Brooke made no further protest, but he smiled somewhat curiously as Jimmy stitched away. His work was not remarkable for neatness, and Brooke remembered that the two women at the ranch were fresh from the cities, where men do not mend their clothes with pieces of tents or cotton flour bags. Then he decided that, after all, it did not matter what they thought of him. One would probably set him down as a rude bush chopper, and the other, whose good opinion he would have valued under different circumstances, was a kinswoman of his adversary. Sooner or later she would know him for what he was, and then it was clear she would only have contempt for him. That she of all women should be Mrs. Devine's sister was, he reflected with a sense of impotent anger, one of the grim jests that Fate seemed to delight in playing. "Now," said Jimmy, breaking off his thread at last, "I guess you might go 'most anywhere if you stand with your face to the folks who talk to you, and don't sit down too suddenly. Be cautious how you get up again if you hear those stitches tearing through." Brooke went out, and discovered that Jimmy had, no doubt as a precautionary measure, sewn several of his garments together as he walked through the shadowy bush towards the ranch. Devine, to whom the scheme suggested had commended itself, was, as it happened, already waiting him in a big log walled room. He sat by the open window, which looked across blue lake and climbing pines towards the great white ramparts of unmelting snow that shut the valley in. The rest of the room was dim, and now the sun had gone, sweet resinous odors and an exhilarating coolness that stirred the blood like wine came in. Two women sat back in the shadow, and Devine moved a little in his chair as he answered one of them. "I know very little about the man, but I never saw more thorough work than he has put in on the flume," he said. "That's 'most enough guarantee for him, but there are one or two points about him I can't quite worry out the meaning of. For one thing, the timber-righters haven't stopped him chopping." Mrs. Devine looked thoughtful, for she was acquainted with the less pleasant aspect of mine-owning, but Barbara broke in. "It is a little difficult to understand what use timber-rights would be to anybody here," she said. "They could hardly get their lumber out, and there are very few people to sell it to if they put up a mill." "I expect they mean to sell it me," said Devine, a trifle grimly. "But you always cut what you wanted without asking anybody."