But Idepski was not to be deflected from his purpose.
"That's all right," he said easily. "I'm coming to him presently. I gave you, at times, the whole length and breadth, and size, and capacity of the Sachigo of to-day. You got all that stuff. But I've saved up the plum. There's a new man come into it. His name's Sternford—Bull Sternford. Guess it's him I need to tell you about before I pass on to the other. It's taken me a while to locate all I needed. And I guess I had luck or I wouldn't have got it all yet."
For once the man's smile reached his eyes.
"What's his position—in Sachigo?" Hellbeam demanded.
"Right on top of the business side of it."
"A financial man?"
The banker's interest was obviously stirred. But Idepski shook his dark head.
"That's the queer of it," he said. "He's a youngster straight out of the forest with no sort of record except as a pretty tough fighting proposition. Here, let me hand it to you in my own way, and I'll answer any sort of question after. I got men chasing up the forest camps. You know that. Well, I get their reports right here in this city at my office. They're read carefully, and anything that looks good is coded, and sent on to me wherever I am. Well, right after I located this feller, Sternford, coming into Sachigo, I got word of some stuff reported from one of your own camps way out north-west of Lake St. Anac. Guess it's about the farthest north in that direction, and it's cut off from any other camp by a hundred miles. On the face of it the stuff didn't seem to need more than a single thought. It was to say my man was quitting the camp. He'd sifted it right through, but there wasn't a 'jack' in the camp with any sort of story worth wasting paper on. There wasn't a trace of our man that way, and he proposed drawing another cover. At the end of his report was one of those notes these boys never seem able to resist mixing up with their official work. It told me of one of those scraps that happened in the camps, and he seemed mighty struck by it. It was between the camp boss, Arden Laval, and a kid called Sternford. Say, when I read that name I jumped. I felt like handing my feller promotion right away. Well, his story was good anyway. It seems this camp boss is about the biggest bluff in the scrap way known to that country. The kid licked him. They fought nearly two hours, 'rough and tough.' And the kid would have killed his man, but for the interference of a missionary feller called Father Adam. He broke 'em loose with a gun, and when he got 'em loose he took the kid right away so he shouldn't hand out the homicide he reckoned to. This report was more than two months old when I got it. Anyway I got it after a feller called Bull Sternford, a queer name by the way, had jumped in on the Sachigo proposition."
The agent flung away his cigarette and helped himself afresh.
"Well," he went on, smiling, "I guess it didn't take me thinking five seconds. I set the wires humming asking a description of this fighting kid. I got it. It was my man. The feller at Sachigo. Well?"