Then he began to bully and pulled the club on me."

Again Grislow's smile was jocose.

"You haven't been tumbling into the ditch with Leshington and Griffith and the rest of us and making love to the little sister, have you?" he jested.

"Don't be a fool if you can help it," was the curt rejoinder. "And don't give yourself leave to say things like that about Amy Massingale. She is too good and sweet and clean-hearted to be dragged into this mix-up, even by implication. Do you get that, Murray?"

"Oh, yes; it's only another way of saying that I'm one of the fools. Go on with the Stephen end of it."

"Well, when I turned him down, young Massingale began to bluster and to say that I'd have to boost the railroad deal, whether I wanted to or not. I told him he couldn't prove it, and he said he would show me, if I'd take half an hour's walk up the valley with him. I humored him, more to get quit of him than for any other reason, and on the way past the camp he borrowed a frying-pan at one of the cook shacks. You know that long, narrow sand-bar in the river just below the mouth of the upper canyon?"

Grislow nodded.

"That is where we went for the proof. Massingale dipped up a panful of the bar sand, which he asked me to wash out for myself. I did it, and you have the results there in that paper. That bar is comparatively rich placer dirt."

"Good Lord!" ejaculated the map-maker. "Comparatively rich, you say?—and you washed this spoonful out of a single pan?"

"Keep your head," said Brouillard coolly. "Massingale explained that I had happened to make a ten-strike; that the bar wasn't any such bonanza as that first result would indicate. I proved that, too, by washing some more of it without getting any more than a few 'colors.' But the fact remains: it's placer ground."

It was at this point that the larger aspect of the fact launched itself upon the hydrographer.

"A gold strike!" he gasped. "And we—we're planning to drown it under two hundred feet of a lake!"

Brouillard's laugh was harsh.

"Don't let the fever get hold of you, Grislow. Don't forget that we are here to carry out the plans of the Reclamation Service—which are more far-reaching and of a good 

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