care for this job. I'm done."

"What's the idea?" There was a little sneer in Jenkins' tone. "Decided you would go back to the old job selling pots and pans?"

"No," and Bob's brown eyes, almost black now, looked straight into Reedy's flushed, insolent face, "I'm going across the line to raise cotton."

Reedy's wide mouth opened in a contemptuous sneer.

"It's rather hot over there for rabbits."

"Yes," Bob's lips closed warningly, "and it may become oppressive for wolves."

Their eyes met defiantly for a moment, and each knew the other understood—and it meant a fight.

CHAPTER V

Bob had never known a resolution before. He thought he had, but he knew now that all the rest compared to what he felt as he left Reedy Jenkins' office were as dead cornstalks to iron rods.

One night nearly nine years ago, when returning through the hills with his fiddle under his arm, he had stopped at the door of his cabin and looked up at the stars. The boisterous fun of an hour ago had all faded out, leaving him dissatisfied and lonesome. He was shabbily dressed, not a dollar in his pocket—not a thing in the world his own but that fiddle—and he knew he was no genius with that. He was not getting on in the world; he was not making anything of himself. It was then that the first big resolution came to him: He would quit this fooling and go to work; he would win in this game of life. Since then in the main he had stuck to that resolution. He had not knowingly passed any opportunity by; certainly he had dodged nothing because it was hard. He had won a little here, and lost there, always hoping, always tackling the new job with new pluck. Yet these efforts had been simple; somebody had offered him a job and he tried to make good at it—and usually had. But to win now, and win big as he was determined to do, he must have a job of his own; and he would have to create that job, organize it, equip it.

"What I'll make it with—or just how—I don't know. But by all the gods of the desert I'm going to win right here—in spite of the thermometer, the devil, and Reedy Jenkins."

To raise cotton one must have a lease, tools, teams, provisions—all of which costs money; and he had just $167.35. But if that girl and her Sanskrit father could get in a cotton crop, he could. It was not too late. Cotton might be planted in the Imperial Valley even up to the last of May. He would get a field already prepared if he could; if not, then he would prepare it.

And a man with a good lease and a good reputation could usually borrow some money on which to raise a crop. Bob's mind again came back to the Red Butte Ranch. It was so big that it almost swamped his imagination, but if he was going to do big things he must think big. If he could possibly sublease that ranch from Benson. But it would take $100,000 to finance a five-thousand-acre cotton crop. Then he thought of Jim Crill, the old man of the Texas oil fields who was looking for investments.

It was daring enough to seem almost fantastic, but Bob quickened his step and turned toward the depot. He could yet catch the morning train for Los Angeles.

But he passed Benson on the way. The same morning Bob called at the Los Angeles office Benson went to Reedy Jenkins in Calexico.

The Red Butte lease had three years to run. Benson began by offering the lease and all the equipment for $40,000. He had spent more than $90,000 on it.

Reedy pushed back the long black lock of hair from his forehead, shook his head lugubriously, and grew pessimistically oratorical. Things were very unsettled over the line: there was talk of increased Mexican duty on cotton, of a raise in water rates; the price of cotton was down; ranchers were coming out instead of going in; no sale at all for leases. He himself had not had an offer for a lease in two months.

They dickered for an hour. Reedy watching with a gloating shrewdness the impractical fellow who had tried to farm with money. He knew Benson had lost money on the last crop, and besides had been thoroughly scared by the sly Madrigal.

"I'm tired of the whole thing." Benson spoke with annoyed vexation. "I tell you what I'll do: I'll walk off the ranch and leave you the whole damn thing for $20,000."

"I'll take it." Reedy knew when the limit was reached. "I'll pay you $2,000 now to bind the bargain; and the balance within ten days."

As Benson left the office with the check, Reedy began figuring feverishly. It was the biggest thing he had ever pulled off. The lease, even with cotton selling for only eight cents, was worth certainly $50,000, the equipment at least $10,000 more. And the five thousand acres was already planted and coming up! In the Imperial Valley the planting is by far the most expensive part of the cotton crop up to picking. It costs from seven to ten dollars an acre to get it planted; after that it is easy. There are so few weeds and so little grass that one man, with a little extra help once or twice during the summer, can tend from forty to eighty acres.

It was such an astounding bargain that Reedy's pink face grew a little pale, and he moistened his lips as he figured. He was trying to reassure himself that it would be dead easy to borrow the other $18,000. He did not have it. In truth, he had only two hundred left in the bank. He thought of Tom Barton and two of the banks from whom he had already borrowed. They did not seem promising. Then he thought of Jim Crill, and the pinkness came slowly back to his face. He smiled doggishly as he picked up the phone, called El Centro, and asked for Mrs. Evelyn Barnett.

Mrs. Evelyn Barnett sat on the porch shaded by a wistaria vine, her feet discreetly side by side on the floor, her hands primly folded in her lap; her head righteously erect, as one who could wear her widow's weeds without reproach, having been faithful to the very last ruffle of her handsome dress to the memory of her deceased.

She had insisted on taking Uncle Crill from the hotel, which was ruining his digestion, and making a home for him. She had leased an apartment bungalow, opening on a court, and with the aid of three servants had, at great personal sacrifice, managed to give Uncle Crill a "real home." True, Uncle was not in it very much, but it was there for him to come back to.

"Uncle," she had said, piously, showing him the homelike wonders that three servants had been able to achieve in the six rooms, "in the crudities of this horrid, uncouth country, we must keep up the refinements to which we were accustomed in the East." The old gentleman had grunted, remembering what sort of refinements they had been accustomed to, but made no outward protests at being thus frillily domesticated after ten years in the Texas oil fields.

And as Mrs. Barnett sat on the porch this morning, fully and carefully dressed, awaiting the result of that telephone message from Calexico, she watched with rank disapproval her neighbours to the right and left. It was quite hot already and Mrs. Borden on the right had come out on the porch, dressed with amazing looseness of wrapper, showing a very liberal opening at the throat, and stood fanning herself with a newspaper. Mrs. Cramer on the left, having finished her sweeping, had come out on the porch also, and in garments that indicated no padding whatever dropped into a rocking chair, crossed her legs, made a dab at her loosely piled hair to see it did not topple down, and proceeded to read the morning newspaper. It was positively shocking, thought Mrs. Barnett, how women could so far forget themselves. She never did.

Directly her primly erect head turned slightly, and her eyes which always seemed looking for something substantial—no dream stuff for her—widened with satisfaction and she put her hand up to her collar to see if the breastpin was in place.

It was Reedy Jenkins who got out of the machine which stopped at the entrance. He took off his hat when halfway to the porch—his