way when you know the things it’s taught me.  While I was way up at that penitentiary camp on the Beaver River I kept all my ears and eyes wide, and I learned most of the things a feller’s liable to learn in this world when he acts that way.  I learned something of the notions lying back of this feller’s work up there.  Say, he hadn’t finished with you when he took that ten millions out of you.”  An ironical smile lit the man’s dark eyes as he thrust home his retaliation for the financier’s insults.  “Not by a lot,” he went on, with a smiling display of teeth that conveyed nothing pleasant.  “They’ve a slogan up there that means a whole heap, and it comes from him, and runs through the whole work going on, right down to the Chink camp cooks.  Guess that mill is only beginning.  It’s the ground work of a mighty big notion.  And the notion is to drive the Skandinavians out of Canada’s pulp trade, and very particularly the Swedes, as represented by the interests of Nathaniel Hellbeam.  Guess you sit right here in New York, but up there they’ve got you measured up to the last pant’s button.”

“They that think?”

The financier’s bloated cheeks purpled as he put his clumsy interrogation.

“Oh, yes.  This feller Standing reckons he’s made a big start, and there are mighty big plans out.  When he and that clownish partner of his, Harker, are through, Sachigo’ll be the biggest proposition in the way of groundwood pulp in the world.  They’ve forests such as you in Skandinavia dream about when your digestion’s feeling good.  They’ve a water power that leaves Niagara a summer trickle.  They’ve got it all with a sea journey of less than eighteen hundred miles to Europe.  But there’s more than that.  When Sachigo’s complete it’s to be the parent company of a mighty combine that’s going to take in all the mills of Canada outside Nathaniel Hellbeam’s group.  And then—­then, sir, the squeeze’ll start right in.  And it isn’t going to stop till the sponge—­that’s Nathaniel Hellbeam—­is wrung dry.”

“You heard all this—­when you were held prisoner and working like a swine in Martin’s forests?”

The smile in Hellbeam’s eyes was no less ironical than the agent’s.

“When I was working like a swine.”

“These lumber-jacks.  They knew all that in Standing’s mind is?”

“No.  But I learned it all.”

“How?”

The demand was instant, and a surge of force lay behind it.

“Because some I saw.  Some I picked up from general talk.  And the rest I pieced together because it’s my job to think hard when the game’s against me.  But it don’t matter.  You know that the things I’ve told you are right.  It’s news to you, but you know it’s right, because you’re thinking hard, and the game’s against—­you.”

“Yes.”

The financier’s admission was the act of a man who has no hesitation in looking facts in the face and acknowledging them.  Idepski’s deductions were irrefutable, because the Swede was a shrewd business man with a full appreciation of the man who had lightened his finances by ten million dollars.