d
I'll throw up my job and run a foot-race with the sheriff, if I have to.
Damn the job, anyway!" he finished petulantly. "I'm tired of being a
robber for somebody else's pocket all the time!"

Blount sat down again and put his face in his hands. After a time he
looked up to say: "I can't let you outbid me in the open market, Dick.
You can't set the friendship peg any higher than I can."

Gantry crossed the room and recovered his top-coat and hat from the
chair where he had thrown them.

"Don't you be a fool," he advised curtly. "There's a railroad down in
Peru that is going bankrupt for the lack of a wide-awake, up-to-date
traffic man. I've had the offer on my desk for a month, and I'm going
to cable to-night. That lets you out, whether you do or don't. But if
you've got the sense of a wooden Indian, you'll do as I've said--and do
it _pronto_. Your time's mighty short, anyway. So long."

And before Blount could stop him he was gone.

XX

A STONE FOR BREAD

Though he had eaten nothing since the early breakfast in the service-car
on the way to Lewiston, Evan Blount let the dinner hour go by unnoted.
For a long time after Gantry had left him he sat motionless, a prey to
thoughts too bitter to find expression in words; the dismaying thoughts
of the hard-pressed champion who has discovered that his foes are of his
own household.

Apart from the one great boyhood sorrow, a sorrow which had been allowed
unduly to magnify itself with the passing years, he had never been
brought face to face with any of the hardnesses which alone can make the
soldier of life entirely intrepid in the shock of battle. In the
backward glance he saw that his homeless youth had been, none the less,
a sheltered youth; that his father's love and care had built and
maintained invisible ramparts which had hitherto shielded him. It was
most humiliating to find that the crumbling of the ramparts was leaving
him naked and shivering; to find that he was so far out of touch with
his pioneer lineage as to be unable to stand alone.

But there are better things in the blood of the pioneers than a
latter-day descendant of the continent-conquering fathers may be able to
discern in the moment of defeat and disaster. Slowly, so slowly that he
did not recognize the precise moment at which the tide of depression and
wretchedness reached its lowest ebb and turned to sweep him back to a
firmer footing, Blount found himself emerging from the bitter wa