he station building which served as the
superintendent's office.

"I've been counting on you, Dick, as you know, ever since this thing
threatened to take shape in my head," Ford began. "First, let me ask
you: do you happen to know where you could lay hands on three or four
good constructing engineers--men you could turn loose absolutely and
trust implicitly? I'm putting this up to you because the Plug Mountain
exile has taken me a bit out of touch."

"Why--yes," said Frisbie, taking time to call the mental roll. "There
are Major Benson and his son Jack--you know 'em both--just in off their
job in the Selkirks. Then there is Roy Brissac; he'd be a pretty good
man in the field; and Chauncey Leckhard, of my class,--he's got a job in
Winnipeg, but he'll come if I ask him to, and he is the best office man
I know. But what on top of earth are you driving at, Stuart?"

Ford cleared his pipe of the ash and refilled it.

"I'll go into the details with you a little later. We shall have plenty
of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good
bit more privacy. The thing I'm trying to figure out will burst like a
bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and"--lowering his
voice--"I can't trust my office force here. _Savez?_"

"I _savez_ nothing as yet," laughed the new supervisor, "but perhaps I
shall if you'll tell me what is going to happen in the next month or six
weeks."

"I'm coming to that, right now. How would you like to take a hunting
trip over on the wilderness side of the range? There are big woods and
big game."

Frisbie grinned. He was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by
the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches
and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated
faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in _Faust_.
Hence, his grin was handsomely diabolic.

"You needn't ask me what I'd like; you just tell me what you want me to
do," he rejoined, with clansman loyalty.

"So I will," said Ford, taking the reins of authority. "We leave here
to-morrow morning for a trip over the Pass and down the Pannikin on the
other side, and if anybody asks you why, you can say that we expect to
kill a deer or two, and possibly a bear. Your part of the outsetting,
however, is to pack your surveying instruments on the burro saddles so
they'll pass for grub-boxes, tent-poles, and the like."

"Call it done," said Frisbie. "But why al