t you could
have done--unless you had kicked old Baumberger into the Snake. He's the
god in this machine. I'd swear to that."

Good Indian had been fiddling with his hat and staring hard at a pile of
old ties just outside the window. He raised his head, and regarded her
steadily. It was beginning to occur to him that there was a good deal to
this Miss Georgie, under that offhand, breezy exterior. He felt himself
drawn to her as a person whom he could trust implicitly.

"You're right as far as I'm concerned," he owned, with his queer,
inscrutable smile. "I think you're also right about him. What makes you
think so, anyway?"

Miss Georgie twirled a ring upon her middle finger for a moment before
she looked up at him.

"Do you know anything about mining laws?" she asked, and when he swung
his head slightly to one side in a tacit negative, she went on: "You say
there are eight jumpers. Concerted action, that. Premeditated. My daddy
was a lawyer," she threw in by way of explanation. "I used to help him
in the office a good deal. When he--died, I didn't know enough to go
on and be a lawyer myself, so I took to this." She waved her hand
impatiently toward the telegraph instrument.

"So it's like this: Eight men can take placer claims--can hold them, you
know--for one man. That's the limit, a hundred and sixty acres. Those
eight men aren't jumping that ranch as eight individuals; they're in the
employ of a principal who is engineering the affair. If I were going to
shy a pebble at the head mogul, I'd sure try hard to hit our corpulent
friend with the fishy eye. And that," she added, "is what all these
cipher messages for Saunders mean, very likely. Baumberger had to have
someone here to spy around for him and perhaps help him choose--or at
least get together--those eight men. They must have come in on the night
train, for I didn't see them. I'll bet they're tough customers, every
mother's son of them! Fighters down to the ground, aren't they?"

"I only saw four. They were heeled, and ready for business, all right,"
he told her. "Soon as I saw what the game was, and that Baumberger was
only playing for time and a free hand, I pulled out. I thought Peppajee
might give me something definite to go on. He couldn't, though."

"Baumberger's going to steal that ranch according to law, you see," Miss
Georgie stated with conviction. "They've got to pan out a sample of gold
to prove there's pay dirt there, before they can file thei