n. Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish,
that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it. So Murphy
fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly
be spent upon a few days' spree without endangering the grubstake he
planned to take into the farther mountains in the spring. Murphy had
been sober now for a couple of months, and he was beginning to thirst
for the liquid joys of Quincy. Presently he nodded his head slowly,
having come to a definite conclusion in his argument with himself.

"I think I'll be goin' t' town in the marnin', Mike, av I kin git a
little money from the boss," he said, lookin' up. "It's comin' cold,
an' more shnow, I'm thinkin', an' I must have shoepacs, I dunno. So
we'll be up early in the marnin', an' it's a hefty two-hours walk t'
town fer anny man--more now with the shnow. An' I be thinkin'--"

What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask. He seemed
not to hear Murphy's declaration at all. Now that he had the beans
soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again. He did not care
what Murphy did. Murphy, in Mike's estimation, was merely a conceited
old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue. Let Murphy go
to town if he liked. Mike had plans of his own.

The old un, for instance, stirred Mike's curiosity a good deal. Why
should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping around
in the woods? They lived in the same cabin, and it seemed to Mike that
she must know all about what the girl was doing and why she was doing
it. And why didn't the men go tramping around like that, since they
were all in together? Mike decided that the two women must be spies,
and the men didn't know anything about it. Probably they were spying
on the men, to get them in trouble with the government--which to Mike
was a vast, formless power only a little less than the Almighty. It
might be that the women were spies for some other government, and
meant to have the men hanged when the time was ripe for it; in other
words, when these queer mines with no gold in them were all done.

But a spy spying on a spy smacked of complications too deep for Mike,
with all his knuckle-cracking. He was lost in a maze of conflicting
conjectures whenever he tried to figure the thing out. And who was the
other spy that stayed up on Taylor Rock? There was smoke up there
where should be no smoke. Mike had seen it. There were little flashes
of light u