you
have borrowed all you can on it, I'll give you my personal note for all
the balance I owe, and see you get every dollar of it, if I have to
work it out during the next three years at twenty dollars a week."

It was that promise that turned the scales. No man of discernment
could look at Rogeen and doubt either his pluck or his honesty.

Two days later forty Chinamen, more eager for jobs now than ever, were
picking cotton at the Chandler and Rogeen ranches--twenty at each place.

Tom Barton went up the outside stairway thumping each iron step
viciously. Six months of gloomy forebodings had terminated even more
disastrously than he had feared. He found Reedy Jenkins rumpled and
unshaven, laboriously figuring at his desk.

Reedy looked up with a sly-dog sort of smile. There were little rims
of red round his eyes, but it was plain he had something new to spring
on his creditor.

"I'm not figuring debts"--Jenkins reached in the drawer and got out a
cigar and lighted it--"but profits."

"Yes," said Barton, murderously, "that is what you are always figuring
on. Debts don't mean anything to you, because you aren't worth a damn.
But debts count with me. You owe me $40,000 on this bright idea of
yours, and your leases aren't worth a tadpole in Tahoe."

"Easy, easy!" Reedy waved his hand as though getting ready to make a
speech. "Perhaps I have temporarily lost my credit; but with a
requisite amount of cash, a man can always get it back--or do without
it.

"I admit this damn war has swamped me. I admit on the face of the
returns I am snowed under--bankrupt to the tune of over $200,000. But
nevertheless and notwithstanding I am going to get away with some coin."

"Well, I hope you don't get away with mine," growled Barton.

A laundry driver entered the door with a bill in his hand. Reedy grew
a little redder and waved at the man angrily.

"Don't bother me with that now; don't you see I'm busy?"

"So am I," said the driver, aggressively, "and this is the third call."

"Leave it," said Jenkins, angrily, "and I'll have my secretary send you
a check for it."

The driver threw it on Reedy's desk and left sullenly. Barton caught
the figures on the unpaid bill--seventy-eight cents.

"I admit," Barton spoke sarcastically as he started for the door, "that
your credit is gone. But if you don't dig up that forty thousand,
you'll be as sorry you ever borrowed it as I am that I lent it."

The last of Nov