For it is a scrap--the biggest
scrap you ever saw, a fight to the finish, with one man lined up
against--do you have any idea what John Crawford is bucking?"
Conniston shook his head. "I know virtually nothing of this thing,
Garton."
"Well, I'll tell you. Single-handed that man is fighting the desert!
And he'd beat it back, too, and conquer it and muzzle it and make it
eat out of his hand if they'd only let him alone. But they won't, the
cold-blooded highway robbers! He's got them to fight with his left
hand while he hammers away at the face of the desert with his right!
Who are 'they'? 'They' are a syndicate; organized capital. 'They'
spell many millions of dollars ready to be spent to defeat John
Crawford."
He stopped suddenly, frowning and gnawing at his pencil. Conniston was
about to ask a question when Garton went on rapidly, such hot
indignation in his tones that Billy Jordan dropped his hands from the
keys of his machine to listen to what he had heard many a time before.
"You know already how Mr. Crawford built the town which is named after
him? He made that town just as a man takes clay into his hands and
makes a modeled figure out of it. And when the job was done he went to
the Pacific Central & Western and showed them why it would pay them to
build a narrow-gage railroad from Bolton, on the other side of the
ridge, thirty miles through mountainous country.
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