"All right, sis," answered Chub humbly, "I'll stop. If I could only get that wireless-telegraph line to workin' between here and the Bluebell I'd have somethin' to keep me busy. Say, Matt, if you've got time I'd like to have you tell me what's the matter with that wireless apparatus. Got a spark from the Bluebell last night, but that's all it amounted to. You're no inventor, but you're always pretty handy in telling me where I make a miscue in my machines. Go up to the house, sis," Chub added to Susie, "and keep that old fire-eater from going out into the hills and slaughtering somebody. I don't think he'd slip out at all, and I know he wouldn't massacre a horned toad, but he likes us to believe he's just naturally a bad man trying to reform, and it's just as well to keep an eye on him." Before Susie left she cast a significant look at Matt. "Let's go up the canal a ways, Chub," said Matt, when he and his chum were alone, "where we can make ourselves comfortable and have a little quiet confab." "You've got more'n your hat on your mind, Matt," returned Chub, "I can tell that by the look of you; but if it's this business of mine that's put you in a funk----" "It's not that altogether, Chub," interrupted Matt. "You see, I've got to leave Phoenix, and I want to talk with you about it." Chub was astounded, and stood staring at Matt with jaws agape. His hair and eyebrows were singed, there was a black smudge on his face, and his clothes were more or less demoralized. In his bewilderment he made a picture that brought a hearty laugh to Matt's lips. "Come on, Chub, what's struck you in a heap?" said Matt, catching his arm and pulling him off along the canal-bank. "You act as though I'd handed you a jolt below the belt." "That's just the size of it, Matt," returned Chub. "Say, if you leave Ph[oe]nix you've got to take Reddy McReady along with you--or you don't go. That's flat. Are you listening to my spiel, pal?" CHAPTER III. DACE SHOWS HIS HAND. "First off, Bricktop," said Matt, after he had taken a comfortable seat on a boulder, "you've got to stop messing around with high explosives. Smokeless powder has been on the market for some time, and you're wasting your energies." "Shucks!" grinned Chub, "sis has been talkin' to you. That's what I told her we were after, but that was only part of it. Perk gave me the idea. If we could take a grain of powder and make it drive a bullet a mile, or ten grains and make it drive a bullet ten miles, we'd have the biggest thing that ever happened. Three men with gatling guns could kill off an army before it got in sight. It's a whale of a notion!" "You bet it's a whale," agreed Matt. "You'd have so much power back of that bullet, Chub, it would blow the thing that fired it into smithereens--and I reckon the three men who were laying for the enemy would go along with the scraps, all right." "You're a jim-dandy, Matt. Say, I didn't think of that," gasped Chub.