just happen to be here and we shall turn them to good account. But if there were any feasible transportation facilities I doubt if we should make use of these native raw materials. It is the policy of the department to go into the market like any other buyer where it can. But here there are no sellers, or, rather, no way in which the sellers can reach us."

"No sellers and no chance for a man to get the thin edge of a wedge in anywhere," lamented the money-maker despairingly. Then his eye lighted upon the graybeard dump of a solitary mine high up on the face of Mount Chigringo. "What's that up there?" he demanded.

"It is a mine," said Brouillard, showing Miss Cortwright how to adjust the field-glass for the shorter distance. "Two men named Massingale, father and son, are working it, I'm told." And then again to Miss Genevieve: "That is their cabin—on the trail a little to the right of the tunnel opening."

"I see it quite plainly," she returned. "Two people are just leaving it to ride down the path—a man and a woman, I think, though the woman—if it is a woman—is riding on a man's saddle."

Brouillard's eyebrows went up in a little arch of surprise. Harding, the topographical engineer who had made all the preliminary surveys and had spent the better part of the former summer in the Niquoia, had reported on the Massingales, father and son, and his report had conveyed a hint of possible antagonism on the part of the mine owners to the government project. But there had been no mention of a woman.

"The Massingale mine, eh?" broke in the appraiser of values crisply. "They showed us some ore specimens from that property while we were stopping over in Red Butte. It's rich—good and plenty rich—if they have the quantity. And somebody told me they had the quantity, too; only it was too far from the railroad—couldn't jack-freight it profitably over the Timanyonis."

"In which case it is one of many," Brouillard said, taking refuge in the generalities.

But Mr. Cortwright was not to be so easily diverted from the pointed particulars—the particulars having to do with the pursuit of the market trail.

"I'm beginning to get my feet on bottom, Brouillard," he said, dropping the courtesy prefix and shoving his fat hands deep into the pockets of the dust-coat. "There's a business proposition here, and it looks mighty good to me. That was a mere nursery notion I gave you a while back—about picking up 

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