The Senator sat in his office with his hat on the back of his head and a U. S. Geological Survey map spread out on the desk in front of him. Bat stood sleepily at attention on the other side of the desk with his hat in his hand. It was a sweltering July afternoon in Smelter City, the air athrob with the derricks and the trucks and the cranes and the pulleys and the steam hoists and the cable car tramway run up and down the face of Coal Hill by natural gravitation. The light was dusky yellow from the smelter smoke; and loafers round the transcontinental railroad station across the street chose the shady side of the building, where they sat swinging their legs from the platform and aiming tobacco juice with regularity and precision in the exact centre of the gray dusty road.

The Senator wore a pair of pince nez glasses. He looked up over the top of them through the yellow sun-light of the open street door.

"Declare, Brydges, the damned rascals are too lazy to brush the flies off," he observed of the brigade of loafers across the street.

Bat threw a glance over his shoulder at the coterie of loafers, and brought his drowsy tortoise-shell glance back to the map lying before the Senator.

"I guess the flies won't bother 'em long as they vote right, Mr.
Senator."

Moyese was slowly turning and turning the thick stub of a crayon pencil between his thumb and fore finger. Bat knew that trick of absent-minded motion always presaged senatorial sermonizing, just as the soft laugh down in the crinkles of the white vest forewarned danger. ("When I see the tummy wrinkles coming, I always feel like telling the other fellow to get the button off his fencing sword—You bet that means business," Bat often confided to the newseditor.)

"Brydges, this country is rapidly lining up two opposing sides: fighting lines, too, by George! Mobocracy versus Plutocracy! I'm only a cog in the wheel, myself, a mere marker for the big counters, my boy; but if I have to put up with the tyranny of one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of the rich to the tyranny of the poor, any day! Why, is any man poor in this country, Brydges? Because he's a damned incompetent unfit swinish hog, too lazy to plant and hoe his own row; so he gets the husks of the corn while the competent man gets the cob—the cob with the corn on, you bet, number one, Silver King, Hard, seventy cents a bushel! If I have to put up with one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of knowledge to the tyranny of ignorance! One butters your bread, anyway, and sometimes puts some jam on with the butter. The other snivels and whines and begs a crust from the other fellow's table, and snaps at the hand that gives him the crust, and spends the time in self-pity that he should spend in work! Look at that row of free-born American citizens, kings in disguise, Brydges! Not a damned man of them ever did a stroke of honest work in his life except on election day, when we line 'em up; and damn it, aren't we right, to line 'em up? What kind of rule are you going to get from that kind of rulership if some one doesn't jump in and group it and direct it; yes, by George, and compel it to keep in line and vote right, just as a general licks his recruits in shape on pain of court martial? Think any battle would ever be won, Brydges, if the commanding officer hadn't the power of a despot? He makes mistakes. Of course, he makes mistakes! So do we! But we're keeping those damned rascals in line for the good of the country; and so, I say, the plutocrats who are being cursed from one end of the country to the other to-day, are playing the same part in modern life as the big war chiefs of the Middle Ages. They are marshalling the forces; leading the advance; conquering the countries with commerce that the old war chiefs used to conquer with arms; building up, constructing, amassing, concentrating in trust and combine all the scattered abilities of men, who would be powerless individually; and we use our tools, that parcel of beauties out there, same as the old war chiefs used their blackguard mercenaries! It's cheaper for us to buy 'em than be bossed by 'em, a darn sight cheaper, Brydges; for us to swing 'em into a bunch and control 'em than be blackmailed by 'em, Brydges! If every penny grafter didn't hold up the corporation, every damned little squirt of a county supervisor and road contractor and town councilman, if they didn't hold the corporation up for blackmail way the highwaymen of old used to hold up the lone traveller, if they didn't hold us up for blackmail, Brydges, it wouldn't be necessary for us to man that gang across the way on voting day!

"Freedom, pah!" The Senator had stopped swirling the stub pencil. He reached forward to a jar of roses on his desk. "Equality? Pah! Dream of fools, Brydges! Doesn't exist! Never did exist! Never can exist! Know how we develop Silver King Corn that gives ninety bushels to the acre instead of old thirty bushel yield?"

Bat had sat down, still sleepily watchful through the tortoise-shell eyes, but a bit wilted in the heat. Some of the men swinging corduroy and blue jean legs from the station platform evidently perpetrated a pleasantry; for there was a loud guffaw, and a shower of tobacco wads into the middle of the road.

"Know how we get high grade corn, high grade rose like this American Beauty: in fact, high grade anything? Well, I'll tell you. It's the same process that brings out high grade men. You go into a field of corn. You pick out best specimens. You keep that for seed, special care, special fine ground, special careful cultivation. You let the others go, feed 'em to the hogs, understand, Bat? It's the same with the roses, and the same with men; and now where's your fine theory of all men equal?"

As Bat did not care to remind the Senator that his own career from the ghetto up contradicted all this fine philosophy, he left the question unanswered.

Moyese pushed the glasses up on his nose and returned to the map.

"How many homesteaders did you succeed in nabbing out of that last train-load?"

"About a hundred, Senator! I've got the list of 'em here . . . haven't counted, but think it will tally up about a hundred."

"What are they, Germans?"

"No, Swedes."

Moyese laughed. "Thrifty beggars will job round and earn double while they're operating for us! Got good big families, Bat?"

It was the turn of the handy man to laugh. "I filed one fellow and eight kids for one hundred and sixty acres each."

"You didn't contract to pay each of the little olive branches three-hundred?"

"Lord, no! If the dad sits tight till we prove up entry, he's to get three-hundred! No fear of his blabbing. He can't speak a word of English; and when I told the woman, through the interpreter that we pay their fare out and each of the kids would get a five, why, she kissed my hand and slobbered gratitude all over me."

"Wayland won't be quite so grateful for that bunch."

"Oh, I didn't file that batch in the N. F. You bet, that's a little too obvious! I put 'em in the Pass, lower end of the Pass, not by a damn sight, I didn't put 'em in the N. F.! I thought Smelter people wanted us to secure that Pass for a dam; and I bunched 'em all in just above the Sheriff's place!"

"That's good! The Sheriff proves up this year; and if you get this bunch in behind, that corks the Pass up pretty effectually! Where are the bounds of the Forest there?"

Bat drew his fore-finger along the map. "Along the red line, here: just to the trail through the canyon."

"Good: now what about the timber claim along the Gully? That's in the Forests, Brydges. I want to force a contest on that; the Swede fellow has cut the logs under his permit; but I'd like to make that doubly sure before we go to trial. If we can get a double cinch on that, we'll knock the claim of the Forestry Department to keep homesteaders out into a cocked hat."

Bat's sleepy eyes emitted sparks and his good natured smile widened to an open grin.

"The Swede happened to use a U. S. Forest hatchet when he cut those logs," he said. "I told him to be sure and stamp the butt end of each log U. S., duly inspected," he said.

Moyese dropped the map and the pencil and his heavy hand with a thud on the desk and laughed noiselessly down into the creases of his fat double chin and into the wrinkling rotundity of his white vest.

"And to cinch it," continued Brydges, "as the fellow's permit didn't cover the Gully, I got some blanket railway scrip for an Irishman, O'Finnigan, Shanty Town, and planked it on the Gully. You see, Senator, by law the settlers can go in on the National Forests wherever it has been surveyed and declared agricultural land; but they can't go in and get title till it is surveyed and passed. But you can plaster the railway scrip where it is unsurveyed. That's the little joker somebody tucked in when the scrip railway act was passed. I guess by the time they have red-taped and trapesed round and wrangled those two tangles of title out, the logs will be safe down the River; and I guess that will about see the finish of Wayland before the coal cases come up—"

"That's it, Brydges." Moyese had lowered his voice. "What about Wayland? Have you found out anything? Where the devil is he? He isn't on his patrol! He hasn't been at the Ridge for three weeks. He hasn't been at the Ridge since I left for Washington. If we could prove how he's been using Government time," he paused to reflect. "That might be shortest way out! Did you find out anything at the MacDonald Ranch?"

Bat threw a precautionary glance over his shoulder towards the door opening on the street. Then he rose, walked across the office, shut the door, came back and drawing his chair close to the desk opposite the Senator, sat down astride with his feet tucked back one round each hind leg.

"Yes, I did; and no again, I didn't! It's just as it may strike you! As a news man, I know how this kind of yarn would be taken by the public."

"Oh, come on with it, Brydges!" Moyese had pushed back and was holding the edge of the desk with his hands. Mr. Bat Brydges recognized that while the creases of good-nature crinkled at the chin, the jaws and the hands had locked.

"Your newsman got this despatch from Mine City: you see it's pretty vague: 'bodies of two men found forty miles from branch of P. & O. Line, thought to be drovers overcome by heat and thirst.' I wired for more particulars; but the railway hands had shovelled the bodies under."

"Brydges," interrupted Moyese sharply, "I'm going to tell you something; and you put it in your pipe and smoke it; and don't waste time running off on false clues. You leave that to women and sissies—to the she-male man! Now listen, a man can't lose himself in the Desert: He can't lose himself in the Wilderness. If he's a damphool, he can get lost, but he can't lose himself, he can't hide in the wilderness, not ever! He can lose himself in a city in one week. He could drop out of sight right here in Smelter City; but he can't go into the wilds and not come out again and people not know it. Somebody sees him go in, and somebody doesn't see him come out; and there you are! It's the same in the wilds as at the North Pole: you can't cook up a fake. Man who goes into the wilds is a marked man till he comes out. Every man, who meets him, takes a turn round to look at him; and he's going to keep looking till the fellow comes out. Now, you take this case. Wayland had on his Service Badge. If he had been one of those two, the fact would have been flashed right down to Washington. Now tell me facts, not rumors; exactly what did you find out?"

When his chief began in that dictatorial fashion, Bat let his facts go in a running fire:

"Well, Flood saw him with his own eyes going up the Pass with that old Canadian duffer the morning, the morning," Bat paused, manifestly unable to specify which morning.

"Yes, the morning after," added the soft, even voice of Moyese. "And the snow slide filled the Pass up to the neck, forty-eight hours later. Yes, I know; but Wayland was too good a mountain man to be caught by a slide."

"I told Flood to get out and examine that slide, anyway! He said 'twasn't any use, this hot weather would clean it up in a couple of weeks. He was going up the Pass when I left for the Valley yesterday."

"What did you find out at the Ridge?"

"That's where the milk is in this cocoanut," answered Bat. "He hasn't passed one night at the Ridge since the night we were all up! You remember who was at the Cabin, night we went up? Well, keep that in mind; when I went across to MacDonald's Ranch to express your regret over this accident, found old man wasn't home. He's expected back from the Upper Pass by train this week: seems he has been arranging new grazing ground for another herd up there. You know how MacDonald house is laid out? Big room as you enter; then a sort of back sitting room for," Bat smiled queerly, a smile that said nothing, yet subterraneously conveyed out to daylight one of those under currents of thought that flows only in the dark, "for the lady. Well, sir, chill blasts of North Pole were tropical zephyrs compared to what I got from that MacDonald gurl."

"I thought her name was Miss MacDonald," suggested the Senator, softly.
He had lowered his chin and was looking over his eye glasses at Brydges.

"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.

"It is, if he sees we're going to involve her, he'll quit."

Moyese didn't answer. He rose from his chair and walked to a rear window, where he stood looking out. Did he credit what he had heard? Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted mind? Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey? Or was his job to obtain certain results at any cost: and was this part of the cost? Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day. Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that sweltering hot July day. When you come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would not pass on the facts. He would pass on the cellar rot.

"If we served up those two stories together hot," emphasized Bat, "we'd about cut the throat of any opposition to our interests in the Valley? He'd quit! I'll bet before he'd see her involved, he'd jump his job!"

When the Senator turned his face to the handy man, he was very sober.
He stood looking over the tops of his glasses boring into Bat's face.

"It's a pity," he said.

"Yes, it's too bad: one hates to have one's faith in human nature all balled out this way; but you never know what kind of a fact you're going ping up against where a woman is concerned." Something in the Senator's look stopped Bat mid-way.

"Brydges, I thought I told you never to meddle with the damphool who makes excuses for what he's going to do. Never do anything, unless you have some end worth while in view; then, if it's worth while, do it, damn it, and don't waste time excusing the means! Now, I'll have nothing to do with this; mind that, Brydges. You do it off your own responsibility. If MacDonald were one of our party, I wouldn't make use of it, if it were ten times over and over true. You'll have to be very careful how you use that, at all! It's effective. I don't deny it's very effective; but it's a pity! If you use that at all, you'll have to use it so it's not libelous."

"Libelous?" burst out the handy man wakening up suddenly, scratching his tousled head and trying to make head or tail of orders that said 'do it' and 'don't do it' in one breath. "I can write it without a name so every man in the State will know who it is: give it as a joke; fetch in Calamity as the mother of the whole mess; the call of the blood, you know; reversion to type! They'll have to prove that the intent was malice before they can get a judgment. They'll have to come out with the truth before they can prove libel. It isn't libelous if it's done as a joke without malice."

Moyese had flung himself down in his chair with a blow of his clenched fist on the desk, when the opening of the office door stopped the oath of disgust on his lips; and Eleanor MacDonald stood framed in the yellow light shining in from the hot street. For a moment, the transition from sun to shade blinded her. Then, she saw who was with the Senator. Brydges sprang up waiting to return her recognition. She made no sign. She walked over where he was standing. The Senator had half risen from his desk. Was it the spirit of the ancestral Indian in her eyes; or of the Man with the Iron Hand? Brydges' oily gloss went to tallow under her look. Moyese knew looks that drilled; and Brydges himself could bore behind for motives; but this look was not a drill: it was a Search Light; and the handy man—well, perhaps, it was the heat—the handy man suddenly wilted.

"You can go, Brydges," ordered Moyese.

"All right! See you again about that, Senator!" Brydges grabbed up the loose notes from the desk and bolted, banging the door behind him.

The Senator's face seemed at once to age and trench with lines. He motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his desk till she had seated herself. Then, he sat down, suddenly remembered his hat, and laid it off. If she had sunk forward on the desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone round and caressed her and petted her and told her she must stop Wayland. His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the Search Light had turned on him.

"You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in, Miss Eleanor; but it was a G— doggon lie! I had been angered: I had been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was slipping back to the usual suavity.