But Archie paid no attention. He strode furiously up to the shack, and even before he reached it he called out,—
"Here, you there! What business have you got building your dirty little roost on my land without permission?"
The mason merely smiled at the angry man in reply. Adelle, who had run up to her husband, tried to pull him back, with a hand on his arm.
"It isn't our land," she said disgustedly. Her foolish husband did not even know the boundaries of their own property, which stopped at the edge of the eucalyptus grove on the top of the hill.
"Well, I won't have him tracking up the place with his paths," Archie said weakly. "He was prowling around the house last night. I saw him."
The mason again smiled at him, as if he scorned to answer back a man who was so evidently "in his booze," as he would put it, and trying to pick a quarrel.
"Anyway you are discharged," he said, in a lordly attempt to get back his dignity. "See Mr. Ferguson in the morning and get your money and—get out!"
"I will not," the mason replied imperturbably.
"What do you say?"
Clark grinned at Adelle and replied with an intentional drawl,—