The Rules of the Game

by Stewart Edward White

He rode in silence for some time, breathing his horse mechanically every fifty feet or so of the steep trail. He was busily recalling and piecing together the fragments of what he had at the time considered an unimportant discussion, and which he had in part forgotten.

"It's a blind," he said at last; "Oldham is working for Baker."

"What makes you think that?"

"Something I heard once."

He rode on. The Basin was dropping away beneath them; the prospect to the north was broadening as peak after peak raised itself into the line of ascending vision. The pines, clinging to the steep, cast bars of shadow across the trail, which zigzagged and dodged, taking advantage of every ledge and each strip of firm earth. Occasionally they crossed a singing brook, shaded with willows and cottonwoods, with fragrant bay and alders, only to clamber out again to the sunny steeps.

Now Bob remembered and pieced together the whole. Baker had been bragging that he intended to pay nothing to the Government for his water power. Bob could almost remember the very words. "'They've swiped about everything in sight for these pestiferous reserves,'" he murmured to himself, "'but they encourage the honest prospector.... Oldham's got the whole matter ... '" and so on, in the unfolding of the very scheme by which these acres had been acquired. "Near headwaters," he had said; and that statement, combined with the fact that nothing had occurred to stir indistinct memories, had kept Bob in the dark. At the time "near headwaters" had meant to him the tract of yellow pine near the head of Sycamore Creek. So he had dismissed the matter. Now he saw clearly that a liberal construction could very well name the Basin as the headwaters of the drainage system from which Sycamore Creek drew, if not its source, at least its main volume of water. He exclaimed aloud in disgust at his stupidity; which, nevertheless, as all students of psychology know, typified a very common though curious phenomenon in the mental world. Suddenly he sat up straight in his saddle. Here, should Baker and the Modoc Mining Company prove to be one and the same, was the evidence of fraudulent intent! Would his word suffice? Painfully reconstructing the half-forgotten picture, he finally placed the burly figure of Welton. Welton was there too. His corroboration would make the testimony irrefutable.

Certainties now rushed to Bob's mind in flocks. If he had been stupid in the matter, it was evident that Baker and Oldham had not. The fight in Durham was now explained. All the demagogic arousing of the populace, the heavy guns brought to bear in the newspaper world, the pressure exerted through political levers, even the concerted attacks on the Service from the floors of Congress traced, by no great stretch of probabilities, to the efforts of the Power Company to stop investigation before it should reach their stealings. That, as California John had said, was the first defence. If all investigation could be called off, naturally Baker was safe. Now that he realized the investigation must, in the natural course of events, come to his holdings, what would be his second line?

Of course, he knew that Bob possessed the only testimony that could seriously damage him. Even Thorne's optimism had realized the difficulties of pressing to a conviction against such powerful interests without some evidence of a fraudulent intent. Could it be that the presence of this Saleratus Bill in company with Oldham meant that Baker was contemplating so sinister a removal of damaging testimony?

A moment's thought disabused him of this notion, however. Baker was not the man to resort to violence of this sort; or at least he would not do so before exhausting all other means. Bob had been, in a way, the capitalist's friend. Surely, before turning a gun man loose, Baker would have found out definitely whether, in the first place, Bob was inclined to push the case; and secondly, whether he could not be persuaded to refrain from introducing his personal testimony. The longer Bob looked at the state of affairs, the more fantastic seemed the hypothesis that the gun man had been brought into the country for such a purpose.

"Why do you suppose Oldham is up there with this Saleratus Bill?" he asked Ware at length.