you: do you happen to know where you could lay hands on three or four
good constructing engineers--men you could turn loose absolutely and
trust implicitly? I'm putting this up to you because the Plug Mountain
exile has taken me a bit out of touch."

"Why--yes," said Frisbie, taking time to call the mental roll. "There
are Major Benson and his son Jack--you know 'em both--just in off their
job in the Selkirks. Then there is Roy Brissac; he'd be a pretty good
man in the field; and Chauncey Leckhard, of my class,--he's got a job in
Winnipeg, but he'll come if I ask him to, and he is the best office man
I know. But what on top of earth are you driving at, Stuart?"

Ford cleared his pipe of the ash and refilled it.

"I'll go into the details with you a little later. We shall have plenty
of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good
bit more privacy. The thing I'm trying to figure out will burst like a
bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and"--lowering his
voice--"I can't trust my office force here. _Savez?_"

"I _savez_ nothing as yet," laughed the new supervisor, "but perhaps I
shall if you'll tell me what is going to happen in the next month or six
weeks."

"I'm coming to that, right now. How would you like to take a hunting
trip over on the wilderness side of the range? There are big woods and
big game."

Frisbie grinned. He was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by
the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches