Grant blinked at him; for a man who has driven for many hours in the cold of the Northwest is apt to suffer from unpleasant and somewhat bewildering sensations when his numbed brain and body first throw off the effect of the frost. "No," he said unevenly. "Let me alone a minute. I didn't see you." The man, who was one of the homesteaders' leaders in another vicinity, sat still with the packet in his hand until, perhaps without any intention of reading it, his eyes rested on the address. Then he sat upright suddenly and stared at Grant. "Do you know what you have got here, Larry?" he asked. Grant stretched out his hand and took the packet, then laid it upon the table with the address downwards. "It's something that dropped out of the wallet," he said. The other man laughed a little, but his face was intent. "Oh, yes, that's quite plain; but if I know the writing it's a letter with something in it from Torrance to the Sheriff. There's no mistaking the way he makes the 'g.' Turn it over and I'll show you." Grant laid a brown hand on the packet. "No. Do you generally look at letters that don't belong to you, Chilton?" Breckenridge saw that Grant was recovering, and that the contemptuous manner of his question was intentional, and guessed that his comrade had intended to sting the other man to resentment, and so lead him from the point at issue. Chilton coloured, but he persisted. "Well," he said, "I guess that one belongs to the committee. I didn't mean to look at the thing, but, now I'm sure of it, I have to do what I can for the boys who made me their executive. I don't ask you how you got it, Larry." "I got it by accident." Chilton looked astonished, and almost incredulous. "Well, we needn't worry over that. The question is, what you're going to do with it?" "I'm going to send it back." Chilton made a gesture of impatience. "That's what you can't do. As we know, the cattle-men had a committee at Cedar a day or two ago, and now here's a packet stuffed with something going to the Sheriff. Doesn't it strike you yet that it's quite likely there's a roll of dollar bills and a letter telling him what he has to do inside it?" "Well?" said Grant, seeing that he must face the issue sooner or later. "We don't want their dollars, but that letter's worth a pile of them to us. We could get it printed by a paper farther east, with an article on it that would raise a howl from everybody. There are one or two of them quite ready for a chance of getting a slap at the legislature, while there's more than one man who would be glad to hawk it round the lobbies. Then his friends would have no more use for the Sheriff, and we might even get a commission sent down to straighten things up for us." "The trouble is that we can't make any use of it," said Grant. "No?" said Chilton, and the men looked at each other steadily. "No," repeated Grant. "It wasn't meant that I should get it, and I'm going to send it back."