im
next, be sure that he starts and keeps going before you stir out of your
tracks."

"You don't believe that deer hunting lie, do you?" asked Bob.

Ware chuckled.

"I was wondering if _you_ did," said he.

"I guess there's no doubt as to who the Modoc Mining Company is."

"Oldham?"

"No," said Bob; "Baker and the Power Company. Oldham is Baker's man."

Ware whistled.

"Well, I suppose you know what you're talking about," said he, "but it's
pretty generally understood that Oldham is on the other side of the
fence. He's been bucking Baker in White Oaks on some franchise business.
Everybody knows that."

Bob opened his eyes. Casting his mind back over the sources of his
information, he then remembered that intimation of the connection
between the two men had come to him when he had been looked on as a
member of the inner circle, so that all things were talked of openly
before him; that since Plant's day Oldham had in fact never appeared in
Baker's interests.

"He's up in this country a good deal," Bob observed finally. "What's he
say is his business?"

"Why, he's in a little timber business, as I understand it; and he buys
a few cattle--sort of general brokerage."

"I see," mused Bob.

He rode in silence for some time, breathing his horse mechanically every
fifty feet or so of the steep trail. He was busily recalling and piecing
together the fragments of what he had at the time considered an
unimportant discussion, and which he had in part forgotten.

"It's a blind," he said at last; "Oldham is working for Baker."

"What makes you think that?"

"Something I heard once."

He rode on. The Basin was dropping away beneath them; the prospect to
the north was broadening as peak after peak raised itself into the line
of ascending vision. The pines, clinging to the steep, cast bars of
shadow across the trail, which zigzagged and dodged, taking advantage of
every ledge and each strip of firm earth. Occasionally they crossed a
singing brook, shaded with willows and cottonwoods, with fragrant bay
and alders, only to clamber out again to the sunny steeps.

Now Bob remembered and pieced together the whole. Baker had been
bragging that he intended to pay nothing to the Government for his water
power. Bob could almost remember the very words. "'They've swiped about
everything in sight for these pestiferous reserves,'" he murmured to
himself, "'but they encourage the honest prospector.... Oldham's got the
whole m