The tyrant of “timber-jacks” frowned again.  “H’m—­reason, eh?  How big a block of Twin Buttes stock shall I offer him?”

Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.

“You always figure in dollars and cents, don’t you, Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway?” she mocked.

“I have always found it the cheapest in the end.”

“Listen,” she said, with the folded fan held up like a monitory finger.  “Mr. Gantry may be back any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest hint.  You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal to him frankly, as one business man to another.”

“But I have heard—­they say he’s all kinds of a crank.”

“Never mind what you have heard.  Tell him all the facts and ask him to help you, and for mercy’s sake don’t offer him a block of your stock.  Put it where it will do the most good.  Put it in the name of Professor William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and show Mr. Blount how dreadfully disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate would be to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders—­including Professor Anners.”

Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil memorandum of the name and address of the new beneficiary.

“You’ll notice that I’m not asking any foolish questions about who this Professor Anners is, or why I should be making him a present of a block of stock.  If I don’t, it’s because what you say goes as it lies.  Anything else?”

“Yes; don’t fail to be perfectly frank with Mr. Blount, and don’t let him put you off.  He may pretend to be very angry at first, but you won’t mind that.”

“I won’t mind anything if I can bring this business down to the every-day commonplace earth once more.  You and the senator and Gantry and McVickar are playing some sort of a game, and you ain’t showing me anything more than the back of the cards.  That’s all right.  I guess I’m fly enough to play my hand blindfolded, if I’ve got to.  I don’t care, just so I win the odd trick.”

Gantry was coming down the avenue of banana-trees with the ice he had taken so much time to procure, and the lumber magnate rose reluctantly.  There was time for only one more question, and he put it hastily.

“When and where can I find Evan Blount?” he asked.

“The day after to-morrow, at his office in Temple Court.  He is out of the city now, but—­” Here Gantry’s coming put an end to the private conference, and the president of the Twin Buttes company went his way.

Not until they had served out their full sentence at Mrs. Weatherford’s crush, and were back in the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain, with Miss Anners safely behind the closed door of her own apartment, did the small conspirator pass the word of good hope on to her husband.

“It is working beautifully,” she exulted.  “He will go to see Evan day after to-morrow—­and after that, the deluge.”

XI