,' they said. Didn't want but sixty thousand for it; that
would give them thirty thousand apiece, after which they'd quit and live
on a ranch. No, they wouldn't go with him to inspect the mine; there
was the map. He couldn't miss it; man at the hotel would drive him out
there. There was, of course, a foot of snow on the ground, which
was frozen hard, but they had provided for that and had cut a lot of
cord-wood, intending to stay till spring. The Englishman could have the
wood to thaw out the ground."

"The Englishman went and found everything as the two prospectors had
said; thawed out the soil in half a dozen places; scooped up the dirt
and every shovelful panned out about twelve hundred to the ton. Then
he came back and paid the money; that was the last of it. Began to dig
again in the spring--and not a trace of anything."

"What was the matter?" asked Breen. So far his interest in mines had
been centred on the stock.

"Oh, the same old swindle," said Mason, looking around the table, a grim
smile on his face--"only in a different way."

"Was it salted?" called out a man from the lower end of the table.

"Yes," replied Mason; "not the mine, but the cord-wood. The two poor
prospectors had bored auger holes in each stick, stuffed 'em full of
gold dust and plugged the openings. It was the ashes that panned out
$1,200 to the ton."

Mason was roaring, as were one or two about him. Portman looked grave,
and so did Breen. Nothing of that kind had ever soiled their hands;
everything with them was open and above-board. They might start a
rumor that the Lode had petered out, throw an avalanche of stock on
the market, knock it down ten points, freezing out the helpless (poor
Gilbert had been one of them), buy in what was offered and then declare
an extra dividend, sending the stock skyward, but anything so low
as--"Oh, very reprehensible--scandalous in fact."

Hodges was so moved by the incident that he asked Breen if he would not
bring back that Madeira (it had been served now in the pipe-stem glasses
which had been crossed in finger-bowls). This he sipped slowly and
thoughtfully, as if the enormity of the crime had quite appalled him.
Mason was no longer a "rough diamond," but an example of what a "Western
training will sometimes do for a man," he whispered under his breath to
Crossbin.

With the departure of the last guest--one or two of them were a little
unsteady; not Mason, we may be sure--Jack, who had come home