"Jest west of the Scaur, about an hour and a half ago. Wier and me was stockin' the head of Scaur Brook with fingerlings. There's more good water — two miles of it — to the east, and all it needed was a fish-ladder around Scaur Falls.
"So I toted in cement and sand and grub last week, and I built me a shanty on the Scaur, and I been laying up a fish-way around the falls. So that's how I come there——" He clicked his teeth and darted a furious glance at the woods. "By God," he said, "I was such a fool I didn't take no rifle. All I had was an axe and a few traps. … I wasn't going to let the mink get our trout whatever you fellows say," he added defiantly, "— and law or no law——"
"Get along with your story, young man," interrupted Lannis; "— you can spill the rest out to the Commissioner."
"All right, then. This is the way it happened down to the Scaur. I was eating lunch by the fish-stairs, looking up at 'em and kind of planning how to save cement, and not thinking about anybody being near me, when something made me turn my head. … You know how it is in the woods. … I kinda felt somebody near. And, by cracky! — there stood a man with a big, black automatic pistol, and he had a bead on my belly.
"`Well,' said I, `what's troubling you and your gun, my friend?' — I was that astonished.
"He was a slim-built, powerful guy with a foreign face and voice and way. He wanted to know if he had the honour — as he put it — to introduce himself to a detective or game constable, or a friend of Mike Clinch.
"I told him I wasn't any of these, and that I worked in a private hatchery; and he called me a liar."
Young Fry's face flushed and his voice began to quiver:
"That's the way he misused me; and he backed me into the shanty and I had to sit down with both hands up. Then he filled my pack-basket with grub, and took my axe, and strapped my kit onto his back. … And talking all the time in his mean, sneery, foreign way — and I guess he thought he was funny, for he laughed at his own jokes.
"He told me his name was Quintana, and that he ought to shoot me for a rat, but he wouldn't because of the stink. Then he said he was going to do a quick job that the police were too cowardly to do; — that he was a-going to find Mike Clinch down to Drowned Valley and kill him; and if he could catch Mike's daughter, too, he'd spoil her face for life——"