led grimly.

"Not for Prescott. Besides, it's not like them to go into a proposition
like this without further investigation. If they'd send an engineer back
with you I'd begin to hope."

"Bosh!" Symes exclaimed impatiently. "My name counts for something in a
game like this."

Mudge was unresponsive.

"Gentlemen understand each other," Symes went on complacently,
"intuition--hunch--kind of a silent sympathy. I tell you, Mudge, I'm
goin' to win a hat off you."

After leaving the office of Mudge, the promoter, J. Collins Prescott,
sauntered into a secluded waiting room in a near-by hotel and sank into
the depths of a huge leather chair. He took a voluminous type-written
report from the pocket of his fashionable top-coat and fell to studying
it with interest and care. He was engrossed in its contents for nearly
an hour, and when he had finished he replaced it in his pocket. Then he
sauntered to the telegrapher's station in the corner of the hotel office
and wrote upon a blank with swift decision a telegram which seemed a
trifle at variance with the almost foppish elegance of his appearance.
The telegram read:

Crooked as a dog's hind leg. Buy.

XVIII

"HER SUPREME MOMENT"

Dr. Harpe had surprisingly good shoulders for so slender a woman--white,
well rounded, and with a gentle feminine slope. That she never had been
given the opportunity of showing them to Crowheart had been a matter of
some regret. Her chance came when Andy P. Symes celebrated the sale of
$150,000 worth of bonds by an invitation ball in the dining-room of the
Terriberry House.

Elation over the placing of these bonds with the estate represented by
J. Collins Prescott mitigated in some slight degree the humiliation and
bitterness of his feelings when, upon his return from his successful
business trip, he found that not only had Grandmother Kunkel gone as she
had foreseen she would go, but Dr. Harpe had resumed her visits as
before and vouchsafed to him no word of explanation or apology at the
deliberate violation of her promise.

In any case, as Symes saw clearly now, the fulfilment of it would have
been futile so far as ending the intimacy was concerned, for the only
result would have been that Augusta would have done the visiting. That
he let the matter of Dr. Harpe's broken word pass without protest
evidenced the completeness of his capitulation, his entire realization
of the hopelessness of resistance to the situation, as did also