Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/297

Rh to the community. Without them it was still worth going into, but could not promise such rich pickings.

Boyd had long since little by little gathered the details of his project and worked them out on paper. His consulting engineers had ridden with him over all the ground. His preliminary surveys, even, had been made fairly under the noses of the Arguellans. If any of them saw the surveyors, it never occurred to them to be curious as to what it was all about. People were always running about with transits. His tables of costs were very complete, all things considered.

At the proper time a thin, gray-faced, tight-lipped silent man came to visit at the Boyd household. Nobody knew who he was, nor took more than a passing interest in him; for his personality was unobtrusive, he rarely opened his head, and he never stirred abroad except on horseback accompanied by his host. They knew him as Mr. Brown. Even Kenneth, retaining still his sleeping quarters in the house, knew—and cared—no more. But if the stranger's incognito had been guessed, what a furore there had been! For this was that mysterious, little known, powerful operator William Bates, who had never had his picture in the papers; had rarely appeared in person, and yet whose manipulations practically governed the stock market; whose constructive operations extended over two continents; whose wealth was uncounted, and whose power no man had ever been known fully to test. A lean, gray wolf-leader of the pack with which Boyd had formerly hunted.

A furore? If his presence had been guessed in Arguello the old dry bones of the defunct boom would have rattled and risen and clothed themselves with Me. For William Bates did not cast for small fry: he used whales for bait. If he considered it worth the trouble personally to make a long journey for the purpose of looking at a proposition, it would be because he considered the proposition had millions in it. Part of which was true. Bates, as a matter of fact, had come only from Pasadena; but he would not even have gone downtown for a small deal.

"Your proposition is feasible," he told Boyd in the den one evening, breaking his silence with the first business comment he