ess than a genius when it comes to handling workingmen. Isn't it so?"

"Oh, that part of it is all right. It's the hoodoo that is making an old
man of me before my time."

"The what?"

Bromley moved uneasily in his chair, and Ballard could have sworn that
he gave a quick glance into the dark corners of the room before he said:
"I'm giving you the men's name for it. But with or without a name, it
hangs over this job like the shadow of a devil-bat's wings. The men sit
around and smoke and talk about it till bedtime, and the next day some
fellow makes a bad hitch on a stone, or a team runs away, or a blast
hangs fire in the quarry, and we have a dead man for supper.
Breckenridge, it is simply _hell_!"

Ballard shook his head incredulously.

"You've let a few ill-natured coincidences rattle you," was his comment.
"What is it? Or, rather, what is at the bottom of it?"

"I don't know; nobody knows. The 'coincidences,' as you call them, were
here when I came; handed down from Braithwaite's drowning, I suppose.
Then Sanderson got tangled up with Manuel's woman--as clear a case of
superinduced insanity as ever existed--and in less than two months he
and Manuel jumped in with Winchesters, and poor Billy passed out. That
got on everybody's nerves, of course; and then Macpherson came. You know
what he was--a hard-headed, sarcastic old Scotchman, with the bitterest
tongue that was ever hung in the middle and adjusted to wag both ways.
He tried ridicule; and when that didn't stop the crazy happenings, he
took to bullyragging. The day the derrick fell on him he was swearing
horribly at the hoister engineer; and he died with an oath in his
mouth."

The Kentuckian sat back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his
head.

"Let me get one thing straight before you go on. Mr. Pelham told me of a
scrap between the company and an old fellow up here who claims
everything in sight. Has this emotional insanity you are talking about
anything to do with the old cattle king's objection to being syndicated
out of existence?"

"No; only incidentally in Sanderson's affair--which, after all, was a
purely personal quarrel between two men over a woman. And I wouldn't
care to say that Manuel was wholly to blame in that."

"Who is this Manuel?" queried Ballard.

"Oh, I thought you knew. He is the colonel's manager and ranch foreman.
He is a Mexican and an all-round scoundrel, with one lonesome good
quality--absolute and unimpeachable lo