He saw now that his enemies were more powerful than ever.

And for a moment he almost wished that he had yielded down there in Denver, that he had not given the ultimatum to the greasy Barnham, that he had accepted the offer made him,--and gone on, out of the fight forever.
Anita! What would it mean to her?
Already engaged, already having given her answer to Maurice Rodaine, this now would be an added incentive for her to follow her promise.

It would mean a possibility of further argument with her father, already too weak from illness to find the means of evading the insidious pleas of the two men who had taken his money and made him virtually their slave.

Could they not demonstrate to him now that they always had worked for his best interests?
And could not that plea go even farther--to Anita herself--to persuade her that they were always laboring for her, that they had striven for this thing that it might mean happiness for her and for her father?
And then, could they not content themselves with promises, holding before her a rainbow of the far-away, to lead her into their power, just as they had led the stricken, bedridden man she called "father"?
The future looked black for Robert Fairchild.

Slowly he walked past the happy, shouting crowd and turned up Kentucky Gulch toward the ill-fated Blue Poppy.
The tunnel opening looked more forlorn than ever when he sighted it, a bleak, staring, single eye which seemed to brood over its own misfortunes, a dead, hopeless thing which never had brought anything but disappointment.