that I used to be intimate with your family. Well, it is a poor errand
and will have a poor end. You can't--no one on earth can, while I sit in
this chair, not even my proprietors."

There was silence broken at last by Alan, who remarked awkwardly:

"If that is so, I must not take up your time any longer."

"I said that I would give you a quarter of an hour, and you have only
been here four minutes. Now, Alan Vernon, tell me as your father's old
friend, why you have gone to herd with these gilded swine?"

There was something so earnest about the man's question that it did not
even occur to his visitor to resent its roughness.

"Of course it is not original," he answered, "but I had this idea about
flooding the Desert; I spent a furlough up there a few years ago and
employed my time in making some rough surveys. Then I was obliged to
leave the Service and went down to Yarleys after my father's death--it's
mine now, you know, but worth nothing except a shooting rent, which just
pays for the repairs. There I met Champers-Haswell, who lives near
and is a kind of distant cousin of mine--my mother was a Champers--and
happened to mention the thing to him. He took it up at once and
introduced me to Aylward, and the end of it was, that they offered me a
partnership with a small share in the business, because they said I was
just the man they wanted."

"Just the man they wanted," repeated the editor after him. "Yes, the
last of the Vernons, an engineer with an old name in his county, a
clean record and plenty of ability. Yes, you would be just the man they