Barker smiled.  “But I have.  Got it this afternoon.”

“Then you know?” ejaculated Stacy in surprise.

“I only know,” said Barker, coloring, “that you said I could back out of it if it wasn’t signed, and that’s what Kitty said, too.  And I thought it looked awfully mean for me to hold a man to that kind of a bargain.  And so—­you won’t be mad, old fellow, will you?—­I thought I’d put it beyond any question of my own good faith by having it in black and white.”  He stopped, laughing and blushing, but still earnest and sincere.  “You don’t think me a fool, do you?” he said pathetically.

Stacy smiled grimly.  “I think, Barker boy, that if you go to the Branch you’ll have no difficulty in paying for the Ditch property.  Good-night.”

In a few moments he was back at the club again before any one knew he had even left the building.  As he again re-entered the smoking-room he found the members still in eager discussion about the new railroad.  One was saying, “If they could get an extension, and carry the road through Heavy Tree Hill to Boomville they’d be all right.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Stacy.

CHAPTER III.

The swaying, creaking, Boomville coach had at last reached the level ridge, and sank forward upon its springs with a sigh of relief and the slow precipitation of the red dust which had hung in clouds around it.  The whole coach, inside and out, was covered with this impalpable powder; it had poured into the windows that gaped widely in the insufferable heat; it lay thick upon the novel read by the passenger who had for the third or fourth time during the ascent made a gutter of the half-opened book and blown the dust away in a single puff, like the smoke from a pistol.  It lay in folds and creases over the yellow silk duster of the handsome woman on the back seat, and when she endeavored to shake it off enveloped her in a reddish nimbus.  It grimed the handkerchiefs of others, and left sanguinary streaks on their mopped foreheads.  But as the coach had slowly climbed the summit the sun was also sinking behind the Black Spur Range, and with its ultimate disappearance a delicious coolness spread itself like a wave across the ridge.  The passengers drew a long breath, the reader closed his book, the lady lifted the edge of her veil and delicately wiped her forehead, over which a few damp tendrils of hair were clinging.  Even a distinguished-looking man who had sat as impenetrable and remote as a statue in one of the front seats moved and turned his abstracted face to the window.  His deeply tanned cheek and clearly cut features harmonized with the red dust that lay in the curves of his brown linen dust-cloak, and completed his resemblance to a bronze figure.  Yet it was Demorest, changed only in coloring.  Now, as five years ago, his abstraction had a certain quality which the most familiar stranger shrank from disturbing.  But in the general relaxation of relief the novel-reader addressed him.