hts, and hundreds of men on the pay-roll, working night and day. I
guess I do get an inkling of what you mean by making a thing. I made
Ophir, and by God, she was a sure hummer--I beg your pardon. I didn't
mean to cuss. But that Ophir!--I sure am proud of her now, just as the
last time I laid eyes on her."

"And you won something there that was more than mere money," Dede
encouraged. "Now do you know what I would do if I had lots of money
and simply had to go on playing at business? Take all the southerly
and westerly slopes of these bare hills. I'd buy them in and plant
eucalyptus on them. I'd do it for the joy of doing it anyway; but
suppose I had that gambling twist in me which you talk about, why, I'd
do it just the same and make money out of the trees. And there's my
other point again. Instead of raising the price of coal without adding
an ounce of coal to the market supply, I'd be making thousands and
thousands of cords of firewood--making something where nothing was
before. And everybody who ever crossed on the ferries would look up at
these forested hills and be made glad. Who was made glad by your
adding four dollars a ton to Rock Wells?"

It was Daylight's turn to be silent for a time while she waited an
answer.

"Would you rather I did things like that?" he asked at last.

"It would be better for the world, and better for you," she answered
noncommittally.

CHAPTER XVI

All week every one in the office knew that something new and big was
afoot in Daylight's mind. Beyond some deals of no importance, he had
not been interested in anything for several months. But now he went
about in an almost unbroken brown study, made unexpected and lengthy
trips across the bay to Oakland, or sat at his desk silent and
motionless for hours. He seemed particularly happy with what occupied
his mind. At times men came in and conferred with him--and with new
faces and differing in type from those that usually came to see him.

On Sunday Dede learned all about it. "I've been thinking a lot of our
talk," he began, "and I've got an idea I'd like to give it a flutter.
And I've got a proposition to make your hair stand up. It's what you
call legitimate, and at the same time it's the gosh-dangdest gamble a
man ever went into. How about planting minutes wholesale, and making
two minutes grow where one minute grew before? Oh, yes, and planting a
few trees, too--say several million of them. You remember the