value," urged
Farwell. "At 6 per cent. it's nine thousand a year from now to eternity
for you and your wife and children. If you refuse, the best you can
hope for is dry-land prices. It's your only salvation, I tell you."

"My word is passed," said McCrae. "Even if it wasn't, I wouldn't be
harried off the little bit of earth that's mine. It's good of you to
take this trouble--I judge you had trouble--but it's not a bit of use."

"Look here," said Farwell. "Will you talk it over with your
family--your wife and daughter particularly? It's due to them."

"I will not," McCrae refused, with patriarchal scorn. "_I_ am the
family. I speak for all."

"The old mule!" thought Farwell. Aloud he said: "I want to tell you
that in a few days you'll lose half your water. The rest will go when
the dam is finished. This is final--the last offer, your last chance.
I've done every blessed thing I could for you. Right now is when you
make or break yourself and your wife and children."

"That's my affair," said McCrae. "I tell you no, and no." He plucked
the oblong paper from Farwell's unresisting fingers. "A lot of money,
aren't you?" he apostrophized it. "More than I've ever seen before, or
will see again, like enough." Suddenly he tore the check in half, and
again and again, cast the fragments in the air, and blew through them.
"And there goes your check, Mr. Farwell!"

"And there goes your ranch with it," Farwell commented bitterly. "One
is worth just about as much as the other now."

"I'm not so sure about that," said McCrae.

"I'm sure enough for both of us," Farwell responded.

With a perfunctory good-bye, he swung into the saddle, leaving McCrae,
a sombre figure, leaning against the slip bars of the corral. He had
anticipated this outcome; but, nevertheless, he was disappointed,
vaguely apprehensive. In vain he told himself that it was nothing to
him. The sense of failure persisted. Once he half turned in his saddle,
looking backward, and he caught, or fancied he caught, the flutter of
white against the shade of the veranda of the distant ranch house. That
must be Sheila McCrae.

For the first time he realized that his concern was for her alone, that
he did not care a hoot for the rest of the family. All this bother he
had been to, all his efforts with old McCrae, his practical holdup of
Carrol, even--he owned it to himself frankly--his failure to push the
construction work as fast as he might had been for her and becaus