The Winning of Barbara Worth

by Harold Bell Wright

That evening Jefferson Worth and his daughter sat alone under the arrow weed ramada facing the river. Moving her camp chair closer in the dusk—so close that, reaching out she laid her warm young hand on the hand of her father—Barbara said in a low tone: "Daddy, I wish you would tell me all about this South Central District business."

She felt the slim nervous fingers move uneasily. Never before had Barbara asked him to explain any of his transactions. The man's habit of retiring behind that gray mask whenever the subject of his business was mentioned, together with the girl's instinctive shrinking lest his answers to such a question should drive them farther apart, prevented. But to-night, perhaps because Willard Holmes was concerned, perhaps because of her peculiar interest in the work involved, Barbara forced herself to ask.

"What do you want to know?"

At his expressionless tone it was to Barbara as though she felt the chill of his cold mask coming between them, but she persisted and in her voice was passionate earnestness. "I want to know all about it, father; I must."

"Why?"

"Because"—she hesitated. "Because I understood from the conversation to-day about the surveys that someone had made a mistake. I—I don't want to make a mistake, daddy. Won't you please explain it all to me? What was it that you let Mr. Greenfield and Mr. Burk think?"

Perhaps because of the memories of the place, or because it was the first time Barbara had ever sought an explanation, or again perhaps it was because Willard Holmes was interested, Jefferson Worth answered: "I let them think I was a fool."

"But why was Mr. Holmes so excited to-day when he found out about those stakes?"

"He discovered that I was not such a fool as they thought."

Then Jefferson Worth explained to the girl the whole situation. He made clear Greenfield's reason for offering him the water rights; why he would have taken the stock without investigation but for the hint he received from the Company engineer's manner and the way Holmes had answered that simple question about the soil; how he had made the survey secretly, because Greenfield would have refused to close the deal if he had known that Worth wanted it after he had it investigated, and because if Greenfield believed the district stock to be valueless he would sell at a very low figure rather than not sell at all; and how it was that same low figure that enabled him to give the men who were working on the canal a chance to acquire farms of their own.