"

"I'm elicted, I s'pose; but it's a job I ain't admirin' to do. If ye've
got half the sinse I give ye credit for havin', ye'll be lettin' that mon
Trevison alone--I'd a lot sooner smoke a segar in that shed av dynamite
than to cross him!"

Corrigan smiled and turned to look in the direction in which the Irishman
was pointing. A small, flat-roofed frame building, sheathed with
corrugated iron, met his view. Crude signs, large enough to be read
hundreds of feet distant, were affixed to the walls:

"CAUTION. DYNAMITE."

"Do you keep much of it there?"

"Enough for anny blastin' we have to do. There's plenty--half a ton,
mebbe."

"Who's got the key?"

"Meself."

Corrigan returned to town, breakfasted, mounted a horse and rode out to
the dam, where he gave orders for some laborers to be sent to Carson. At
nine o'clock he was back in Manti talking with Pickand, and watching the
dinky engine as it pulled the loaded flat-cars westward over the tracks.
He left Pickand and went to his office in the bank building, where he
conferred with some men regarding various buildings and improvements in
contemplation, and shortly after ten, glancing out of a window, he saw a
buckboard stop in front of the _Castle_ hotel. Corrigan waited a little,
then closed his desk and walked across the street. Shortly he confronted
Hester Harvey in her room. He saw from her downcast manner that she had
failed. His face darkened.

"Wouldn't work, eh? What did he say?"

The woman was hunched down in her chair, still wearing the cloak that she
had worn in Trevison's office; the collar still up, the front thrown open.
Her hair was disheveled; dark lines were under her eyes; she glared at
Corrigan in an abandon of savage dejection.

"He turned me down--cold." Her laugh held the bitterness of self-derision.
"I'm through, there, Jeff."

"Hell!" cursed the man. She looked at him, her lips curving with amused
contempt.

"Oh, you're all right--don't worry. That's all you care about, isn't it?"
She laughed harshly at the quickened light in his eyes. "You'd see me
sacrifice myself; you wouldn't give me a word of sympathy. That's you!
That's the way of all men. Give, give, give! That's the masculine
chorus--the hunting-song of the human wolf-pack!"

"Don't talk like that--it ain't like you, kid. You were always the gamest
little dame I ever knew." He essayed to take the hand that was twisted in
the folds of her cloak, bu