In the office of The King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company, James Greenfield was aroused by a knock at the door. He lifted his head from his arms and looked around as if awakened out of a deep sleep.

Another knock, and he slipped the picture he held in his hand into his pocket and called, "Come in."

The door opened and Jefferson Worth stepped into the room.

For a moment the president of the wrecked Company sat staring at his business rival, then he leaped to his feet, his fists clenched and his face working with passion. "You can't come in here, sir. Get out!" he said with the voice and manner he would have assumed in speaking to a trespassing dog.

Jefferson Worth stood still. "I have business of importance with you, Mr. Greenfield," he said, and his air of quiet dignity contrasted strangely with the rage of the larger man.

"You can have no business with me of any sort whatever. I have nothing to do with your kind. This is my private office. I tell you to get out."

Jefferson Worth turned calmly as though to obey, but instead of leaving the room closed the door and locked it. Then, placing the small grip he carried upon the table, he deliberately went close to the threatening president and said coldly: "This is rank nonsense, Greenfield. I won't leave this office until I'm through with what I came to do. I have business with you that concerns you as much as it does me."

"You're a damned thief, a low sharper! I tell you I have nothing to do with you. Now get out or I'll throw you out!"

Jefferson Worth answered in his exact, precise manner, as though carefully choosing and considering his words: "No, you won't throw me out. You'll listen to what I have come to tell you. The rest of your statement, Greenfield, is false and you know it. It will be just as well for you not to repeat it." The last low-spoken words did not appear to be uttered as a threat but as a calm statement of a carefully considered fact. James Greenfield felt as a man who permits himself to rage against an immovable obstacle--as one who spends his strength cursing a stone wall that bars his way or a rock that lies in his path. With an effort he regained a measure of his self-control.

"Well, out with it. What do you want?"

"Sit down," said Worth, pointing to a chair. Mechanically the other obeyed. "You have no reason for taking this attitude toward me, Mr. Greenfield," began Worth with his air of simply stating a fact.

At his words the wrath of the other again mastered him. "No reason! You--you dare to tell me that? When you and the young woman that you call your daughter have come between me and the boy who is more than a son to me! When you have broken our close relationship of years' standing and robbed me of his companionship! When you have wrecked and ruined all my plans for his future! When you have defeated the object of my life! No reason? But what can you understand of us? You're a nobody, sir, without a place or a name in the world; a common, low-bred, ignorant sharper with no family but a nameless daughter of unknown parentage whom you found on the desert. How can you understand what Willard Holmes is to me?"

"I figured that you would feel this way about it," came the colorless words. "That's what I came here for to-night--to fix it up."

The angry amazement of Greenfield at what he considered the man's presumption could find no expression.

Worth continued: "I know a great deal more about you and your folks than you think. When I saw that my"--he hesitated over the word, then spoke it plainly--"my daughter was becoming interested in Willard Holmes, I took some pains to look up his history. In doing that I naturally found out a good deal about you. Later I learned a good deal more."

"It is immaterial to me what you know," muttered the other in a tone of deep disgust. "What do you want?"

Worth spoke with quiet dignity. "I want you to understand first, Mr. Greenfield, that my girl is just as much to me as young Holmes is to you. You are right; I am a nobody, ignorant and all that, but you must not think Mr. Greenfield that because you belong in New York and I belong in the West that this thing is harder for you than it is for me. You are not going to lose your boy but I"--for the first time ............