camp with any sort of story worth wasting paper on.  There wasn’t a trace of our man that way, and he proposed drawing another cover.  At the end of his report was one of those notes these boys never seem able to resist mixing up with their official work.  It told me of one of those scraps that happened in the camps, and he seemed mighty struck by it.  It was between the camp boss, Arden Laval, and a kid called Sternford.  Say, when I read that name I jumped.  I felt like handing my feller promotion right away.  Well, his story was good anyway.  It seems this camp boss is about the biggest bluff in the scrap way known to that country.  The kid licked him.  They fought nearly two hours, ‘rough and tough.’  And the kid would have killed his man, but for the interference of a missionary feller called Father Adam.  He broke ’em loose with a gun, and when he got ’em loose he took the kid right away so he shouldn’t hand out the homicide he reckoned to.  This report was more than two months old when I got it.  Anyway I got it after a feller called Bull Sternford, a queer name by the way, had jumped in on the Sachigo proposition.”

The agent flung away his cigarette and helped himself afresh.

“Well,” he went on, smiling, “I guess it didn’t take me thinking five seconds.  I set the wires humming asking a description of this fighting kid.  I got it.  It was my man.  The feller at Sachigo.  Well?”

Idepski’s smiling interrogation was full of satisfaction.

“Go on.”  The watchful eyes of the financier seemed to have narrowed.

“Now, by what chance does this feller, Bull Sternford, come straight from one hell of a scrap in a far-off camp belonging to Skandinavia to run the business end of Sachigo?  What happened after that fool missionary got him away?  And—­”

Idepski broke off, pondering.  He flicked his cigarette ash without regard for the carpet.

Hellbeam stirred in his chair impatiently.  His lips seemed to become more prominent.  His small eyes seemed to become smaller.

“You ask that, yes?  You?” he snorted.  “A child may answer that thing.  You think?  Oh, yes, you think.”  The hand supporting his cigar made a gesture that implied everything disparaging.  “Our man—­this Martin—­has gone out of Sachigo because—­of you?  I tell you, no!  Does a man give up the money, the big plan he makes, at the sight of an—­agent?  He took you in his hand and sent you to the swine life of the forest where he could have crushed you like that.”  He gripped the empty air.  “Then he goes—­where?  You say he fears and quits.  What does he fear?  You?” The man shook his head till his cheeks were shaken by the violence of his movement.  “He goes somewhere.  But he does not quit.  That is clear.  Oh, yes.  The mill goes on.  It grows and prospers.  The man Harker remains.  Where comes the money for Sachigo to grow?  Trade?  Yes, some.  But not all.  I know these things.  The mill goes on—­the same as with Martin