that promises to
feed our fury. . . .

"That is where the Independent Workers of the World gets its recruits.
And once its clutches close on us--" He stopped suddenly and clambered
to his feet. "Miss Torrance, you'd better go home. You shouldn't come
here. Go--right away!" His fists were clenched, his under lip gripped
between his teeth.

She had dropped from her seat and was staring at him, alarmed at last.
Over his face, into his very clothes and manner, had passed something
that tumbled her rudely back to the Koppy she knew best, the malignant,
sneering, mesmeric, uncouth underforeman her father and Adrian
suspected. He stooped and lifted his hat jerkily.

"Workers strong," he said in his broken English. "They see big things,
they do them. I, a vice-president--just a Pole, but big man--I order.
Go home!"

Yet he turned his back before she did, and even as she started away she
knew he knew that he could not harm her. She ran as she had never run
before, clutching her work in a grim little fist, not from fear of
Koppy but of the strange thing she had seen.

Within sight of the grade she sank on the forest floor and lay looking
up through tangled pictures, as through the woven ceiling of green
leaves that sprinkled the sky. Then she sat up, smoothed her hair,
wiped from her face every mark of agitation, and sauntered back to the
shack.

"Where have you been?" Conrad called anxiously to her from the doorway.
"We were calling you."

"Just getting away from you cold-blooded schemers," she laughed.
"There's peace in the woods tonight, anyway." And she went past him to
the kitchen to boil the kettle.

CHAPTER XIX

THE BEAT OF A MOUNTED POLICEMAN

Sergeant Mahon was not happy in his new work. After a Police
experience that knew only the ranching district he found the new
conditions, the new crimes and criminals, irritating and a little
bewildering. None of the trailing he loved, of horse and steer; no
ranchers and cowboys and rustling gunmen any longer filled the horizon
of his friendships and duties. He began to fear that a few months of
it would wipe from his mind all he had ever learned. Even his horse
was of little use, for the only path to ride, the three miles to the
trestle, was quite as easy by foot or ballast train.

The limitations of his official horizon were stifling, a mere mile or
two in radius. And within that circle were only a handful he could
call friends, and a camp of