yside the most lurid headlines came from; not a few people shook
their heads and prophesied that when the Spring thaw came the body of a
reckless, blood tainted monster would be found where it had been hurled
in desperation from a high cliff. The sheriff's own personal opinion,
known only to the sheriff, perhaps came as close to the truth as any
man's.

Of all the men and women who knew him, perhaps none evinced less
concern in Wayne Shandon's fate than Helga Strawn. She had something
else to do. Looking ahead far and carefully, doing nothing hastily,
planning and shaping her way, with Sledge Hume and her lost interest in
the Dry Lands always looming large in the foreground of her thoughts,
she was already supplying her quota of grist to the great invisible
mills. She bought, upon her own initiative, a small farm just on the
edge of Hume's land, investing ten thousand dollars in it, and came
there to live. She bought conservatively at twenty dollars an acre.
If the project, now involved in uncertainty, were perfected her land
would be worth from two to five times what she had paid for it. On the
other hand, if nothing came of the campaign for irrigation, it was
always worth twenty dollars. It was Helga Strawn's way to play safe.

She saw much of Sledge Hume. Or rather she allowed Sledge Hume to see
much of her. The same thing with a variation, and that variation
important in the woman's shrewd eyes. Hume had no means of knowing how
much money she possessed, but he did know that she had paid out ten
thousand dollars in cash. He knew also that she was a woman. In his
eyes, never clearsighted from the mote of conceit and the dust of
arrogant superiority, a woman was a fool. He needed money, he wanted
money, her money as well as another's. He had gone far already in the
project that would make him a rich man if it succeeded; he was going
further. If litigation now were to raise its long wall against him he
meant to surmount the wall or tunnel under it. He had gone too far to
stop; his money was invested; he wanted more money to invest with it.

While he made the woman his study she coolly dissected his character,
not satisfied with the composite, both patient and shrewd in her
analysis. While he sought to read her, handicapped by his prejudice,
she spelled the letters of the man's soul.

She came to see, after the first few days, that Hume's one working
theory of life was that of the survival of the fitt