ng out.

"Loudon, has it ever occurred to you that the colonel's mine play is a
very large-sized trump card? We can submerge the house, the grounds, and
his improvements up yonder in the upper canyon and know approximately
how much it is going to cost the company to pay the bill. But when the
water backs up into that tunnel, we are stuck for whatever damages he
cares to claim."

"Sure thing," said Bromley. "No one on earth will ever know whether
we've swamped a five-million-dollar mine or a twenty-five-cent hole in
the ground."

"That being the case, I mean to see the inside of that tunnel," Ballard
went on doggedly. "I am sorry I allowed Mr. Pelham to let me in for
this; but in justice to the people who pay my salary, I must know what
we are up against over there."

"I don't believe you will make any bad breaks in that direction,"
Bromley suggested. "If you try it by main strength and awkwardness, as
Macpherson did, you'll get what he very narrowly escaped--a young lead
mine started inside of you by one of the colonel's Mexican bandits. If
you try it any other way, the colonel will be sure to spot you; and you
go out of his good books and Miss Elsa's--no invitations to the big
house, no social alleviations, no ice-cream and cake, no heavenly summer
nights when you can sit out on the Greek-pillared portico with a pretty
girl, and forget for the moment that you are a buccaneering bully of
labouring men, marooned, with a lot of dry-land pirates like yourself,
in the Arcadia desert. No, my dear Breckenridge; I think it is safe to
prophesy that you won't do anything you say you will."

"Won't I?" growled the new chief, looking at his watch. Then: "Let's go
down to breakfast." And, with a sour glance at the hill over which the
roof-smashing rock of the previous night must have been hurled: "Don't
forget to tell Quinlan to be a little more sparing with his powder up
here. Impress it on his mind that he is getting out building stone--not
shooting the hill down for concrete."

VII

THE POLO PLAYERS

Ballard gave the Saturday, his first day in the new field, to Bromley
and the work on the dam, inspecting, criticising, suggesting changes,
and otherwise adjusting the wheels of the complicated constructing
mechanism at the Elbow Canyon nerve centre to run efficiently and
smoothly, and at accelerated speed.

"That's about all there is to say," he summed up to his admiring
assistant, at the close of his first admi