nningham. She put it
on the desk before him and stood waiting, timidly, afraid to voice her
demand for justice, yet too desperately anxious to leave with it
unspoken.

He leaned back in his swivel chair, his cold eyes challenging her.
"Well," he barked harshly.

She was a young, soft creature, very pretty in a kittenish fashion,
both sensuous and helpless. It was an easy guess that unless fortune
stood her friend she was a predestined victim to the world's selfish
love of pleasure, and fortune, with a cynical smile, had stood aside
and let her go her way.

"I . . . I . . ." A wave of color flooded her face. She twisted a rag
of a handkerchief into a hard wadded knot.

"Spit it out," he ordered curtly.

"I've got to do something . . . soon. Won't you--won't you--?" There
was a wail of despair in the unfinished sentence.

James Cunningham was a grim, gray pirate, as malleable as cast iron and
as soft. He was a large, big-boned man, aggressive, dominant, the kind
that takes the world by the throat and shakes success from it. The
contour of his hook-nosed face had something rapacious written on it.

"No. Not till I get good and ready. I've told you I'd look out for
you if you'd keep still. Don't come whining at me. I won't have it."

"But--"

Already he was ripping letters open and glancing over them. Tears
brimmed the brown eyes of the girl. She bit her lower lip, choked back
a sob, and turned hopelessly away. Her misfortune lay at her own door.
She knew that. But-- The woe in her heart was that the man she had
loved was leaving her to face alone a night as bleak as death.

Cunningham had always led a life of intelligent selfishness. He had
usually got what he wanted because he was strong enough to take it. No
scrupulous nicety of means had ever deterred him. Nor ever would. He
played his own hand with a cynical disregard of the rights of others.
It was this that had made him what he was, a man who bulked large in
the sight of the city and state. Long ago he had made up his mind that
altruism was weakness.

He went through his mail with a swift, trained eye. One of the letters
he laid aside and glanced at a second time. It brought a grim, hard
smile to his lips. A paragraph read:

There's no water in your ditch and our crops are burning up. Your
whole irrigation system in Dry Valley is a fake. You knew it, but we
didn't. You've skinned us out of all we had, you damned bloodsucke