It was a deadlock.  Ford bowed and laid his hand on the door.

“You are still the president of the Pacific Southwestern, Mr. Colbrith, and while you remain president—­”

The old man’s pride of office took fire like tow in a furnace.

“What do you mean by that, Mr. Ford?  Make yourself clear, sir!” he quavered.

“I mean just this:  if your niece, Miss Alicia Adair, hadn’t been good enough to say that she will be my wife, I’d carry this thing up to the board of directors and do my level best to have you put where you could do the least harm.”

“You?  Alicia?” the old man shrilled.  And then, in an access of senile rage that shook him like a leaf in the wind:  “I said you were suspended—­you are discharged, sir—­here and now!  If you give another order as an official of the Pacific Southwestern company, I’ll—­I’ll put you through the courts for it!”

Ford opened the door and went out, leaving the president clutching his chair with one hand and balling the other into a shaking fist.  The die was cast, and he had thrown a blank at the very moment when the game seemed to be turning his way.  What would Alicia say?

As if the unspoken query had evoked her, the door of her room opened silently and she stood before him in the corridor.

“Tell me,” she commanded.

“We have fought it out, and I’ve had my beating,” he said soberly.  “When I thought I had him fairly down,—­he was actually begging me to stay on with the company,—­we got tangled up again over North, and he fired me bodily.”

“Did you—­did you tell him about our—­”

“Yes; and that was what set off the final fireworks.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and made him face her squarely.

“Stuart, did you lose your temper?”

“I—­I’m afraid I did—­just at the last, you know.  It’s simply an unspeakable state of affairs, Alicia, dear!  At a moment when we should be setting the whole world afire in a superhuman effort to flog this piece of construction track into shape, your uncle paralyzes everything!”

The constraining touch of her hands became almost a caress.  “What shall you do, Stuart?  Is there nothing to be done?”

He took his resolution on the spur of the moment.

“Yes, thank heaven!  Your uncle has got to find a printing press, or at least a telegraph wire, before he can make my discharge effective.  Before he can do that, or until he does it, I’m going to pull the throttle wide open and race that discharge circular, if I go to jail for it, afterward!  Who knows but I shall have time to save the day for the company after all?  Good-by, dearest.  In twenty minutes I shall be riding for the MacMorroghs’ camp, and when I get there—­”

“You are going to ride back?—­alone?  Oh, no, no!” she protested; and the clinging arms held him.

“Why, Alicia, girl—­see here:  what do you imagine could happen to me?  Why, bless your loving heart, I’ve been tramping and riding this desert more or less for two years!  What has come over you?”