r. Not in this fog! We'd better get ashore----"

"And let him wreck this dam?"

"If he's going to wreck it, we'd better be off it."

In his fear Craig became insulting, and that attitude ended his control
of the situation. "You're hired with money, you cowards! Now earn it!"

"This is where your money can't buy something for you, Mr. Craig," the
captain of the gunmen declared, and then he led the retreat of his squad
across Skulltree dam and into the woods on the far shore from the
portentous, invisible peril.

And with dire extremity clearing for the moment his clouded vision,
enabling him to look squarely at the matter of service and loyalty as he
was able to command it, Craig knew that when his money failed him in the
north country he had no other resource. He had blinked that fact in the
past, having found that in ordinary affairs his dollars were dominant;
but this extraordinary event was knocking out from under him all the
props of confidence; he felt bitterly alone all of a sudden.

"We'll have to vamoose off this dam," declared the deputy sheriff.

"You've got your duty as an officer of the law," shouted Craig,
desperately feeling that in the case of this man, at least, he was
making an appeal to something that was not covered by a money
consideration.

"And I've got my common sense, too!" retorted the sheriff. He started
away.

"So have I," agreed the attorney, a lawyer who had obeyed a telegram and
had joined the Craig expedition at the shire town of the county the
night before.

"There's an injunction!" stormed the field director.

"And there's a lunatic with a sack of dynamite." The lawyer crooked his
arm across his face; a missile from the white void had splashed near by
and water sprayed him. "You have told me that Latisan is no longer in
Flagg's service. I'm not depending now on law, Mr. Craig, I'm depending
on my legs."

He fled on the trail of the officer. But he left a pregnant thought in
Craig's mind: Latisan was not an employee of Echford Flagg. As a matter
of fact, Craig owned to himself--his clarity of vision persisting in
that time of overwhelming disaster, in the wreck of the hopes built on
the power of his money--that the thing had now become almost wholly a
personal, guerrilla warfare between himself and Latisan; and when the
truth came out, if the matter were forced to that issue, Craig would
lack the backing of authority fully as much as Latisan lacked it then,
in his assault o