“Hold on, Mr. Senator!  I am coming to that!  Her father has been away a month.  I found out from Calamity and the road gang that Wayland hasn’t been at the Cabin since that night I was there; and Gee Whittiker,” Brydges laughed sleepily, the same smile that said nothing but came up from the subterranean under current, “he was a bear with a sore head that night; spent most of the night prancing the Ridge.  Well, a fellow can’t exactly stand on one leg and then on t’other all through a call.  She didn’t ask me to sit down.  Said her father was coming home by Smelter City and you could have the pleasure of conveying your sympathy personally:  kept standing herself all the time; kept looking from me to the door.  Well, sir, while she was looking through the door behind me, I was looking through the door behind her.”  And as Bat said it, he looked away.  “Wayland’s Range coat was hanging in that inner room.”

Bat smiled slowly and sleepily; then openly grinned as who should say “now the cat is out”; but when he turned to Moyese, his chief had whirled in the swing chair and was sitting with hands clasped under his hat, and the back of his head towards Brydges.

A glossy smile had come over Bat’s face that is not good to see on man, woman, child or beast; and it is the same kind of smile on all four, not laughter, nor light, not definite enough to be malicious, nor pointed enough to be self accusatory, nor direct enough to be challenged and repudiated; a smile untellably familiar—­a Satyr-faced thought looking through a veil, somehow sinuously suggestive, saying nothing at all, yet conveying the physical sensation of pus from an ulcerous thing; and strangely enough, there are blow-fly natures that prefer pus to nectar.

If Brydges had not been so absorbed in the jocularity of his own sensations, he would have observed that his chief remained singularly silent.

“Oh, I don’t suppose he’s there all this time.”  Bat rushed to the defence of the absent, (Heaven bless such defenders).  “That old Canadian duffer, who seems to have hitched up with him on the Rim Rocks accident, your ranch foreman saw ’em pass together at noon; tried to telephone ‘Herald,’ but I choked that off; that old fellow once wrote our paper to know about Canadian settlers here.  He recognized Calamity and talked about old North West Rebellion days.  It’s my theory he’s here about something that’s been hushed up!  Like dad, like daughter,” Bat pronounced.

“It’s my theory when MacDonald comes back from the Upper Pass, Wayland and the old fellow will turn up about the same time.  Haven’t been able to learn what it is; but I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts, they are all absent on the same trail.  If we let go a broadside, they’ll have to come out with the truth to shut us off; and there is where we are going to get him; see?  I’ve got another theory, too.”

“What’s that?” asked the Senator, without turning.