been gophering around
this country for years, never touching a colour, grub running low,
and--well, there ain't any use bothering with that part now. I can
think it up when the time comes. Here's the cream of the plant. We've
had such a darn hard time of it that when at last, under the
extraordinary circumstances which I have recounted before, we light on
the almost undiluted gold of the Golden Queen, your mind is so weakened
that you can't stand the strain of prosperity. You're haunted with
delusions that you're still a poor man, and I can't keep any decent
clothes on you--fast as I buy 'em you tear 'em up. Now I'm willing to
sell the Golden Queen for the merely nominal sum of--what shall we
strike 'em for? Five hundred? For five hundred dollars, then, so I
can get out of this country to some place where my poor pardner will
receive good medical treatment."

"And I'm the goat?" says I. "Well, I expected that. But do you expect
anybody's going to swallow that guff? It's good. Ag, it would do fine
in a newspaper, but can you find a man to trade five hundred hard iron
dollars for it?"

Aggy drew himself up mighty proud. "I'll tell you what I've done in my
day," says he, "I've made an intelligent man believe that the first
story I told him wasn't so. Can you beat it?"

"I know you, Ag," says I. Then we had to slide down and see if we
could get a small loan off Uncle Peters, for we didn't have enough dust
to finance salting our sand-bank and pay for a trip to town, too. Ag
would have it that we must do our turn for the old man. "It'll amuse
him," says he, "and he's more likely to come forward." Truth of the
matter was, when Aggy got one of his fine idees, he had to let the
neighbourhood in.

Well, sir, Uncle Peters was that pleased he forked over a cartridgeful
without weighing it. My play was to look melancholy, and tear a slit
in my clothes once in a while. I had to just make believe that part
when we was rehearsing for the old man, as there wasn't enough material
to be extravagant with.

So up to town we goes, and if you ever see a picture of hard luck on
two feet, it was me.

"I'm going to strike for a gambling joint," says Ag. "You take a
tin-horn gam, and he knows everything, and that's just the kind of man
I'm looking for."

So when we hit town, Ag sails into the Palace Dance Emporium, where
they had the games running in the middle of the place between the lunch
counter and the bar. He