"So I ought. But let me tell you, Lenore. I've been hopin' to get Nash dead to rights."
"What more do you want?" she demanded.
"I mean regardin' his relation to the I.W.W.… Listen. Here's the point. Nash has been tracked an' caught in secret talks with prominent men in this country. Men of foreign blood an' mebbe foreign sympathies. We're at the start of big an' bad times in the good old U.S. No one can tell how bad. Well, you know my position in the Golden Valley. I'm looked to. Reckon this I.W.W. has got me a marked man. I'm packin' two guns right now. An' you bet Jake is packin' the same. We don't travel far apart any more this summer."
Lenore had started shudderingly and her look showed her voiceless fear.
"You needn't tell your mother," he went on, more intimately. "I can trust you an' … To come back to Nash. He an' this Glidden—you remember, one of those men at Dorn's house—they are usin' gold. They must have barrels of it. If I could find out where that gold comes from! Probably they don't know. But I might find out if men here in our own country are hatchin' plots with the I.W.W."
"Plots! What for?" queried Lenore, breathlessly.
"To destroy my wheat, to drive off or bribe the harvest-hands, to cripple the crop yield in the Northwest; to draw the militia here; in short, to harass an' weaken an' slow down our government in its preparation against Germany."
"Why, that is terrible!" declared Lenore.
"I've a hunch from Jake—there's a whisper of a plot to put me out of the way," said Anderson, darkly.
"Oh—good Heavens! You don't mean it!" cried Lenore, distractedly.