Stevens haunched his shoulders.

“It’s not the woman I’m thinking about.  It’s you.  I’d sure change my location.”

“Why wouldn’t it be just as well if I told the police of his threat?” asked Aldous, looking across the river with a glimmer of humour in his eyes.

“Oh, hell!” was the packer’s rejoinder.

Slowly he unwound his long legs and rose to his feet.

“Take my advice—­move!” he said.  “As for me, I’m going to cross that cussed river this afternoon or know the reason why.”

He stalked away in the direction of his outfit, chewing viciously at his quid.  For a few moments Aldous stood undecided.  He would liked to have joined the half-dozen men he saw lounging restfully a distance beyond the grazing ponies.  But Stevens had made him acutely aware of a new danger.  He was thinking of his cabin—­and the priceless achievement of his last months of work, his manuscript.  If Quade should destroy that——­

He clenched his hands and walked swiftly toward his camp.  To “burn out” an enemy was one of Quade’s favourite methods of retaliation.  He had heard this.  He also knew that Quade’s work was done so cleverly that the police had been unable to call him to account.

Quade’s status had interested Aldous from the beginning.  He had discovered that Quade and Culver Rann, his partner at Tete Jaune, were forces to be reckoned with even by the “powers” along the line of rail.  They were the two chiefs of the “underground,” the men who controlled the most dangerous element from Miette to Fort George.  He had once seen Culver Rann, a quiet, keen-eyed, immaculately groomed man of forty—­the cleverest scoundrel that had ever drifted into the Canadian west.  He had been told that Rann was really the brain of the combination, and that the two had picked up a quarter of a million in various ways.  But it was Quade with whom he had to deal now, and he began to thank Stevens for his warning.  He was filled with a sense of relief when he reached his cabin and found it as he had left it.  He always made a carbon copy of his work.  This copy he now put into a waterproof tin box, and the box he concealed under a log a short distance back in the bush.

“Now go ahead, Quade,” he laughed to himself, a curious, almost exultant ring in his voice.  “I haven’t had any real excitement for so long I can’t remember, and if you start the fun there’s going to be fun!”

He returned to his birds, perched himself behind a bush at the river’s edge, and began skinning them.  He had almost finished when he heard hoarse shouts from up the river.  From his position he could see the stream a hundred yards below the ford.  Stevens had driven in his horses.  He could see them breasting the first sweep of the current, their heads held high, struggling for the opposite shore.  He rose, dropped his birds, and stared.

“Good God, what a fool!” he gasped.