Murphy, having listened attentively thus far, settled back against the wall, swung a rough-shod foot and began nursing his pipe and elbow again.  “A-ah, an’ it’s the trail to Minnesota, then,” he commented disgustedly, nodding his head derisively.  “Umm-hmm—­it’s back in Minnesota ye’re wanderin’ befuddled with yer sphies.  So l’ave Minnesota wance more, Mike, an’ put some beans a-soakin’ like I explained t’ ye forty-wan times a’re’dy.  My gorry, they’re like bullets the way ye bile them fer an hour and ask that I eat thim.  An’ since yer eyes is so foine and keen, Mike, that ye can see sphies thick as rabbits in the woods, wud ye just pick out a few of the rocks, Mike, that will not come soft with all the b’ilin’ ye can give thim?  For if I come down wance more with me teeth on a rock, it’s likely I might lose me temper, I dunno.”

Mike grumbled and got out the beans, and Murphy went back to his smoking and his meditations.  He made so little of Mike’s outburst about the spies that he did not trouble to connect it with any one in the basin.  Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish, that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it.  So Murphy fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly be spent upon a few days’ spree without endangering the grubstake he planned to take into the farther mountains in the spring.  Murphy had been sober now for a couple of months, and he was beginning to thirst for the liquid joys of Quincy.  Presently he nodded his head slowly, having come to a definite conclusion in his argument with himself.

“I think I’ll be goin’ t’ town in the marnin’, Mike, av I kin git a little money from the boss,” he said, lookin’ up.  “It’s comin’ cold, an’ more shnow, I’m thinkin’, an’ I must have shoepacs, I dunno.  So we’ll be up early in the marnin’, an’ it’s a hefty two-hours walk t’ town fer anny man—­more now with the shnow.  An’ I be thinkin’—­”

What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask.  He seemed not to hear Murphy’s declaration at all.  Now that he had the beans soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again.  He did not care what Murphy did.  Murphy, in Mike’s estimation, was merely a conceited old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue.  Let Murphy go to town if he liked.  Mike had plans of his own.

The old un, for instance, stirred Mike’s curiosity a good deal.  Why should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping around in the woods?  They lived in the same cabin, and it seemed to Mike that she must know all about what the girl was doing and why she was doing it.  And why didn’t the men go tramping around like that, since they were all in together?  Mike decided that the two women must be spies, and the men didn’t know anything about it.  Probably they were spying on the men, to get them in trouble with the government—­which to Mike was a vast, formless power only a little less than the Almighty.  It might be that the women were spies for some other government, and meant to have the men hanged when the time was ripe for it; in other words, when these queer mines with no gold in them were all done.