as placing brimming cups of
blistering hot coffee beside the plates of food and condensed milk-cans
upon the table, while he leafed slowly through the sheaf of blue-prints
with the other, satisfying himself that they were untampered with. Fat
Joe shook his head mournfully over this last exhibition and dropped into
a chair.

They ate in silence that morning--a silence so heavy that the faint
breathing of Garry in the bunk beyond them sounded almost stentorian at
times. More than once Joe's gaze went to that colorless face; just as
often it searched Steve's gravely unreadable countenance, and it was Fat
Joe who first found the silence no longer endurable.

"What," he ventured to interrupt the other's brooding, "what is it,
Steve, you call one of them little, gangling, bow-spectacled guys that
fools his waking hours away studyin' the customs and morals and suchlike
of birds and things?"

Almost immediately Steve's face grew less blank at that bland question,
and although his eyes failed to shift from the invisible point beyond Joe
at which he was staring, his lips did curl a little. He had long before
learned to play up, solemnly, to those unprefaced and disingenuous leads.

"Ornithologist?" he inquired soberly. "Ornithologist--if that is what
you mean."

Joe nodded briskly.

"That's it!" he exclaimed. "I knew it was ornery something-or-other,
and--and that makes it fit the case all the prettier, now don't it?
Because in the last half-hour or so, since I left you here to tend to the
cookin', I've been studying the birds somewhat myself. And having been a
little successful, so to speak, I'm ornerier'n even before I commenced."
He stopped to swallow half the steaming coffee in his cup, and if when he
began again his voice had hardened perceptibly, it was nevertheless still
elaborately guileless. "Steve," he said, "have _you_ ever stopped to
consider real close and earnest any of the peculiarities of our feathered
friends? Say--well, say owls, for instance?"

Then Steve ceased to smile. He thought a moment, but his reply remained
tuned to the other's artless key.

"Why, yes," he drawled. "Yes, and no. As for the latter, however, I
will admit that I have always believed their reputation for--er--wisdom
to be a greatly overestimated thing."

Widely Fat Joe grinned his pleasure. His chief's eyes were no longer
vague nor blank.

"Which just bears out my own personal research in the field," he stated.
"Not