hat is what every day should be.

CHAPTER XII

If Gray cherished any lingering doubts as to the loyalty of Mallow,
erstwhile victim of his ruthlessness, or of McWade and Stoner, the
wildcat promoters, those doubts vanished during the next day or two. As
a matter of fact, the readiness, nay, the enthusiasm with which they
fell in with his schemes convinced him that he had acted wisely in
yielding to an impulse to trust them. At first, when he divulged his
enemy's identity, they were thunderstruck; mere mention of Henry
Nelson's name rendered them speechless and caused them to regard their
employer as a harmless madman, but as he unfolded his plans in greater
detail they listened with growing respect. The idea seized them
finally. In the first place, it was sufficiently fantastic to appeal to
their imaginations, for they saw in Gray a lone wolf with the courage
and the ferocity to single out and pull down the leader of the herd,
and, what was more, they scented profit to themselves in trailing with
him. Then, too, the enterprise promised to afford free scope for their
ingenuity, their cunning, their devious business methods, and that
could be nothing less than pleasing to men of their type.

But early enough he made it plain that he intended and would tolerate
no actual dishonesty; crooked methods were both dangerous and
unsatisfactory, he told them, hence the fight must be fair even though
merciless. To annoy, to harass, to injure, and if possible actually to
ruin the banker, that was his intention; to accomplish those ends he
was willing to employ any legitimate device, however shrewd, however
smart. His entire fortune--and his associates, of course, greatly
exaggerated its size--would be available for the purpose, and when he
sketched out the measures he had in mind the trio of rogues realized
that here indeed was a field wide enough for the exercise of their
peculiar gifts. They acknowledged, too, a certain pleasure in the
comfortable assurance that they would involve themselves in no illegal
consequences.

At their first council of war Gray gave each of them a number of
definite things to do or to have done, the while he sought certain
facts; when they assembled for a second time, it was to compare, to
tabulate, and to consider an amount of information concerning the
activities of Henry Nelson that would have greatly surprised that
gentleman had he been present to hear it.

For one thing, there had been pre