"What do you suppose I do? Fight, too?" He laughed--mirthlessly--conscious always of his secret pity for this girl. "Well," he said, "when your father makes enough to quit, he'll take you out of this. It's a vile hole for a young girl----" "See here," she said, flushing; "you're rather particular for a young man who stuck up a tourist and robbed him of four thousand dollars." "I'm not complaining on my own account," returned Smith, laughing; "Clinch's suits me." "Well, don't concern yourself on my account, Hal Smith. And you'd better keep out of the dance, too, if there are any strangers there." "You think a State Trooper may happen in?" "It's likely. A lot of people come and go. We don't always know them." She opened a sliding wooden shutter and looked into the bar room. After a moment she beckoned him to her side. "There are strangers there now," she said, "--that thin, dark man who looks like a Kanuk. And those two men shaking dice. I don't know who they are. I never before saw them." But Smith had seen them at Ghost Lake Inn. One of them was Sard. Quintana's gang had arrived at Clinch's dump. A moment later Clinch came through the pantry and kitchen and out onto the rear porch where Smith was washing glasses in a tub filled from an ever-flowing spring. "I'm a-going to get supper," he said to Eve. "There'll be twenty-three plates." And to Smith: "Hal--you help Eve wait on the table. And if anybody acts up rough you slam him on the jaw--don't argue, don't wait--just slam him good, and I'll come on the hop." "Who are the strangers, dad?" asked Eve. "Don't nobody know 'em none, girlie. But they ain't State Troopers. They talk like they was foreign. One of 'em's English--the big, bony one with yellow hair and mustache." "Did they give any names?" asked Smith. "You bet. The stout, dark man calls himself Hongri Picket. French, I guess. The fat beak is a fella named Sard. Sanchez is the guy with a face like a Canada priest--Jose Sanchez--or something on that style. And then the yellow skinned young man is Nicole Salzar; the Britisher, Harry Beck; and that good lookin' dark gent with a little black Charlie Chaplin, he's Victor Georgiades." "What are those foreigners doing in the North Woods, Clinch?" enquired Smith. "Oh, they all give the same spiel--hire out in a lumber camp. But _they_ ain't no lumberjacks," added Clinch contemptuously. "I don't know what they be--hootch runners maybe--or booze bandits--or they done something crooked som'ers r'other. It's safe to serve 'em drinks." Clinch himself had been drinking. He always drank when preparing to cook. He turned and went into the kitchen now, rolling up his shirt sleeves and relighting his clay pipe. IV By nine o'clock the noisy chicken supper had ended; the table had been cleared; Jim Hastings was tuning his fiddle in the big room; Eve had seated herself before the battered melodeon.