the woods, freed from observation, the bohunk was
more apt to discard his mask of stupidity. Somewhere there his plans
were laid, orders given and received.

What the Sergeant picked up little by little in the woods, small as it
was and unsatisfying to his youthful impatience, sufficed to sustain
his hopes. The constant meeting after work-hours with slinking bohunks
who always avoided him, convinced him that something within the law was
afoot, and repeated glimpses of distant groups which dribbled away when
he came within sight induced him to alter his methods. More covertly
he hunted, though it tried him sorely, and snatches of conversation
untangled from the froth of their utterances did much to simplify his
task and give more definition to his search.

Somehow his mind never quite freed itself of the haunting memory of his
discoveries that early day down the slope of the river bank. Though
the tracks were dim, he was satisfied that horses had passed that way
at no distant date. Suspicious at first, doubtful as the marks
advanced toward the river (largely on account of certain past memories
roused by peculiarities he seemed to recognise), he had later decided
that what he saw was no figment of an imagination rendered more lively
by the revival of the story of Blue Pete. Certainty was added by the
suspicion that efforts had been made by a master-hand to hide the
tracks.

Where that led he could not even guess, though at that stage his mind
kept reverting to the Indian.

The mysterious arrivals and disappearances of the redskin as Torrance
saw them was interesting enough, but they were as nothing to Mahon
compared with his own failure to meet the Indian face to face. That
was epitomised in the incident of the voice from the darkness over the
trestle the night he rushed to Torrance's assistance. There was little
to connect Torrance's inexplicable Indian friend with the Indian bohunk
who had dived that first day over the cliff to almost certain death,
but Mahon had been living among inferences and deductions and a certain
question was arising in his mind. Still it pointed nowhere.

Constable Williams had told him of isolated bands of Indians who had
visited the camps during the previous summer, and Mahon conceived the
idea that with one of these braves Torrance had had dealings which
placed the redskin under obligation though the contractor himself might
not suspect it. An Indian never forgets; that was th