ton did not catch the words distinctly. "It will take
just a moment, and--and it is very important."

Reluctantly she paused. Conniston went out and heard Hapgood shut the
door after him. He shrugged his shoulders.

Mr. Crawford did not again refer to the bad news which he had brought,
but instead seemed to have forgotten it. He asked Conniston question
after question, seeking significant details, demanding to know how
many feet the ditch had been driven upon each separate day of the
week, what difficulties had been met, how the men did the parts
allotted them, what Truxton counted upon accomplishing upon each day
to come. And after ten minutes of sharp, quick questions he leaned
forward and, with his eyes steady and searching upon Conniston's,
demanded, abruptly:

"Is Truxton showing any signs of nervous irritability?"

"Yes." Conniston hesitated, wondering what was in the other man's
thoughts. He began an explanation such as he had made Argyl, but Mr.
Crawford cut him short.

"That will do. Thank you. That is all that I wanted to know."

He got to his feet and strode back and forth in the little room, his
brows bunched together. Conniston, seeing for the first time in this
man whom he had held unendingly resourceful, indomitable, signs of a
militating anxiety, felt a sudden chill at his heart. Were they, after
all, playing a losing game? Was the combination of desert and
Swinnerton and capital going to prove too much for them? Was John
Crawford even now looking clearly into the future and seeing himself a
beaten, broken man?

For a moment of torture, during which he realized to the uttermost
what success would mean, what failure, he feared that the vision which
he had thought to have glimpsed through this sturdy pioneer's eyes was
the true vision, feared that the fight was going out of John Crawford.

And a moment later a little shiver tingled through him as John
Crawford stopped in front of him, looking down at him, as he saw that
the make-up of this man was not broken, but that it was being bent
like a powerful spring which draws its strength from outside pressure.
He thought swiftly that the greater the weight put upon a powerful
spring the greater was its recoil, the greater weights might it fling
aside. Mr. Crawford was half smiling. His lips were calm. In his eyes
there was no hint of fear or of failure. Instead a steady light there
spoke with clear forcefulness of an unshaken determination, and more
t