fight for a contract, and then lose it because a saw
has broken, or an off-bearer, lugging slabs away from the big wheel,
can allow one to strike at just the wrong moment and let the saw pick
it up and drive it through the boiler, laying up the whole plant for
three weeks. I want to know why it is that only about one out of three
contracts I land are ever filled. Thayer's got something to do with
it, I know. Why? That's another question. But there must be others.
I want to know who they are and weed them out. I've only got three and
a half years left, and things are going backward instead of forward."

"How you intend to fin' this out?"

"I don't know. I've got one lead--as soon as I'm able to get into
town. That may give me a good deal of information; I came out here, at
least, in the hope that it would. After that, I'm hazy. How big a
telegraph office is there at Tabernacle?"

"How big?" Ba'tiste laughed. "How _petite_! Eet is about the size of
the--what-you-say--the peanut."

"Is there ever a time when the operator isn't there?"

"At noon. He go out to dinner, and he leave open the door. If eet is
something you want, walk in."

"Thanks." A strange eagerness was in Houston's eyes. "I think I'll be
able to get up to-morrow. Maybe I can walk over there; it's only a
mile or two, isn't it?"

But when to-morrow, came, it found a white, bandaged figure sitting
weakly in front of Ba'tiste's cabin, nothing more. Strength of purpose
and strength of being had proved two different things, and now he was
quite content to rest there in the May sunshine, to watch the
chattering magpies as they went about the work of spring
house-building, to study the colors of the hills, the mergings of the
tintings and deeper hues as the scale ran from brown to green to blue,
and finally to the stark red granite and snow whites of Mount Taluchen.

Ba'tiste and his constant companion, Golemar, were making the round of
the traps and had been gone for hours. Barry was alone--alone with the
beauties of spring in the hills, with the soft call of the meadow lark
in the bit of greenery which fringed the still purling stream in the
little valley, the song of the breeze through the pines, the sunshine,
the warmth--and his problems.

Of these, there were plenty. In the first place, how had Thayer known
that he was on the way from the East? He had spoken to only two
persons,--Jenkins, his bookkeeper, and one other. To these