tipped our
hand. Mr. Johnson can now examine the plans of mice or men that your
combined sagacities have so obligingly placed face upward before him, and
decide his policies at his leisure. If I were in his shoes, this is what
I would be at: I'd tell my wondrous tale to big money. And then I would
employ very many stranger men accustomed to arms; and when I went after
that mine, I would place under guard any reasonable and obliging
travelers I met, and establish a graveyard for the headstrong. And that's
what Johnson will do. He'll go to the Coast for capital, at the same
time sendin' young Stanley back to his native East on the same errand."

"You may be right," said Zurich, somewhat staggered. "If you are, their
find must be a second Verde or Cananea, or they would never have taken a
precaution so extraordinary as a false location. What on earth can have
happened to rouse their suspicions to that extent?"

"Man, I wonder at you!" said tall Eric. "You put trust in your brains,
your money, and your standing to hold you unstained by all your
left-handed business. You expect no man to take heed of you, when the
reek of it smells to high heaven. Well, you deceive yourself the more.
These things get about; and they are none so unobserving a people, south
of the Gila, where 't is fair life or death to them to note betweenwhiles
all manner of small things--the set of a pack, the tongue of a buckle,
the cleat of a mine ladder. And your persecution of young Stanley, now.
Was you expectin' that to go unremarked? 'T is that has made Peter
Johnson shy of all bait. 'T was a sorry business from the first--hazing
that boy; I take shame to have hand in it. And for every thousand of that
dirty money we now stand to lose a million."

"'T was a piker's game," sneered Dewing. "Not worth the trouble and risk.
We had about three thousand from Zurich to split between us; little
enough. Of course Zurich kept his share, the lion's share."

"You got the middleman's chunk, at any rate," retorted Zurich.

"I did the middleman's work," said the gambler tranquilly. "Now,
gentlemen, we have not been agreeing very well of late. Eric, in
particular, has been far from flattering in his estimates of my social
and civic value. We are agreed on that? Very well. I may have mentioned
my intelligence? And that I rate it highly? Yes? Very well, then. I shall
now demonstrate that my self-appraisal was justified by admitting that my
judgment on this occasio