“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 matter ... ’” and so on, in the unfolding of the very scheme by which these acres had been acquired.  “Near headwaters,” he had said; and that statement, combined with the fact that nothing had occurred to stir indistinct memories, had kept Bob in the dark.  At the time “near headwaters” had meant to him the tract of yellow pine near the head of Sycamore Creek.  So he had dismissed the matter.  Now he saw clearly that a liberal construction could very well name the