trail was narrow, and Brouillard unconsciously set a pace which was almost inhospitable for a stockily built man whose tendency was toward increasing waist measures. But when they reached the pine-tree of the anchored blue-prints at the upper portal, Mr. Cortwright recovered his breath sufficiently to gasp his appreciation of the prospect and its possibilities.

"Why, good goodness, Mr. Brouillard, it's practically all done for you!" he wheezed, taking in the level, mountain-enclosed valley with an appraisive eye-sweep. "Van Bruce and the chauffeur came up here last night, with one of the car lamps for a lantern, but of course they couldn't bring back any idea of the place. What will you do?—build your dam right here and take out your canal through the canyon? Is that the plan?"

Brouillard nodded and went a little further into details, showing how the inward-arching barrier would be anchored into the two opposing mountain buttresses.

"And the structure itself—how high is it to be?"

"Two hundred feet above the spillway apron foot."

The lard millionaire twisted his short, fat neck and guessed the distance up the precipitous slopes of Chigringo and Jack's Mountain.

"That will be a whale of a chunk of masonry," he said. Then, with business-like directness: "What will you build it of?—concrete?"

"Yes; concrete and steel."

"Then you are going to need Portland cement—a whole world of it. Where will you get it? And how will you get it here?"

Brouillard smiled inwardly at the pork packer's suddenly awakened interest in the technical ways and means. His four years in the desert had taken him out of touch with a money-making world, and this momentary contact with one of its successful devotees was illuminating. He had a growing conviction that the sordid atmosphere which appeared to be as the breath of life to Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright would presently begin to make things taste coppery, but the inextinguishable charm of the veiled princess was a compensation. It was partly for the sake of seeing her with the veil abolished that he recovered the paper-weighting field-glass and gave it to her, showing her how to focus it upon the upper reaches of the valley.

"We are in luck on the cement proposition," he told the eager money-maker. "We shall probably manufacture our own supply right 

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