What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask. He seemed not to hear Murphy's declaration at all. Now that he had the beans soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again. He did not care what Murphy did. Murphy, in Mike's estimation, was merely a conceited old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue. Let Murphy go to town if he liked. Mike had plans of his own. The old un, for instance, stirred Mike's curiosity a good deal. Why should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping around in the woods? They lived in the same cabin, and it seemed to Mike that she must know all about what the girl was doing and why she was doing it. And why didn't the men go tramping around like that, since they were all in together? Mike decided that the two women must be spies, and the men didn't know anything about it. Probably they were spying on the men, to get them in trouble with the government--which to Mike was a vast, formless power only a little less than the Almighty. It might be that the women were spies for some other government, and meant to have the men hanged when the time was ripe for it; in other words, when these queer mines with no gold in them were all done. But a spy spying on a spy smacked of complications too deep for Mike, with all his knuckle-cracking. He was lost in a maze of conflicting conjectures whenever he tried to figure the thing out. And who was the other spy that stayed up on Taylor Rock? There was smoke up there where should be no smoke. Mike had seen it. There were little flashes of light up there on sunny days--Mike had seen them also. And there was nothing in the nature of Taylor Rock itself to produce either smoke or flashes of light. No one but a spy would stay in so bleak a place. That was clear enough to Mike by this time; what he must find out was why one spy followed another spy. The very next day Marion left the cabin and set forth with a square package under her arm. Mike, watching from where he was at work getting out timbers for next year's assessment work on the claims, waited until she had passed him at a short distance, going down the trail toward Quincy. When she had reached the line of timber that stood thick upon the slope opposite the basin, he saw Kate, bulky in sweater and coat, come from the cabin and take the trail after Marion. When she also had disappeared in the first wooded curve of the trail, up the hill, Mike struck his axe bit-deep into the green log he was clearing of branches, and shambled after her, going by a short cut that brought him into the trail within calling distance of Kate.