Then he came back.

"I'll take that money."

"Good."

Peter paid it over, and then watched the other as he took the original message which Slosson had written off a file and laid it on the table beside a blank form.

"Say, be as sharp as you can over it," Steve said urgently. Then he passed into the inner room and closed the door.

The interior of Mike Callahan's livery barn was typical of a small prairie town. Rows of horse-stalls ran down either side of it, from one end to the other. At the far end sliding doors opened out upon an enclosure, round which were the sheds sheltering a widely varied collection of rigs and buggies. Also here there was further accommodation for horses. Just inside the main barn, to the left, the American Irishman had two small rooms. The one at the front, with its window on Main Street, was his office. Behind this, dependent for light upon a window at the side of the building, was a harness-room crowded with saddles and harness of every description, also a bunk on which Mike usually slept when he kept the barn open at night.

It was late at night now, about midnight on the day following Peter McSwain's momentous effort with Steve Mason. Four men were gathered together in profound council in Mike's harness-room. The atmosphere of the place was poisonous. A horse blanket obscured the window, and the door was shut and locked, although the barn itself was closed for the night, and there was small enough chance of intrusion. Still, every precaution had been taken to avoid any such contingency.

A single guttering candle stuck in the neck of a black bottle illumined the intent faces of the men. Gordon was sitting at a small table with a sheet of paper in front of him and a small morocco-bound book beside it. Silas Mallinsbee and Peter McSwain were sitting upon Mike Callahan's emergency bunk, while the owner of it contented himself with an upturned bucket near the door. Cigar-smoke clouded the room and left the atmosphere choking, but all of them seemed quite impervious to its inconvenience.

For awhile there was no other sound than the rustle of the leaves of Gordon's book and the scratching of the indifferent pen he had borrowed from Mike. Then, after what seemed interminable minutes, he looked up from his task with a transparent smile.

"It's all right," he said in a low, thrilling tone. "I guess we've got the game in our hands. He's used the governor's code."

"You can read it?" demanded Peter quickly, leaning forward with a stiff, tense motion.

"Is it what we guessed?" inquired Mike, with a sigh of relief.

Mallinsbee alone offered no comment.

Gordon nodded in answer to each inquiry. He was reading what he had written over to himself.

Then he turned sharply to Peter.

"For goodness' sake give me a cigar. I need something to keep me from shouting."

His tone, and the expression of his eyes were full of excitement.

"It's the greatest luck ever," he went on, while Peter produced a cigar and passed it across to him. "This feller's in direct communication with the governor. You see, this code is the private one. I had it as the dad's secretary. The manager had it, and, of course, my father.

No one else. So it's just about certain this thing was an important matter for Slosson to be allowed to use it. Now I'd never heard of this Slosson before, so that it's also evident he's one of my father's secret agents. A matter which further proves the affair's importance."

He lit his cigar and puffed at it leisurely as he contemplated his paper with even greater satisfaction.

"This is addressed direct to the old man, which--makes our work doubly easy," he went on. "Also the nature of the message helps us. If it had been to our manager it would have been more difficult to work out my plans."

He raised the paper so that the candlelight fell full upon it.

"This is the transcript. 'Occipud, New York'--that's my father," he added in parenthesis.

"'Have bought in Snake's Fall, working on instructions. Buffalo Point crowd out for a heavy graft. Utterly unscrupulous lot, offering impossible deal. Have turned them down on grounds provided for in your instructions. Snake's Fall everything you require. Would suggest you come up here incognito, if possibly convenient. There are other propositions in coal worth a deep consideration. Coal deposits here the greatest in the country. Must come an enormous boom. Will send word later on this matter. Am sending letter covering operations. I think it will be urgent that you visit this place shortly in interests of boom as well as the coal.--SLOSSON.'"

Gordon looked round at the faces of his companions in silent triumph.

And in each case he encountered a keen expectancy. As yet his fellow conspirators were rather in the dark. The significance of that transcript was not yet sufficiently clear.

"What comes next?" inquired Mallinsbee in his calm, direct fashion.

The others simply waited for enlightenment.

Gordon chuckled softly.

"Now we know we can get at Slosson's messages and my father's messages to him, and, having the code book, by a miracle of good luck, in my possession, the rest is easy. First, Peter must get a copy of my father's reply to this. Meanwhile I shall send an urgent message to my father in Slosson's name to _come up here at once_. The answer to that must never reach Slosson. Get me, Peter? You've got that boy Steve where you need him. You must hold him there and pay his price. I'll promise him he'll come to no harm. When my father finds out things I'll guarantee to pacify him. This way we'll get my father here, I'll promise you. And when he does get here the fun 'll begin--as we have arranged. That clear? Mike's got his work marked out. You yours, Peter. Mr. Mallinsbee and I will do the rest. Peter, you did a great act laying hands on this message. It was worth double the price. The whole game is now in our hands."

Gordon folded up the paper and placed it inside the code book, which he carefully returned to his pocket.

Mike rubbed his hands.

"Say, it's sure a great play," he said gleefully.

"And seein' you're his son the risk don't amount to pea-shucks," nodded the perspiring hotel proprietor.

"You can be quite easy on that score," laughed Gordon. "I can promise you this: it won't be the old dad's fault, when this is over, if you don't find yourselves gathered around a mighty convivial board somewhere in New York--at his expense. You know my father as a pretty bright financier. I don't guess you know him as the sportsman I do."

Mallinsbee suddenly bestirred himself and removed his cigar.

"I kind o' wish he weren't your father, Gordon, boy," he said bluntly.

"It sort of seems tough to me."

Gordon's eyes shot a whimsical smile across at Hazel's father.

"I'd hate to have any other, Mr. Mallinsbee," he said. "Maybe I know how you're feeling about it. But I tell you right here, if my father knew I had this opportunity and didn't take it, he'd turn his face to the wall and never own me as his son again. You're reckoning that for a son to do his father down sort of puts that son on a level with David Slosson or any other low down tough. Maybe it does. But I just think my father the bulliest feller on earth, and I love him mighty hard. I love him so well that I'd hate to give him a moment's pain. I tell you frankly that it would pain him if I didn't take this opportunity. It would pain him far more than anything we intend to do to him--when we get him here."

He rose from his seat and his good-natured smile swept over the faces of his companions.

"How do you say, gentlemen? Our work's done for to-night. Are we for bed?"

CHAPTER XVIII

WAYS THAT ARE DARK

The people of Snake's Fall were in the throes of that artificial excitement which ever accompanies the prospect of immediate and flowing wealth in a community which has been feverishly striving with a negative result.

Nor was this excitement a healthy or agreeable wave of emotion. It was aggressive and vulgar. It was hectoring and full of a blatant self-advertisement. Men who had never done better for themselves than a third-rate hotel, or who had never used anything more luxurious than a street car for locomotion in their ordinary daily life, now talked largely of Plaza hotels and automobiles, of real estate corners and bank balances. They sought by every subterfuge to exercise the dominance of their own personalities in the affairs of the place, only that they might the further enhance their individual advantage.

Schemes for building and trading were in everybody's minds, and money, so long held tight under the pressure of doubt, now began to flow in one incessant stream towards the coffers of the already established traders.

Every boom city is more or less alike, and Snake's Fall was no variation to the rule. Gambling commenced in deadly earnest, and the sharpers, with the eye of the vulture for carrion, descended upon the place. How word had reached them would have been impossible to tell.

Then came the accompaniment of loose houses, and every other evil which seems to settle upon such places like a pestilential cloud.

To Gordon, looking on and waiting, it was all a matter of the keenest interest, not untinged with a certain wholesome-minded disgust, and when he sometimes spoke of it in the little family circle at the ranch, or to the worldly-wise Mike Callahan in his barn, his talk was never without a hint of real regret.

"It makes a feller feel kind of squeamish watching these folks," he observed to Mike, as they sat smoking in the latter's harness-room one afternoon. "You see, if I didn't know the whole game was lying in the palm of my hand I'd just simply sicken at the sordidness of it. We can't feel that way, though. We're worse than them. They're just dead in earnest to beat the game by the accepted rules of it, which don't debar general crookedness. We're out to win by sheer piracy. Makes you laugh, doesn't it? Makes it a good play."