day there are so many problems of
critically vital importance--problems that the pterodactyls never knew
anything about."

"I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of
them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it."

"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her
tone was personal rather than conventional.

"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose
sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed
alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to
protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had
befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the
wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber
magnate's attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the
fact that her father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of
share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though
whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.

"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the incident of the
afternoon.

"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm afraid I let Hathaway escape
without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable
scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me
to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I
might communicate my consent without committing anybody. I made a
mistake in not firing him bodily!"

Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot on the tiled hearth.

"You made your greatest mistake in the very beginning, Evan," she said
decisively. "You should have made a confidant of your father."

"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was all right until this
political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I
couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the
corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr.
McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I
could really do something toward bringing about a better understanding."

"And now you believe you can't?--that it is impossible?"

"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great game' seems to be
everything in this benighted commonwealth, and everybody plays it--my
father, his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians. Surely
you wouldn't say that I should have let father put me on the S