signed: Mary R. Fortune, Secretary.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING

The second annual meeting of the Tecolote stockholders found Whitney H.
Stoddard in the chair. Henry Rimrock Jones was too busy on the stock
market to permit of his getting away. He was perfecting a plan where
by throwing in all his money, and all he could borrow at the bank, he
hoped to wrest from Stoddard his control of Navajoa, besides dealing a
blow to his pride. But Whitney H. Stoddard, besides running a railroad
and a few subsidiary companies as well, was not so busy; he had plenty
of time to come to Gunsight and to lay out a carefully planned program.
As his supposed friend, the mysterious Mrs. Hardesty, had remarked once
upon a time: he was a very thor