s effort to
change the subject was too crude and it roused a spirit of bulldog
tenacity in the younger man. "You will pardon me if I go back to the
original question. What are we going to do about that undermined hill?"

The president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve.

"Just at present, Mr. Ballard, we shall do nothing. To-morrow morning
you may put your entire force on the ditch work, discharging the various
camps as soon as the work is done. Let the 'hollow tooth' rest for the
time. If a mistake has been made, it's not your mistake--or Mr.
Bromley's. And a word in your ear: Not a syllable of your very natural
anxiety to any one, if you please. It can do no good; and it might do a
great deal of harm. I shouldn't mention it even to Bromley, if I were
you."

"Not mention it?--to Bromley? But Bromley knows; and we agree fully----"

"Well, see to it that he doesn't talk. And now I must really beg to be
excused, Mr. Ballard. My duties as host----"

Ballard let him go, with a feeling of repulsive disgust that was almost
a shudder, and sat for a brooding hour in silence while the fireworks
sputtered and blazed from the platform on the mesa's edge and the full
moon rose to peer over the background range, paling the reds and yellows
of the rockets and bombs. He was still sitting where the president had
left him when Bromley came in to announce the close of the _fete
champetre_.

"It's all over but the shouting, and they are taking to the Pullmans.
You don't care to go to the foot of the pass with one of the trains, do
you?"

"Not if you'll go. One of us ought to stay by the dam while the lake is
filling, and I'm the one."

"Of course you are," said Bromley, cheerfully. "I'll go with the first
section; I'm good for that much more, I guess; and I can come back from
Ackerman's ranch in the morning on one of the returning engines." Then
he asked the question for which Ballard was waiting: "How did Mr. Pelham
take the new grief?"

"He took it too easily; a great deal too easily, Loudon. I tell you,
there's something rotten in Denmark. He was as cold-blooded as a fish."

Hoskins, long since reinstated, and now engineman of the first section
of the excursion train, was whistling for orders, and Bromley had to go.

"I've heard a thing or two myself, during the day," he averred. "I'll
tell you about them in the morning. The company's secretary has been
busy making stock transfers all day--when he wasn't sp