ime to
look into the pedigree of every horse I buy. I'm busy. The Police are
so unreasonable when it comes to law."

"That's why," he went on, after a thoughtful silence, "I'd like to
steer them off the horse question. There's lots else for them to
do. . . . Why didn't I think of Mavy before?"

He went to the edge of the bank and whistled. Ten minutes later Conrad
was with them.

"Koppy got them repairs done yet?"

"Pretty nearly," replied the foreman.

"When the Indian can get away, send him up . . . or maybe we'd better
wait till after hours--if he wouldn't ask overtime."

"You'll never find him after hours; he doesn't sleep in the camp.
Wanders off somewhere in the bush. He has about as much use for white
trash as you have."

"Send him right away then."

CHAPTER X

MAVY TAKES A RISK

Mavy, known on the camp books as Peter Maverick, received the summons
to the boss's shack with his customary silence. For a moment after
Conrad delivered the message he hesitated, then, nodding shortly, he
swung into the trestle and began to clamber up by way of the hundred
and fifty feet of network supports, scorning the path that led up the
bank before the foreman's shack. With a puzzled shake of his head
Conrad watched the strange figure growing smaller.

"A hundred of him," he muttered, "and they could take the whole bunch
of bohunks. If he's a specimen of the wild Indian, Lord only knows
what right we had to clean them out of the land. Mr. Torrance would
say it was because they never build railways."

To the bohunks, mildly staring after the vanishing halfbreed, his
method of reaching the top was merely foolishly exhausting; but several
weeks of acquaintance had taught them to accept his silent
peculiarities with nothing more than casual wonder, though they
disliked him for his unsociability, for the cold contempt that twisted
his lips, and for the stifled volcano that smouldered within his
squinting eyes. They hated him more than ever now, with a hatred that
could be liquidated only in blood. Their own criminal schemes that had
taken the lives of two of their companions they did not consider, but
the man who had exposed the cause of the deaths, and had made them
sweat unrequited hours for exercising the only weapon they knew in
their relentless fight against their bosses, must answer to them for
his temerity and treason. Hereafter the halfbreed was just prey;
sooner or later he would fall before