at's all I ask of you. If you
think I'm wrong you're welcome to vote against me; but believe me, this
is no Sunday-school job. There's a big fight coming on, I can feel it
in my bones, and the best two-handed scrapper wins. Old W. H.
Stoddard, when he had me in jail and was hoping I was going to be sent
up, he tried to buy me out of this mine. He started at nothing and
went up to twenty million, so you can guess how much it's worth."

"Twenty million!" she echoed.

"Yes; twenty million--and that ain't a tenth of what he might be
willing to pay. Can you think that big? Two hundred million dollars?
Well then, imagine that much money thrown down on the desert for him
and me to fight over. Do you think it's possible to be pleasant and
polite, and always reasonable and just, when you're fighting a man
that's never quit yet, for a whole danged mountain of copper?" He rose
up and shook himself and swelled out his chest and then looked at her
and smiled. "Just remember that, in the days that are coming, and give
me the benefit of the doubt."

"But I don't believe it!" she exclaimed incredulously. "What ground
have you for that valuation of the mine?"

"Well, his offer, for one thing," answered Rimrock soberly. "He never
pays what a thing is worth. But did you see Mr. Jepson when I went
into the assay house and began looking at those diamond-drill cores?
He was sore, believe me, and the longer I stayed there the more fidgety
Jepson got. That ore assay's big, but the thing that I noticed is that
all of it carries some values. You can begin at the foot of it and
work that whole mountain and every cubic foot would pay. And that
peacock ore, that copper glance! That runs up to forty per cent. Now,
here's a job for you as secretary of the Company, a little whirl into
the higher mathematics. Just find the cubic contents of Tecolote
mountain and multiply it by three per cent. That's three per cent.
copper, and according to those assays the whole ground averages that.
Take twenty claims, each fifteen hundred feet long, five hundred feet
across and say a thousand feet deep; pile the mountain on top of them,
take copper at eighteen cents a pound and give me the answer in dollars
and cents. Then figure it out another way--figure out the human
cussedness that that much copper will produce."

"Why--really!" cried Mary as she sat staring at him, "you make me
almost afraid."

"And you can mighty well be so," he answe