"If that had been all, I wouldn't have called you up here," he
continued. "I've taken a long time in coming down to the real hell
of the affair, because I wanted you to understand the situation
from the beginning. After I left Brokaw I came north again. I
possessed all the funds necessary to make an honest working
organization out of the Northern Fish and Development Company. I
hired two hundred additional men, added twenty new fishing-
stations, began a second road-bed to the main line, and started a
huge dam at Blind Indian Lake. We had thirty horses, driven up
through the wilderness from Le Pas, and twenty teams on the way.
There didn't appear to be an important obstacle in the path of our
success, and I had recovered most of my old enthusiasm when Brokaw
sprung a new mine under my feet.

"He had written a long letter almost immediately after I left him,
which had been delayed at several places. In it he told me that he
had discovered a plot to wreck our enterprise, that some powerful
force was about to be pitted against us in the very country we
were holding. I could see that Brokaw was tremendously worked up
when he wrote the letter, and that for once he felt himself
outwitted by a rival faction, and realized to the full a danger
which it took me some time to comprehend. He had discovered
absolute evidence, he said, that the bunch of trust capitalists
whom he had beaten were about to attack us in another way. Their
forces were already moving into the north country. Their object
was to stir up the country against us, to bring about that
condition of unrest and antagonism between the people of the north
and ourselves which would compel the government to take away our
license. Remember, this license was only provisional. It was, in
fact, left to the people of the north to decide whether we should