"John, you get your dinner, bid us an affectionate farewell, and go along with old Straight. Go alone. Tell him you left all your duffel at Withee's camp and don't need any guide. I'll look after the rest of it. Chris Straight can hide his dude and the girl, but he can't pull up the ground behind him." They started off promptly after the noon snack, the taciturn Christopher offering no comment on Mr. Barrett's amiable compliance, and apparently blandly unsuspicious that the Honorable Pulaski concealed guile under a demeanor which had suddenly become pacific. Men who had made their warfare more by craft and less by brute strength would have been more wily. John Barrett and Pulaski Britt had always been too confident of their own power to think subterfuge necessary. Barrett, especially, as he strode along at the heels of old Christopher, was so well content with his own first essay in duplicity that his taking-down was correspondingly humiliating. They were resting, he and the old guide, after a tough scramble around a blowdown that they had encountered a mile or so from Britt's camps. With a jerk of his chin Christopher indicated a far-off sound on the back trail. "Pretty busy, that woodpecker is, Mr. Barrett!" "Stumpage John" assented, wondering at the same time how such an old woodsman could misinterpret that chip-chop. "The fool Indian ought to make allowance for a blowdown," he reflected, angrily. "He's following too close." "In this world you expect cheap men to lie and cheat," remarked Christopher, serenely. "But you don't hardly expect State senators and candidates for governor to be that sort." "What the devil do you mean?" demanded Barrett, with heat. "I mean that Britt's Indian, Newell Sockbeson, is following us and makin' a double-blaze for--well, I suppose it's so that Pulaski Britt and his men can chase us up. As to why, you probably know better than I do, Mr. Barrett." The timber baron stared at this disconcerting old plain-speaker without finding fit words for reply. "It can hardly be that he's goin' to all that trouble simply to get the girl. Mr. Wade is ready to turn the girl over to you, Mr. Barrett. Why is it that men ain't willin' to play fair in this world? What does Pulaski Britt want to meddle in this thing for?" "I think you're wrong about the Indian following us," paltered the millionaire. "You're only guessin' about that, Straight." "When I see Pulaski Britt talk to an Indian, when I see that Indian pack a lunch, take a camp-axe, and hide at the mouth of the trail, I don't have to guess, Mr. Barrett. Some of us old fellows of the woods see a whole lot of things without seemin' to take much notice." He got up off the tree-trunk where he had been sitting and made ready to take the trail again, swinging his pack to his shoulders.