g. By winking at lawlessness of all kinds,
their own particular brands of lawlessness, by which they and their
backers make money, go unquestioned. So far from helping, they'd make it
exceedingly difficult for any sheriff who should have the temerity to
come in here in the discharge of his duty."

"You foresaw all this before the contract was awarded?"

"Not all--though I had been told that the MacMorroghs ran 'open camps'
where the work was far enough from civilization to take the curse off.
What you've seen, and what I've been telling you, is bad enough, God
knows; but it will be worse before it is better. After we've had a few
pay-days, and the men begin to realize that they are here to toil and to
be robbed ... Kenneth, it will be hell on earth; and the company will
pay for it--the company always pays in the end."

"I've got a notion," said the attorney, after another plodding mile of
reflection; but what it was he did not say.

Ford and his companion reached Copah in the afternoon of the third day
out from Saint's Rest, and, singularly enough, the mine owners who were
disputing the extension right-of-way were found amenable to reason. What
Kenneth did to secure the P. S-W. right-of-way across the mining claims,
Ford did not know, or seek to know; though a word or two let fall by the
attorney led him to believe that the Transcontinental encouragement was
not quite specific enough in dollars and cents to warrant the
obstructors in holding out.

Ford was for starting back the next morning: he had missed Brissac and
both of the Bensons on the way over. But Kenneth confessed to being
saddle-sore, and begged for another day's respite. Ford agreed without
giving the matter a second thought. Upon such unconsidered trifles--an
indifferent "yes" or "no"--turn the poised scales of life. For one other
day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union,
Copah's tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day
Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at
the moment as a mess of pottage.

It was in this wise. At this period of its existence Copah, the future
great, was merely a promise; a camp of magnificent prospects. Isolated
by one hundred and fifty miles of wagon-road and pack-trail from one
railroad base, and by forty miles of mountains from the other, its
future turned upon the hope of cheaper transportation. As a gold camp it
was an anomaly. With a single exception