y-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he
was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar--which should
have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had
been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.

Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the
Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The
through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled,
and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing
acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the
second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a
well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired
reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman
who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment--a man
whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were
singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with
his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.

At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be,
with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a
newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The
hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was
directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose
property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved
in litigation.

It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond
the boundaries of the commonplaces. Oddly enough, considering the fact
that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion
to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law.
Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself
thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had
apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.

Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the
wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching
another matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making
investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies
operating "in the mountains"--bad investments, he feared, since the
Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of
timber in the mou