instant return to seriousness: "But you mustn't think of that—of course, you won't—with so many other and greater things to consider."

"On the contrary, I shall think very pointedly of that; pointedly and regretfully—because your brother has made it practically impossible for me to help."

"My brother?" with a little gasp.

"Yes. He offered to buy my vote with a block of 'Little Susan' stock. That wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't talked about it—told other people what he was going to do. But he did that, as well."

He felt rather than saw that she had turned quickly to face the porch post, that she was hiding her face in the crooking of an arm. It melted him at once.

"Don't cry; I was a brute to say such a thing as that to you," he began, but she stopped him.

"No," she denied bravely. "The truth may hurt—it does hurt awfully; but it can't be brutal. And you are right. Stevie has made it impossible."

An awkward little silence supervened and once more Brouillard dragged his watch from its pocket.

"I'm like the awkward country boy," he said with quizzical humor. "I really must go and I don't know how to break away." Then he went back to the closed topic. "I guess the other thing was brutal, too—what I said about your brother's having made it impossible. Other things being equal——"

Again she stopped him.

"When Mr. Ford comes, you must forget what Stevie said and what I have said. Good-by."

An hour later, when the afternoon shadow of Jack's Mountain was lying all across the shut-in valley and pointing like the angle of a huge gnomon to the Quadjenàï Hills, Brouillard was closeted in his log-built office quarters with a big, fair-faced man, whose rough tweeds and unbrushed, soft hat proclaimed him fresh from the dust-dry reaches of the Quesado trail.

"It is your own opinion that I want, Victor," the fair-faced man was saying, "not the government engineer's. Can we make the road pay if we bring it here? That is a question which you can answer better than any other living man. You are here on the ground and you've been here from the first."

"You've had it out with Cortwright?" Brouillard asked. And then: "Where is he now? in Chicago?"

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