He stopped suddenly, frowning and gnawing at his pencil.  Conniston was about to ask a question when Garton went on rapidly, such hot indignation in his tones that Billy Jordan dropped his hands from the keys of his machine to listen to what he had heard many a time before.

“You know already how Mr. Crawford built the town which is named after him?  He made that town just as a man takes clay into his hands and makes a modeled figure out of it.  And when the job was done he went to the Pacific Central & Western and showed them why it would pay them to build a narrow-gage railroad from Bolton, on the other side of the ridge, thirty miles through mountainous country.  He had that planned out long before the first shack was put up in Crawfordsville.  And he knew what he was doing.  The P. C. & W. built the road and have run an accommodation train back and forth daily ever since.  And they have made money at it hauling freight, merchandise from the main line, building-material, farming implements—­everything which had to go into Crawfordsville; hauling farm produce from the new settlement back into Bolton.

“Because he had shown the P. C. & W. that the thing could be done on a paying basis, because it was done and did pay, the P. C. & W. listened to him when he made a second proposition to them.  He went straight to Colton Gray, and Colton Gray listened to him.  What Gray advises, the P. C. & W. does.  In the end, after many interviews and much investigation and discussion, Crawford made Gray see the matter the way he saw it.  The P. C. &.  W. contracted to begin work on a line from Crawfordsville to Valley City and on across the desert to the main transcontinental railroad at Indian Creek the day that sufficient water to irrigate fifty square miles of land had been brought into this part of the ‘valley.’  It was agreed by both contracting parties that the water was to be brought to this spot by noon of October first, or all contracts became null and void.

“The day that Gray agreed for the P. C. & W. Mr. Crawford put men to work on the first preliminary survey.  He had already the necessary water concessions.  He had studied his ground, made his plans with a carefulness which overlooked nothing which a man could foresee, and had every reason to believe, to be positive, that he could have all the water he wanted in the valley a whole month before the first of October.

“And I tell you he could have done it if they had just let him alone!  But they wouldn’t.  Within thirty days after the first shovelful of earth was turned there was a strong organization perfected to defeat him.  Why?  In the first place there is a certain bloated toad in our local puddle named Oliver Swinnerton who has his hatchet out on general principles for the Old Man.  In the town of Bolton he’s the mayor and the chief of police and the board of city fathers and the municipal janitor all rolled into one pompous, pot-bellied little body.