other argument for prohibition. All the rest of the
town had got a good start before he appeared on the scene and to drown
that black thought--defeated by a woman--he drank deep with the crowd
at the Alamo. At the end of the bout when, his thoughts coming
haphazard, he philosophized on the disasters of the day, his brain
slipped a cog and brought two ideas together that piled Pelion on the
Ossa of his discontent.

The first vision to rise was that of the lady typist, exacting her full
pound of flesh; and then, groping back to that other catastrophe, his
mind fetched up--Andrew McBain! And then he remembered. She worked
for McBain. He straightened up in the bar-room chair and gusty curses
swept from his lips.

"You're stung, you sucker!" he cried in a fury. "You're sold out to
Andrew McBain! Oh, you dad-burned idiot--you ignorant baboon--you were
drunk, that's why you signed up!"

Rimrock's pitiful rage at that other personality that had marred his
fair hopes in his mine--that perverse, impulsive, overweening inner
spirit that took the helm at each crisis of his life--was a rage to
make the gods above weep if they did not laugh at the jest. And this
blind, drunken self that rose up within him to sit leeringly in
judgment on his acts, it judged not so ill, if the truth must be
spoken. He had gone to Mary Fortune with the bouquet of Bourbon subtly
blended with the aroma of his cigar and the fine edge of his reason had
been dulled by so much when he matched his boy's wit against hers. His
mind had not sought out the hidden motive that lay behind what she had
said; he had followed where she led and, finding her logic impregnable,
had yielded like a child, in a pique. Yes, yielded out of spite
without ever once thinking that she worked, day by day, for McBain.

A dull rage came over him and when he roused up next morning that fixed
idea was still in his brain. But in the morning it was different.
Those two personalities that had been so exalted, and differentiated,
by drink, snapped back into one substantial I Am; and his tumultuous,
fighting ego took command. Rimrock rose up thinking and the first hour
after breakfast found him working feverishly to build up a defense. He
had been jumped once before by Andrew McBain--it must not happen again.
No technicality must be left to serve as a handle for this
lawyer-robber to seize. Before noon that day Rimrock had two gangs of
surveyors on their way to his Tecolot