“Oh, dear!  I feel as if I were a conspirator.”

“I believe you are one.  Your dictograph has arrived.  Shall I send George Sea Otter over with it?  And have you somebody to install it?”

“Oh, bother!  Does it have to be installed?”

“It does.  You place the contraption—­hide it, rather—­in the room where the conspirators conspire; then you run wires from it into another room where the detectives listen in on the receivers.”

“Could George Sea Otter install it?”

“I think he could.  There is a printed card of instructions, and I dare say George would find the job no more baffling than the ignition-system on the Napier.”

“Will he tell anybody?”

“Not if you ask him not to.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even a whisper to himself, Shirley.”

“Very well, then.  Please send him over.  Thank you so much, Bryce Cardigan.  You’re an awful good old sort, after all.  Really, it hurts me to have to oppose you.  It would be so much nicer if we didn’t have all those redwood trees to protect, wouldn’t it?”

“Let us not argue the question, Shirley.  I think I have my redwood trees protected.  Good-bye.”

He had scarcely finished telephoning his home to instruct George Sea Otter to report with the express package to Shirley when Buck Ogilvy strolled into the office and tossed a document on his desk.  “There’s your little old temporary franchise, old thing,” he announced; and with many a hearty laugh he related to Bryce the ingenious means by which he had obtained it.  “And now if you will phone up to your logging-camp and instruct the woods-boss to lay off about fifty men to rest for the day, pending a hard night’s work, and arrange to send them down on the last log-train to-day, I’ll drop around after dinner and we’ll fly to that jump-crossing.  Here’s a list of the tools we’ll need.”

“I’ll telephone Colonel Pennington’s manager and ask him to kick a switch-engine in on the Laurel Creek spur and snake those flat-cars with my rails aboard out to the junction with the main line,” Bryce replied.  And he called up the Laguna Grande Lumber Company—­only to be informed by no less a person than Colonel Pennington himself that it would be impossible to send the switch-engine in until the following afternoon.  The Colonel was sorry, but the switch-engine was in the shop having the brick in her fire-box renewed, while the mogul that hauled the log trams would not have time to attend to the matter, since the flats would have to be spotted on the sidetrack at Cardigan’s log-landing in the woods, and this could not be done until the last loaded log-train for the day had been hauled out to make room.

“Why not switch back with the mogul after the logtrain has been hauled out on the main line?” Bryce demanded pointedly.

Pennington, however, was not trapped.  “My dear fellow,” he replied patronizingly, “quite impossible, I assure you.  That old trestle across the creek, my boy—­it hasn’t been looked at for years.  While I’d send the light switch-engine over it and have no fears—­”