"Look here," said Farwell. "Will you talk it over with your family—your wife and daughter particularly? It's due to them."
"I will not," McCrae refused, with patriarchal scorn. "I am the family. I speak for all."
"The old mule!" thought Farwell. Aloud he said: "I want to tell you that in a few days you'll lose half your water. The rest will go when the dam is finished. This is final—the last offer, your last chance. I've done every blessed thing I could for you. Right now is when you make or break yourself and your wife and children."
"That's my affair," said McCrae. "I tell you no, and no." He plucked the oblong paper from Farwell's unresisting fingers. "A lot of money, aren't you?" he apostrophized it. "More than I've ever seen before, or will see again, like enough." Suddenly he tore the check in half, and again and again, cast the fragments in the air, and blew through them. "And there goes your check, Mr. Farwell!"
"And there goes your ranch with it," Farwell commented bitterly. "One is worth just about as much as the other now."
"I'm not so sure about that," said McCrae.
"I'm sure enough for both of us," Farwell responded.
With a perfunctory good-bye, he swung into the saddle, leaving McCrae, a sombre figure, leaning against the slip bars of the corral. He had anticipated this outcome; but, nevertheless, he was disappointed, vaguely apprehensive. In vain he told himself that it was nothing to him. The sense of failure persisted. Once he half turned in his saddle, looking backward, and he caught, or fancied he caught, the flutter of white against the shade of the veranda of the distant ranch house. That must be Sheila McCrae.
For the first time he realized that his concern was for her alone, that he did not care a hoot for the rest of the family. All this bother he had been to, all his efforts with old McCrae, his practical holdup of Carrol, even—he owned it to himself frankly—his failure to push the construction work as fast as he might had been for her and because of her. And what was the answer?
"Surely," said Farwell, straightening himself in the saddle, "surely to blazes I'm not getting fond of the girl!"