“You said that I was a partner of Jed’s and directed all the scullduggery. That is hardly likely, but suppose that it were true. You can’t prove it. You think that I recommended Dugan’s appointment, but I didn’t. He was assigned to us by the district office and nobody on the forest had anything to say about it. You may say that I had the district office appoint him, but you can’t prove it. There is no proof that I am Jed Clark’s partner. It does not exist. You may know—it beats me how you found it out if you do, but you may know—that I hold a mortgage on Jed’s ranch. Even that would be hard to prove for the mortgage is not recorded. But a mortgage is no proof of partnership or even of complicity.
“You have woven a web of circumstantial evidence around me that looks bad. It would not stand in a court of law for a minute, but it will look nasty and will ruin my reputation. It will not do you any good to lose out in the law suit. In fact it may harm you with a lot of people because it will look as though you were trying to slip something over on me to push your own advancement. Of course you want to make good. You want to clean up this crooked business and make the best showing that you can. But I do not believe that you want to ruin a man for nothing.”
“You are perfectly safe in thinking that,” Scott said. He thought that Dawson was trying to pump him to see what information he really had. Yet, the ranger was not asking many questions or giving him much chance to talk. He could not make out just what the game was. It was too deep for him.
“I thought so,” Dawson said resuming his story. “When I first came to this country ten years ago I had lived on the prairies all my life and hated them. They were so flat that you could look till your eyes ached and not see anything. The wind blew from one week’s end to the next and there was no getting away from it. I fell in love with these old mountains as soon as I laid eyes on them and I would have taken any job which would have given me a chance to be in them and live. This forest service job was better than that. It gave me a home in the heart of the mountains, a good living and a little more. I had a good business head and I invested my savings in sheep. I was successful and amassed a small capital. I could have left the service and made a fortune in sheep, but I liked the mountains too well to leave them for wealth. I accumulated considerable property more as mental exercise than anything else. I had no use for the money and would not leave the mountains and this outdoor life for any amount of wealth.
“So you see what my life here and my reputation mean to me and how little I care for the money I have made. You on the other hand are a young man, probably seeking your fortune in any field that shows the best chances. There is big money in sheep for the man who will devote his life to it.
“I have tried to show you what this life means to me. I think I have shown you how utterly impossible it would be for you to prove your case. You will only succeed in ruining me without helping either yourself or the service.”
“I can’t agree with you,” Scott said, “because I think that I can prove all those things.” The man talked so frankly and pled so earnestly that it was hard to believe him utterly false. Scott began reviewing his evidence to see if it was really as purely circumstantial as Dawson had said it was.
Dawson looked at him keenly and thought that he was wavering. “Drop this impossible charge against me,” he said suddenly, “and all my accumulations of the past ten years are yours.”
So that was his game? All this smooth story was but the craftily laid background for the offering of a bribe. He was taking the last desperate chance of buying himself out of a hole which he knew to be otherwise hopeless.
Scott’s growing sympathy turned instantly to disgust. “You can’t bribe me,” he sneered contemptuously, “any more than your hired cutthroat could bluff me.”