ing the longest kind of a chance--"

"Ah, _oui_! But the man who is drowning, he will, what-you-say, grab
at a haystack."

"True enough. Go ahead. I'll mark our figures down too, as you read."

And together they settled to the making of a bid that ran into the
millions, an overture for a contract for which they had neither mill,
nor timber, nor flume, nor resources to complete!

CHAPTER XV

Time dragged after that. Once the bid was on its way to Chicago, there
was nothing to do but wait. It was a delay which lengthened from June
until July, thence into late summer and early autumn, while the hills
turned brown with the colorings of the aspens, while Mount Taluchen and
its surrounding mountains once more became grim and forbidding with the
early fall of snow.

The time for the opening of the bids had passed, far in the distance, but
there had come no word. Ba'tiste, long since taken into as much of a
partnership agreement as was possible, went day after day to the post
office, only to return empty-handed, while Houston watched with more
intensity than ever the commercial columns of the lumber journals in the
fear that the contract, after all, had gone somewhere else. But no
notice appeared. Nothing but blankness as concerned the plans of the
Mountain Plains and Salt Lake Railroad.

Medaine he saw but seldom,--then only to avoid her as she strove to avoid
him. Houston's work was now in the hills and at the camp, doing exactly
what the Blackburn mill was doing, storing up a reasonable supply of
timber and sawing at what might or might not be the first consignment of
ties for the fulfillment of the contract. But day after day he realized
that he was all but beaten.

His arm had healed now and returned to the strength that had existed
before the fracture. Far greater in strength, in fact, for Houston had
taken his place in the woods side by side with the few lumberjacks whom
he could afford to carry on his pay roll. There, at least, he had right
of way. He had sold only stumpage, which meant that the Blackburn camp
had the right to take out as much timber as it cared to, as long as it
was paid for at the insignificant rate of one dollar and fifty cents a
thousand feet. Thayer and the men in his employ could not keep him out
of his own woods, or prevent him from cutting his own timber. But they
could prevent him from getting it to the mill by an inexpensive process.

From dawn until dusk he labo