side of the hill and at right angles to the
mouth. Across the ravine from the cave stood a small log building
which Messrs. Rosenblatt and Sprink had used as an office during
the month of their regime. Further down the ravine were scattered
the workmen's cabins, now deserted.

In the preparing of plans for this last meeting Rosenblatt and
Sprink spent long hours that day. Indeed, it was late in the
afternoon when their conference broke up.

An hour later found Malkarski, pale and breathless, at the door of
Portnoff's cabin, unable to recover his speech till Portnoff had
primed him with a mug of Sprink's best whiskey.

"What is it, my brother?" cried Portnoff, alarmed at his condition.
"What is it?"

"A plot!" gasped Malkarski, "a most damnable plot! Give me another drink."

Under the stimulus of the potent liquid, Malkarski was able in a
few minutes between his gasps to tell his story. Concealed by a
lumber pile behind Rosenblatt's shack, with his ear close to a crack
between the logs, he had heard the details of the plot. In the cross
tunnel at the back of the cave bags of gunpowder and dynamite were
to be hidden. To this mass a train was to be laid through the cross
tunnel to a convenient distance. At a certain point during the
conference Rosenblatt would leave the cave on the pretext of
securing a paper left in his cabin. A pile of brushwood at some
distance from the cave would be burning. On his way to his cabin
Rosenblatt would fire the train and wait the explosion in his own
shack, the accidental nature of which could easily be explained
under the circumstances. In order to remove suspicion from him,
Rosenblatt was to appear during the early evening in a railway camp
some distance away. The plot was so conceived and the details so
arranged that no suspicion could attach to the guilty parties.

"And now," said Malkarski, "rush to Wakota, where I know Mr. French
and Kalman are to be to-day. I shall go back to the mine to warn them
if by any chance you should miss them."

Old Portnoff was long past his best. Not for many years had he
quickened his pace beyond a slow dog trot. The air was heavy with
an impending storm, the blazed trail through the woods was rough,
and at times difficult to find, so that it was late in the evening
when the old man stumbled into the missionary's house and poured
out his tale between his sobbing gasps to Brown and a Sergeant of
the Mounted Police, who was present on the Queen's