Bill lay that night staring up at the whitish blur of his tent roof with a cloudy moon above it, and thought circles around the thing. Walter and John _couldn't_ be the thieves Al Freeman had called them. A thief cannot keep his fingers off other men's money. Walter and John had made money for many a man. But that painfully exact report of seeing and hearing Luella in Goldfield was true. It had to be true. That was something which no man could build convincingly out of his imagination; not to Bill, where Luella was concerned. She had a certain fixed idea in her talk, always. She seemed able to discriminate between subjects, and to stick to one for minutes at a time before drifting into other sentences that conveyed an entirely different impression of what might be going on back of those observant, yellow eyes. To one who did not know Luella, it would be impossible to simulate her uncanny imitation of intelligence,--which Bill more than half believed to be genuine reasoning power. Perhaps the bird was especially quick to read faces and to connect certain expressions on the countenance with certain groups of words. It could not be accident, in Bill's opinion. Accidents do not happen with consistent regularity, and Luella's remarks were usually pithy and to the point. It was therefore a fixed basis of reasoning, in Bill's mind, to grant the authenticity of Al Freeman's contention that Luella was at the bottom of the plot. Beyond that point, however, Bill continued to flounder in doubts. He hated himself for even speculating upon the dishonesty of Walter and John, although he had found them a bit touchy, a shade jealous of their authority and their judgment. Walter had assumed executive control; John, as treasurer, had the responsibility of keeping the accounts impeccable. Bill had attended the annual stockholders' meeting, on the last afternoon of the year, and he had been almost awed by the meticulousness of John Emmett's financial report. It had sounded like some carefully compiled government statistics, and Bill had been compelled to sit and listen to a careful reading. The reëlection of the Board of Directors had been a mere form. Bill, Walter and John were the directors,--Nevada demanding only three. They were as inevitably reëlected to the same offices. There had not been many stockholders present, the day being almost a holiday. Those who were present voted perfunctorily and with complete unanimity; indeed, so harmonious had been the meeting that every one may as well have stayed at home, save the secretary, Bill thought.