that seemed interminable.
Gray was watchful, expectant; Nelson was plainly shaken by a desire so
desperate that resistance left him weak. He was like an animal frozen
in the very attitude of springing.

"Foxy, aren't you?" he managed to say, at last. "Tempting me to--make
the first move." With a mighty effort of will he forced his tense body
to relax. "The act of a bully! Bah! Wouldn't I be a fool--"

"A bully is usually a coward," Gray said, slowly. "Neither of us is a
coward. I'm not ready to--join the issue that way, especially in a
place like this. The game is too exciting to--"

"You'll get all the excitement you're looking for," Nelson cried,
wrathfully. "You've cost me a lot of money, but you could have cost me
a lot more if you hadn't been fool enough to brag about it and give me
warning. Now--I'll send you out of Texas afoot."

"On my back, perhaps, but never on my feet."

Without another word the banker passed on, but he went blindly, for his
mind was in black chaos. No chance now for secrecy; he was in for a bit
of hell. He managed to kill the story in the local papers, but it
appeared in the Dallas journals, which was even worse, and for the
first time in his life he found himself an object of ridicule. The
Arkansas transaction was made to appear the most outrageous swindle of
recent oil history, and, coming so quickly after the Jackson exposure,
it excited double interest and amusement.

In truth, the facts about the salting of that Arkansas tract did make a
story, for the methods employed had been both new and ingenious. Nelson
had been fooled by a showing of oil in an ordinary farm well, and by a
generous seepage into a running stream some distance away. Not until a
considerable sum had been spent in actual drilling operations, however,
did those seepages diminish sufficiently to excite suspicion
sufficiently, in fact, to induce the crew to pump the water well dry.
This done, an amazing fraud had been discovered. It had been found that
the vendor of the land had removed the rock curbing and behind it had
packed a liberal quantity of petroleum-soaked cotton waste. Naturally,
when the well had been walled up again and permitted to resume its
natural level, the result was all that the unscrupulous owner could
have expected.

The creek seepage had turned out to be equally counterfeit, but even
more ingeniously contrived. It had manifested itself where a stratum of
clean white sand, underlaid with cla