Smith had his vote of thanks from Colonel Dexter Baldwin in person late in the afternoon of the day following the summary eviction of the sham mine locators in the upper reservoir; presidential thanks for his prompt defense of the company's interests, and a warm outhanding of fatherly gratitude for the rescue at the unloading side-track. The vote was passed in Williams's sheet-iron office at the dam, the colonel having driven out to the camp for the express purpose; and the chief of construction himself was not present.

"You've loaded us up with a tolerably heavy obligation, Smith—Corry's mother and me," was the way the colonel summed up in the personal field. "If you hadn't been on deck and strictly on the job at that railroad crossing yesterday morning——"

"Don't mention it, Colonel," Smith broke in, protesting honestly as plain "John" where a "J. Montague" might have made self-gratulatory capital. "There is only one thing in this world more onerous than owing an obligation, and that is the feeling that you've got to live up to one. I did nothing more than any man would have done for any woman. You know it, and I know it. Let's leave it that way and forget it."

The tall Missourian's laugh was entirely approbative.

"I like that," he said. "It's a good, man-fashion way of looking at it. Corry wanted me to tell her what I was going to say to you, and I said I'd be hanged if I knew. I owe you one for making it easy. You know how I feel about it—how any father would feel; and that's enough."

"Plenty," was the brief rejoinder.

"But there's another chapter to it that neither of us can cross out; you'll have to come out to the ranch and let Corry's mother have a hack at you," Baldwin went on. "I couldn't figure you out of that if I should try. And now about those claim-jumpers: I suppose you didn't know any of them by name?"

"No."

"Corry says you gave them the time of their lives. By George, I wish I'd been there to see!" and the colonel slapped his leg and laughed. "Did they look like the real thing—sure-enough prospectors?"

"They looked like a bunch of hired assassins," said Smith, with a grin. "It's some more of the interference, isn't it?"

The colonel's square jaw settled into the fighting angle.

"How much do you know about this business mix-up of ours, Smith?" he asked.

"All that Williams could tell me in a little heart-to-heart talk we had the other day."

"You agreed with him that there was a tolerably big nigger in the wood-pile, didn't you?"

"I had already gathered that much from the camp gossip."

"Well, it's so. We're just about as helpless as a bunch of cattle in a sink-hole," was the ranchman president's confirmation of the camp guesses. "As long as it was a straightaway stunt of buying land and building a dam and digging a few ditches, we were in the fight. We knew what we wanted, and we had the money to go out and buy it. But now it looks as if we were aiming to get it where the chicken got the cleaver. If our hunch about the Escalante irrigation trust is right, we are not only going to lose our money and our work; we've run slap up against a proposition that will shut us out of the water altogether and force us to buy it of these Eastern sharks—at their own price. When it comes to that, we may as well make 'em a present of the entire Little Creek district. They can take it whenever they have a mind to."

Smith was thinking of the young woman with the resolute slaty-gray eyes when he said: "That is, of course, if you lie down and let them put the steam-roller over you. But you're not going to do that, are you?"

Baldwin shook his head as one who will not permit himself to minimize a hazard.

"Keep that notion of the cattle in a sink-hole in front of you, Smith, and you'll get a pretty fair idea of the chances. What in the name of the great horn spoon can we do—more than we have done?"

"There are a number of things that might be done," said Smith, falling back reflectively upon the presumably dead and buried bank-cashier part of him. "In the first place, these trust people can't take your dam and your ditch right of way until after they have bought up a voting control of your stock. It is very pointedly up to you and your fellow stockholders to say whether or not you are going to let them scare or force you into selling, isn't it?"

"I reckon maybe it is. But two of our men have already sold out, and more will follow. These Eastern sharks 've got the bulge on us; they have the money, and we're just about as good as dead broke."

"Of course," said the younger man. "That was part of the game; to swamp you with costly lawsuits, use up your capital, and break your credit. It's done every day in business, and in a thousand different ways, some of them pure robberies, but most of them legally defensible. You folks have made the mistake of letting it go too far on too small a capitalization. You're left without a fighting fund. Still, while there is life there is always hope. And if you can manage to stay in the game and play it out, there is big money in it for all of you; enough to make it well worth while for you to put up the fight of your lives."

"Big money?—you mean in saving our investment?"

"Oh, no; not at all; in cinching the other fellows," Smith put in genially. "As Williams explained it to me, there is the biggest kind of a killing in it for you people, if you can hold on and win out."

Colonel Dexter Baldwin lifted his soft hat and ran his fingers through his grizzled hair.

"Say, Smith; you mustn't forget that I'm from Missouri," he said half quizzically.

"But I shouldn't think you'd need to be 'shown' in this particular instance," was the smiling rejoinder. "Why are these Eastern capitalists spending their good money on a scheme to freeze out your little handful of ranch owners, Colonel? Surely you've asked yourself that question long before this, haven't you?"

"Why, yes; it's because they want to get something for nothing, isn't it?"

"In a general sense, of course, that is the basis of all crooked business schemes. But the chance to sell you people water from your own dam isn't the only thing or the main thing in this case; that part of it is merely incidental. Didn't Williams tell me that they are obliged to have this dam site, or, at least, one as high up the river as this, in order to get the water over to their newly alienated grant in the western half of the park?"

"I don't know what Bartley told you, but that is the fact."

"No way of dodging that, is there? They couldn't possibly build a dam of their own, lower down, and make it work, could they? I'm asking because what I don't know about irrigation engineering would fill a Carnegie library in a good-sized little city."

"You've got it straight," said the colonel. "A good part of the Escalante Grant lies higher than our Little Creek ranches. From any point farther down the river than this, they'd have to pump the water to get it up to the Escalante mesas."

"Very good. Then they're simply obliged to have your dam, or—Don't you see the alternative now, Colonel?"

"Heavens to Betsy!" exclaimed the breeder of fine horses, bringing his fist down upon Williams's desk with a crash that made the ink-bottles dance. And then: "The Lord have mercy! What a lot of fence-posts we are—the whole kit and b'ilin' of us! If they get the dam, they sell water to us; if they don't get it, we sell it to them!"

"That's it, exactly," Smith put in quietly. "And I should say that your stake in the game is worth the stiffest fight you can make to save it. Don't you agree with me?"

"Great Jehu! I should say so!" ejaculated the amateur trust fighter. Then he broke down the barriers masterfully. "That settles it, Smith. You can't wiggle out of it now, no way or shape. You've got to come over into Macedonia and help us. Williams tells me you refused him, but you can't refuse me."

If Smith hesitated, it was only partly on his own account. He was thinking again of the young woman with the honest eyes when he said: "Do you know why I turned Williams down when he spoke to me the other day?"

Colonel Dexter Baldwin had his faults, like other men, but they were not those of indirection.

"I reckon I do know, son," he said, with large tolerance. "You're a 'lame duck' of some sort; you've made that pretty plain in your talks with Williams, haven't you? But that's our lookout. Bartley is ready to swear that you are not a crooked crook, whatever else it is that you're dodging for, and if we want to shut our eyes to the way you won't loosen up about yourself.... Besides, there's yesterday; and what you did down at the railroad crossing and out yonder in the hills——"

"We agreed to forget the yesterday incidents," the lame duck reminded him quickly. And then: "I ought to say 'No,' Colonel Baldwin; say it straight out, and stick to it. If I don't say it—if I ask for a little time—it is because I want to weigh up a few things—the things I can't talk about to you or to Williams. If, in the end, I should be fool enough to say 'Yes,' it will be merely because, the way things have turned out with me, I'd a little rather fight than eat. But even in that case it is only fair to you to say that, right in the middle of the scrap, I may fall to pieces on you."

Baldwin was too shrewd to try to push his advantage when there was, or seemed to be, a chance that the desired end was as good as half attained. And it was a purely manful prompting that made him get up and thrust out his hand to the young fellow who was trying to be as frank as he dared to be.

"Put it there, John," he said heartily. "Nobody in the Timanyoni is going to pry into you an inch farther than you care to let 'em; and if you get into trouble by helping us, you can count on at least one backer who will stand by you until the cows come home. Now then, hunt up your coat, and we'll drive over to Hillcrest for a bite to eat. I know you won't be easy in your mind until you've had it out with Corry's mother—about that little railroad trick—and you may as well do it now and have it over with. No; excuses don't go, this time. I had my orders from the Missus before I left town, and I know better than to go home without you. Never mind the commissary khaki. It won't be the first time that the working-clothes have figured at the Hillcrest table—not by a long shot."

And because he did not know how to frame a refusal that would refuse, Smith got his coat and went.