and the Timber thieves, and the Dummy homesteaders, and all that?  You can’t buck the combination, Dick!  It isn’t only Moyese!  He’s a mere tool himself in this game.  It’s the Ring you’re up against, and you can chase yourself all your life round that Ring, and never get anywhere.  The big dubs at Washington, the politicians, they are only spokes themselves in that wheel.  If you buck into that wheel, you get yourself tangled into a pulp; and if any of those dubs down in Washington thinks he won’t fit into the Ring, why he’ll find himself broken and jerked out so quick he won’t know what has happened till he sees the Wheel going round again with a new spoke in his place.”

“Bat, did you stay up here to say that to me?”

“No, I did not.”  With a twig Bat pushed down the tobacco in his pipe.  “I stayed up here, if you want to know, because we were on our way to the cow camp when the parson and his kid joined us.  I guess every man has his limit.  That cow-camp gang is mine.  I want to live a little longer; and I don’t want to know things that might make it useful for me to die.  When Moyese wants to deal with that gang, he can go it alone.”

“Brydges,” said Wayland, “you have given me some frank advice. I’m going to reciprocate.  You know what is going on out here.  You know why that Arizona gang comes up here.  You know why we can’t touch them—­they are off the Range of the Forest.  You know about the stolen coal for the Smelter Ring, thousands of acres of it; and the stolen timber limits for the Lumber Ring, millions of acres of them.  If the public knew, Bat, we’d win our fight.  It would be a walk over.  Every man jack of them would lie down, and stay put.  Why don’t you tell in your paper?  Why don’t you tell the truth when you send the dispatches East?  If you did, Bat, we could clean out the gang in a month.  Why don’t you play the game a man should play?  Every newspaper man likes a clean sporty fight; and no knifing in the back.  Why don’t you put up that fight for us, now, Brydges, and stop giving us side jabs?”

Brydges’ pipe fell from his teeth.

“Wayland—­what in hell—­do you think—­I’m working for?”

There was a big silence.

The look of masterdom came back to Wayland’s face; but he paused, looking straight ahead in space.  Perhaps he was looking for the hard grip of the next grapple.  He had a curious trick at such times of clinching his teeth very tight behind open lips; and the pupil of his eye became a blank.

“You are at least sincere, Brydges,” he said.  Bat gathered up his shattered pipe.

“I’m not a past-master, yet,” he said.  “I haven’t reached the point where I can believe my own lies; so I don’t tell ’em and get caught.  I’ve dug down in the mortuaries of other men too often—­long as a man doesn ’t believe his own lies, he’s on guard and doesn’t get caught.  It’s when he comes ping against a buzz-saw and finds it’s a fact that he has to pay or back down or lose out.  You can’t budge a fact, damn it!  Thing always shows the same!”