chance, I would merely remove his incentive to
hustle and make good."

"But it seems so cruel, John, to take such a practical view of the
situation. He cannot understand your point of view and he will regard
you as another Shylock."

"Doubtless," he replied; "nevertheless, if we are ever forced to regard
him as a prospective son-in-law, it will be comforting to know that even
if he lost, he made me extend myself. He is a man and a gentleman, and I
like him. He won me in the first minute of our acquaintance. That is
why I decided to stand pat and see what he would do." Parker leaned over
and laid his hand on that of his wife. "I will not play the bully's
part, Kate," he promised her. "If he is worth a chance he will get it,
but I am not a human Christmas tree. He will have to earn it." After a
silence of several seconds he added, "Please God he will whip me yet.
His head is bloody but unbowed. It would be terrible to spoil him."

XX

Miguel Farrel pulled up his pinto on the brow of a hill which, along
the Atlantic seaboard, would have received credit for being a mountain,
and gazed down into the Agua Caliente basin. Half a mile to his right,
the slope dipped into a little saddle and then climbed abruptly to the
shoulder of El Palomar, the highest peak in San Marcos County. The
saddle was less than a hundred yards wide, and through the middle of it
a deep arroyo had been eroded by the Rio San Gregorio tumbling down
from the hills during the rainy season. This was the only outlet to
the Agua Caliente basin, and Don Mike saw at a glance that Parker's
engineers had discovered this, for squarely in the outlet a dozen
two-horse teams were working, scraping out the foundation for the huge
concrete dam for which Parker had contracted. Up the side of El
Palomar peak, something that resembled a great black snake had been
stretched, and Farrel nodded approvingly as he observed it.

"Good idea, that, to lay a half-mile of twelve-inch steel pipe up to
that limestone deposit," he remarked to Parker, who had reined his
horse beside Don Mike's. "Only way to run your crushed rock down to
the concrete mixer at the dam-site. You'll save a heap of money on
delivering the rock, at any rate. Who's your contractor, Mr. Parker?"

"A man named Conway."

"Old Bill Conway, of Santa Barbara?"

"The same, I believe," Parker replied, without interest.

"Great old chap, Bill! One of my father's best friends, although