h to
make a getaway. We'll ride him down sure."

"Maybe we will and maybe we won't," the oil broker replied. "I'd give
odds that he goes scot free."

"Then you'd lose," Kirby answered, smiling easily.

CHAPTER XXII

"ARE YOU WITH ME OR AGAINST ME?"

Miss Phyllis Harriman had breakfasted earlier than usual. Her
luxuriant, blue-black hair had been dressed and she was debating the
important question as to what gown she would wear. The business of her
life was to make an effective carnal appeal, and she had a very sure
sense of how to accomplish this.

A maid entered with a card, at which Miss Harriman glanced indolently.
A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, but it was not wholly one
of amusement. In the dark eyes a hint of adventure sparked. Her
pulses beat with a little glow of triumph. For this young woman was of
the born coquettes. She could no more resist alluring an attractive
man and playing with him to his subsequent mental discomfort than she
could refrain from bridge drives and dinner dances. This Wild Man from
Wyoming, so strong of stride, so quietly competent, whose sardonic
glance had taken her in so directly and so keenly, was a foeman worthy
of her weapons.

"Good gracious!" she murmured, "does he usually call in the middle of
the night, I wonder? And does he really expect me to see him now?"

The maid waited. She had long ago discovered that Miss Phyllis did not
always regulate her actions by her words.

"Take him into the red room and tell him I'll be down in a minute,"
Miss Harriman decided.

After which there was swift action in the lady's boudoir.

The red room was scarcely more than a cozy alcove set off the main
reception-room, but it had a note of warmth, of friendly and seductive
intimacy. Its walls whispered of tete-a-tetes, the cushions hinted at
interesting secrets they were forever debarred from telling. In short,
when Miss Harriman was present, it seemed, no less than the clothes she
wore, an expression of her personality.

After a very few minutes Miss Phyllis sauntered into the room and gave
her hand to the man who rose at her entrance. She was simply but
expensively gowned. Her smile was warm for Kirby. It told him, with a
touch of shy reluctance, that he was the one man in the world she would
rather meet just now. He did not know that it would have carried the
same message to any one of half a dozen men.

"I'm so glad you came to see me," she