Bill looked at his watch; it was eight o'clock. He stood up, wincing as his injured foot touched the floor, and hobbled across the room where he wrenched a rough, split shelf from the wall. This, together with some sticks of firewood, he rolled in a blanket, placing it near the stove. He added more wood until the bundle was about the size and shape of a man, and covered it with his other two blankets. Filling the broken stove with wood he blew out the lantern and limped silently out into the night. Two hours later Creed, bird's-eye spotter and bad man of the worn-out little town of Hilarity, knocked the ashes from his pipe and held a glowing brand to the dial of his watch. "The greener should be asleep by now," he muttered, and, rolling his blanket, kicked snow over the remnant of his camp-fire, picked up his rifle, and ascended the steep side of a deep ravine lying some two hundred yards to the westward of the clearing where Bill Carmody had encamped for the night. After leaving Moncrossen's office on the previous afternoon he had traveled all night, and reached Melton's old No. 8 in the early morning. All day he had slept by the side of his fire in the bottom of the ravine, and in the evening had lain in the cover of the scrub and watched the greener stable the horses and limp to the deserted shack. At heart Creed was a craven, a bullying swashbuckler, who bragged and blustered among the rheumy-eyed down-and-outers who nightly foregathered about Burrage's stove, but who was servile and cringing as a starved puppy toward Moncrossen and Stromberg, who openly despised him. They made good use of his ability to "spot" a bird's-eye tree as far as he could see one, however, an ability shared by few woodsmen, and which in Creed amounted almost to genius. The man had never been known to turn his hand to honest work, but as a timber pirate and peddler of rotgut whisky among the Indians, he had arisen to comparative affluence. His hate for the greener was abysmal and unreasoning, and had been carefully fostered by Moncrossen who, instinctively fearing that the new man would eventually expose his nefarious double-dealing with his employer, realized that at the proper time Creed could be induced to do away with the greener under circumstances that would leave him, Moncrossen, free from suspicion. In the framing of Bill Carmody, Stromberg had no part. Moncrossen could not fathom the big Swede, upon whose judgment and acumen he had come to rely in the matter of handling and disposing of the stolen timber. Several times during the winter he had tentatively broached plans and insinuated means whereby the Swede could "accidentally" remove his swamper from their path. The reversing of a hook which would cause a log to roll just at the right time on a hillside; the filing of a link; the snapping of a weakened bunk-pin, any one of these common accidents would render them safe from possible interference.