aries-to-be and fix up the details of a nice little deed of
kindness of which I am the proud author."

"Fat commission in it for you, eh?" says I.

J. Bayard looks pained and hurt. "Really," says he, "I hadn't thought of
that. No, the outlay will be slight. In fact, it's merely a matter of
launching a young man in society."

"Well, well!" says I. "That's a husky job for a couple of grown men like
us, ain't it? Who's the young gent--Clarence what?"

"Ever hear of Hungry Jim Hammond?" says he.

I had, but couldn't quite place him; so J. Bayard supplies the
description. He'd started out as a railroad man, Hammond had, back in
the days when Pyramid Gordon was first beginnin' to discover that
swappin' hot air for votin' shares was perfectly good business so long
as you could get away with the goods. Only Hammond was the real thing.
He was a construction expert.

Mr. Gordon had found him on the payroll of a line he'd annexed by a
midnight deal; concluded he knew too much about the job to be a safe man
to have around; so he transfers him to the Far West and sets him to work
on a scheme to lay out a road parallelin' the Southern Pacific. Hammond
couldn't tell it was a stall. He blazes merrily ahead surveyin' a right
of way across three States, and had got as far as Death Valley when the
rumor comes to camp that this new line is all a fake.

Hammond had a gang of twenty-five or thirty men with him, and his weekly
pay check hadn't shown up for about a month. But he couldn't believe
that Pyramid had laid down on him. He'd got mighty int'rested in
buildin' that road across the desert, and had dreamed some rosy dreams
about it. But his men felt diff'rent. They wanted action on the
cashier's part, or they'd quit. Hammond begged 'em to stay. He even blew
in his own bank account settlin' part of the back wages. But inside of
three days his crew had dwindled to a Chinese cook and a Greaser mule
driver. Took him a couple of weeks more to get wise to the fact that he
was stranded there in the sand, six miles from a water hole, with a few
cases of canned beef and a sack of corn meal.

Even then he didn't give up for good. He made his way back to a stage
station and sent through a wire to Pyramid askin' for instructions. More
than a month he waited, with no word from Gordon. Seems that by then
Pyramid was too busy with other things. He'd cashed in on his bluff and
was sortin' a new hand. And maybe he wa'n't anxious to have Hammond c