The negotiations in connection with the transfer of the mine property were practically completed.  The money for the improvements effected had been paid.  There remained only a few minor matters to be settled, and for that a meeting was arranged at the mine on the evening of the following day.  At this meeting Kalman had with great reluctance agreed to be present.  The place of meeting was the original cave, which had been enlarged to form a somewhat spacious room, from which there had been run back into the hill a tunnel.  At the entrance to this tunnel a short cross-tunnel had been cut, with an exit on the side of the hill and at right angles to the mouth.  Across the ravine from the cave stood a small log building which Messrs. Rosenblatt and Sprink had used as an office during the month of their regime.  Further down the ravine were scattered the workmen’s cabins, now deserted.

In the preparing of plans for this last meeting Rosenblatt and Sprink spent long hours that day.  Indeed, it was late in the afternoon when their conference broke up.

An hour later found Malkarski, pale and breathless, at the door of Portnoff’s cabin, unable to recover his speech till Portnoff had primed him with a mug of Sprink’s best whiskey.

“What is it, my brother?” cried Portnoff, alarmed at his condition.  “What is it?”

“A plot!” gasped Malkarski, “a most damnable plot!  Give me another drink.”

Under the stimulus of the potent liquid, Malkarski was able in a few minutes between his gasps to tell his story.  Concealed by a lumber pile behind Rosenblatt’s shack, with his ear close to a crack between the logs, he had heard the details of the plot.  In the cross tunnel at the back of the cave bags of gunpowder and dynamite were to be hidden.  To this mass a train was to be laid through the cross tunnel to a convenient distance.  At a certain point during the conference Rosenblatt would leave the cave on the pretext of securing a paper left in his cabin.  A pile of brushwood at some distance from the cave would be burning.  On his way to his cabin Rosenblatt would fire the train and wait the explosion in his own shack, the accidental nature of which could easily be explained under the circumstances.  In order to remove suspicion from him, Rosenblatt was to appear during the early evening in a railway camp some distance away.  The plot was so conceived and the details so arranged that no suspicion could attach to the guilty parties.

“And now,” said Malkarski, “rush to Wakota, where I know Mr. French and Kalman are to be to-day.  I shall go back to the mine to warn them if by any chance you should miss them.”

Old Portnoff was long past his best.  Not for many years had he quickened his pace beyond a slow dog trot.  The air was heavy with an impending storm, the blazed trail through the woods was rough, and at times difficult to find, so that it was late in the evening when the old man stumbled into the missionary’s house and poured out his tale between his sobbing gasps to Brown and a Sergeant of the Mounted Police, who was present on the Queen’s business.  Before the tale was done the Sergeant was on his feet.