en it in partnership with any man whom I felt I
had to watch. But I just thought that I'd better put it all on the
table for you to consider. I'd like to ask you--what do you think?"

The man in blue flannel and corduroy tapped the sodden heel from his
pipe and loaded it afresh.

"Yesterday," he answered, "yesterday--Well I couldn't guarantee just
what I might have thought, twenty-four hours back. But doesn't one
fact remain unchanged still, no matter what we think? Suppose we admit
that some one else does want this stretch of track we're laying?
Suppose somebody is figuring on picking it up cheap, at a bankruptcy
price, if we forfeit to the Reserve Company? You know yourself that
you would never have begun it simply for the profit there will be in
moving the Reserve logs and the millions on millions of feet of lumber
both to the east and west, which can't be touched at anything but a
prohibitive figure, without this road. We were going through to the
border, too. And if some one else is betting that we don't; if some
one else is betting that we can't yank a trainload of logs down to this
end of the line, before the first of May, that doesn't alter our case
any, does it? Even though we suspect that some man is playing us to
lose, do we have to know exactly who he is?"

Slowly but very surely the older man's face began to smooth.

"Once or twice," he stated, "I've thought to anticipate you, perhaps
because I have it on you a little, as they say, in the matter of years.
I'm not going to attempt it any more. For I thought that this
conversation would be at least a surprise to you. You sit there and
take it very quietly, for a man who has been badly startled."

"Fat Joe has been preaching it for a month." Oddly enough, Stephen
O'Mara chose that point at which to laugh, softly. "And I, for a
month, have been ridiculing him. That's one of Fat Joe's pet
diversions, you know. When all other excitement fails Joe invariably
falls back upon an imagination too totally vivid to be wasted on
technical things. I laughed at him, until last night. Do you--but of
course you know Garry Devereau?" he finished.

"Knew his father," Elliott answered succinctly. "Know him well! Good
blood--good brains--big hearts! Why?"

And then, for the second time that day, Steve related the salient
points of that episode which had opened with the trio of owls along the
trail and ended with the first gray streaks of returning day.