e job's his," said Welton. "But it won't do him much good,
because it won't last long. We're cleaned up in Minnesota; and have only
an odd two years on some odds and ends we picked up in Wisconsin just to
keep us busy."

"What are you going to do then?" asked Orde, quietly dipping his oars
again.

"I'm going to retire and enjoy life."

Orde laughed quietly.

"Yes, you are!" said he. "You'd have a high old time for a calendar
month. Then you'd get uneasy. You'd build you a big house, which would
keep you mad for six months more. Then you'd degenerate to buying
subscription books, and wheezing around a club and going by the cocktail
route. You'd look sweet retiring, now, wouldn't you?"

Welton grinned back, a trifle ruefully.

"You can no more retire than I can," Orde went on. "And as for enjoying
life, I'll trade jobs with you in a minute, you ungrateful old idiot."

"I know it, Jack," confessed Welton; "but what can I do? I can't pick up
any more timber at any price. I tell you, the game is played out. We're
old mossbacks; and our job is done."

"I have five hundred million feet of sugar pine in California. What do
you say to going in with me to manufacture?"

"The hell you have!" cried Welton, his jaw dropping. "I didn't know
that!"

"Neither does anybody else. I bought it twenty years ago, under a
corporation name. I was the whole corporation. Called myself the
Wolverine Company."

"You own the Wolverine property, do you?"

"Yes; ever hear of it?"

"I know where it is. I've been out there trying to get hold of
something, but you have the heart of it."

"Thought you were going to retire," Orde pointed out.

"The property's all right, but I've some sort of notion the title is
clouded."

"Why?"

"Can't seem to remember; but I must have come against some record
somewhere. Didn't pay extra much attention, because I wasn't interested
in that piece. Something to do with fraudulent homesteading, wasn't it?"

Orde dropped his oars across his lap to fill and light a pipe.

"That title was deliberately clouded by an enemy to prevent my raising
money at the time of the Big Jam, when I was pinched," said he. "Frank
Taylor straightened it out for me. You can see him. As a matter of fact,
most of that land I bought outright from the original homesteaders, and
the rest from a bank. I was very particular. There's one 160 I wouldn't
take on that account."

"Well, that's all right," said Welton, his jolly eyes