“What I know about him wouldn’t get him a job anywheres where I had the say-so. Last summer he was workin’ for the C. C. & I. at Whitlow--a strike-breaker. Before that he was doin’ time at Brushy Mountain, for some sort o’ crookedness, I dunno what. Maybe I ort to ’a’ told you this when you hired him, but I allowed you knowed what you was doin’, an’ it wasn’t none o’ my business. He’s a good drill boss.” Tregarvon was examining the bits of steel critically. “Tryon, I’d give something to know just where these came from originally,” he said. “Maybe I might help out a little on that, too. I served my time in the shop before I went to work for the railroad. D’you know what kind o’ steel that is?” “No.” “It’s some o’ that new-fangled, high-speed tool-steel that you temper by heatin’ it white-hot and coolin’ it in a fan blast. Jenkins, the Whitlow blacksmith, was showin’ me a piece of it last Sat’day night at Tait’s. Looked like it might ’a’ been cut off the same bar with these little chunks o’ Jim Sawyer’s.” “In other words, you believe that these bits were made in the Whitlow blacksmith shop?” “I ain’t a-sayin’ so, because I can’t prove it. But my boy, Tom, saw Thaxter, the Whitlow bookkeeper, stop his buggy in the big road two or three days ago whilst a man came out o’ the bushes to talk to him. The man was Jim Sawyer. More ’n that, there’s just natchelly only the one place in the Wehatchee where that steel _could_ come from. They’ve got it at Whitlow, an’ I don’t reckon there’s ar’ another blacksmith shop in the valley that ever heerd tell of it.” “Tryon, you’ve done a good afternoon’s work,” said the master of Ocoee, dropping the three cubes into his pocket. “We owe all of our hard luck, excepting the blown-up boiler, which may have been due to its own rottenness, to the C. C. & I., with Thaxter pulling the strings and Sawyer doing the actual dirty work. Isn’t that the way you have it figured out?” “That’s about the way it _ort_ to stack up,” said the foreman. “But somehow it don’t gee all the way ’round. You’d say it’s mighty near a dead cinch that Sawyer was the one that doped the drill-hole with these here slow-’em-downs; but right there the vein pinches out. Them two times that the walkin’-beam fell down, Sawyer was the man that stood the best chance o’ gettin’ his head bu’sted. Then you an’ Mr. Carfax both saw the man that put the dannymite into the old b’iler, an’ I hain’t heerd neither one of you a-sayin’ it was Sawyer. You’d ’a’ knowed him, wouldn’t you?” “It wasn’t Sawyer,” said Tregarvon definitively. “Sawyer has a beard, and that man was smooth-faced.”