re talking.
"You see, you don't know me yet."

"I don't see just how I can be of service to you," he suggested.

"I'll try to be explicit. I have never had the pleasure of meeting Mr.
Hume and yet I think that I could write a very correct character sketch
of the gentleman. Egotism and selfishness, two things in most men,
just one in Sledge Hume! He is shrewd and hard and his god is gold.
Am I right?"

"Hume is hardly an intimate acquaintance of mine."

She laughed softly, twisting the brandy glass slowly in her white
fingers.

"I know enough of the Hume blood," she said presently, "to make a close
guess at the man's character. We are not related, even distantly, for
nothing, Mr. Shandon. My mother was a Hume," she added coolly, her
manner again reminding the man strangely of Hume himself. "You see, he
chose the wrong woman when he cheated me. It's going to be diamond cut
diamond now."

Shandon looked at the girl curiously, falling to see what mad hope she
could have of regaining rights that were deeded away a year ago,
falling as well to find a reason for her coming all these miles to make
a confidant of him.

"I usually go about things in my own way," she said after one of her
brief pauses. "What I have to say I'll say as it comes to me. In case
your cousin Garth returns before I have done you can send him away upon
any pretext you choose. Tell him we want to talk privately; that will
do as well as anything. Smoke, if you want to," as she saw his eyes go
to the mantelpiece where an old black pipe lay. "Maybe it will make
you patient during my harangue."

Wayne got his pipe and, lighting it, sat upon the edge of the table
looking down at her through the smoke.

"Six months ago," she went on, "I realised that Hume had underpaid me.
Why?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I knew his breed. If he offers a
dollar for a thing it's worth ten. I made investigations through an
agent who came up to Dry Valley from San Francisco. He turned in his
bill on time and that was about all. He was an ordinary man and
consequently a fool. But, blind as a bat himself, he showed me a
little light that set me thinking. A few days ago I came out myself."
She snapped her fingers. "It didn't take me that long to get to the
bottom of the whole thing."

"What thing?"

"The scheme Hume is promoting on the quiet to put water on the Dry
Lands. The water is to come from your river. Are you in on the deal
too?"

Her