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78 and Easton supplied them with everything. They owned the electric light plant and the water works. Indeed, they owned and controlled everything that the cottagers were obliged to have, and netted a fine income each year.

All this was a challenge to Jarrod. The fires of his mental energy must be fed, even when he was "resting," and without the slightest personal antagonism to Wilder and Easton, but simply because he saw there was a battle to be fought for the cottagers, whose ranks he had joined, his logical mind began to figure out ways and means to force the fighting.

A day or two later the lawyer took the electric car to Kochton and read a little Michigan law in the office of a friendly attorney. The result apprised him that he was uncovering nothing more than a huge game of "bluff," which had been played so long and with such amazing assurance