Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/312

 Certainly he had made a raise somewhere!

"We will hear your criticisms,"replied Mr. Butefish, with the restraint of offended dignity.

" In the first place, everybody knows that the soil in this country sours and alkalies when water stands on it." Toomey spoke as a man who had wide experience. He looked at "Doc" Fussel, who shrivelled with the chagrin that filled him, when Toomey added, " That settles the peppermint bog, doesn't it?

" Take the next proposition: What's the use of carlines that begin nowhere and end nowhere? A cripple could walk from one end of the town to the other in seven minutes. You couldn't raise enough outside capital to buy the spikes for it.

"Take fossils — a school boy would know that the demand for fossils is limited, and who is sure that the bed is inexhaustible until it's tested. When the govern- ment is taking nitrates out of the air in Prouty to make ammunition, you and I will be under the daisies, Gov- ernor."

If looks could kill, Toomey would have died standing. But he continued emphatically:

" The salvation of Prouty is water. By water I mean the completion of the irrigation project Gentlemen I am here to state unreservedly that I can put that enterprise through, providing the stockholders will give mc an option upon fifty-one per cent, of the stock. I must have the controlling interest."

Could he have an option? Could he! Only the restraining hand of a neighbor upon his coat tail prevented Walt Scales from hurdling the intervening chairs to reach Toomey to thrust his shares upon him. Hope and skepticism of the genuineness of his assertions commingled in the faces upon which Toomey looked, while he waited