“If I had only the Hudson’s Bay Company to contend with, I would have little fear for the outcome. With them it is largely a question of strategy. If there is any violence it will come from some zealot in their service, and we can hold our own against such. But Montell is an eel. He looms more threatening than the Company. In these three years I have had no accounting with him. I have done the dirty work, while he holed up at the post, or looked after the St. Louis end. I have more than once come near tripping him up in petty tricks. Secretly he hates me, for at bottom he is an arrogant old freebooter. And for all his grovelling last night, he is a dangerous man. By one means and another I know that he has made up his mind to put me in the lurch once this winter’s trade is turned. Without me, he can do little in the way of getting furs. Otherwise, I would be cooling my heels in MacLeod guardhouse yet. You may have guessed that he was the spirit which moved Blackie to pass in the knife and saw. “But once full arrangements are made, and the pelts begin to come in with spring, why, then—I don’t know what he will do, how he will engineer his plan to eliminate my interest in the profits. He has some card up his sleeve. Half of everything is mine, but I have nothing to show it. There is nothing between us but his word! and that, I have learned at last, is a thing he can twist to suit the occasion. He has begun shaping things to suit himself on this trip. He cut a bit of the ground from under my feet back there in MacLeod. I’ll pay him for that, though; and he knows it. The finishing touch will come this winter, or in the spring. He hates me, just as he hates any man whom he cannot lead by the nose, and he will move like the old fox he is. There’s money in it—for him. And money and power are Simon Montell’s twin gods. “Between these cross-fires, I will have my hands more than full. I can only be in one place at a time. There is not a man with the bull-train, or among the few that remain in the North, but is under Montell’s thumb. Most of them could not understand if I told them. The thing is too subtle for their simple, direct minds. For that reason, I sought for some one I could trust to keep a clear eye open, and his ears cocked; for whatever Montell does he will do by stealth. That evening we fell in together at the foot of the Sweet Grass I was headed for the Sanders ranch, thinking to get Walt to come North with me. He would have enjoyed this sort of thing. You know how we fared that night. And you can see why, when the Police raid put him beyond my helping, I turned to you. I had you in mind all the while we lay in the guardhouse, but I hesitated to drag you into it, until I learned of the robbery charged to you. Then I went back for you, judging that of the two evils you would choose the one I offered.