“I haven’t put my hands on your affairs,” shouted Colonel Dodd, furious at being baited in this amazing manner.  Never before had any visitor dared to raise his voice in that office.  “You’re crazy.”

“You’re right—­we are—­pretty nearly so.  Myself and these two neighbors of mine have tied up every dollar we can rake and scrape to build a water-plant for our little village and give our folks clean water from a lake, not the rotten poison you would pump out of our millstream for us.  We have tried to do this for our town and make an honest dollar for ourselves.  Now you have got us lashed to the mast, financially, so you think, and you propose to step in and gobble our franchise.  That’s enough to make men crazy.”

“Get out of my office!”

“You grabbed the franchise and common stock of Westham that way,” declared Davis.  “You scooped in Durham and Newry and a lot of others.  But I’m here to warn you, Colonel Dodd.  Danburg is going to choke you if you try to swallow it.  We are only countrymen, and we know it.  You have always done all the bossing and threatening in this state up to now.  But I tell you, Colonel Dodd, there comes a time when the rabbit will spit in the bulldog’s eye.  If we three go out of this room in the same spirit in which we came into it something will drop in this state.  We shall have a story to tell.”

Colonel Dodd swung his chair around and faced his desk.

“Gentlemen, let’s not get excited,” he appealed.  Ostensibly he reached for a pencil.  He also pushed a button he had not touched before that day.  Then he came around slowly on the swivel of his chair.  “You have mentioned certain towns, Davis.  Those towns have water systems that are a part of the Consolidated, to be sure.  But the men who promoted those plants and were unable to complete them came to us and begged us to step in and take the burden off their hands.”  While Colonel Dodd talked he kept glancing, but in an extremely unobtrusive manner, at a huge and magnificent Japanese screen that occupied one corner of his office.  “It is easy enough to start ventures in this world, Mr. Davis.  An inexperienced man can do that.  But it most often takes experience and a lot of money to install a successful water plant.”

“We want to get down to cases, Colonel Dodd,” insisted the spokesman.  “We haven’t come here without posting ourselves.  We know how you have talked to the others.  But you can’t bluff us.  You propose to steal our plant, such of it as we have been able to build to date.  One word from you to the money gang takes the hoodoo off us.  Now talk business!  Do you propose to pot us like you have the rest?”

The heart of the big rose in the center of the screen flashed once with a glow that was imperceptible unless one had been gazing at it, watching for a signal.  Colonel Dodd understood that Miss Kate Kilgour had entered through a low door and was behind the screen, ready with note-book and pencil.  He leaned back in his deep chair and interlocked his pudgy fingers across his paunch.