"It's too bad you didn't run Plimsoll out of the county, or the state,"

remarked the spinster. "He'll not rest until he does you some sneakin'

injury, soon as he figgers out what'll do you the most harm."

"An' him the least risk," remarked Sam.

"Since the excitement is temp'rarily over," said Miranda dryly, looking at where Mormon snored beneath blankets, "I reckon we better all foller his example. If that man Keith wants to buy my claims I'm willin' to sell. Milkin' is more in my line than minin', I've decided. I had a fool idea we'd pick up nuggets, top of the ground. From what Mr. Westlake tells me, you got to put out a lot of money before you even find out whether you're goin' to see the color of gold."

"Let's hold a pow-wow before we turn in," said Sandy. "Westlake, what do you know about Keith? Anything?"

"I've heard of him. I imagine he started out as a promoter rather than a developer. He has made some lucky strikes. There is no doubt but that he can float this proposition on a large scale, induce others to put money into it. The least likely-looking properties he'll put on the market and tie them up with the reports of any strikes he, or others, may make. He'll put the camp on a working basis. If the gold's here that will be a sound one. You see, Miss Bailey, not every porphyry d.y.k.e is going to have a gold lining."

"Do you figger it w'ud pay best to sell him outright or let him form a company?" asked Sandy.

"For your claims, or these of Miss Bailey and her nephew?"

"All of 'em. Didn't you say they were all on the same syncline?"

"Yes. You really want to go by my opinion? I am not too experienced."

"You know a darn sight mo' about it than we do. I'm not takin' Keith's opinion on anything he wants to buy. He's tipped his hand already in showin' how far an' fast he came here. Probably had Plimsoll tied up on an option or he w'udn't have said 's much as he did."

"Then--there is no doubt in my mind that Patrick Casey picked the best side of the gulch. The indications are in sight there. This side the exposed reef may have been ground down below the sylvanite. There are glacial signs all around here. I would say sell these for cash, holding out on price until Keith refuses to offer more. He'll come back for a final bid. But let him organize with your claims."

"The Molly Casey Mine? With fifty-one per cent. of the shares, if we can't get more?"

"He'll squeal like a pig before he grants that," said Westlake. "But he'll have to come through to your terms. Those claims are the big bet of this camp, and he knows it."

It would have surprised Keith had he known how accurately the young engineer he had glanced at and dismissed as almost an amateur at the game, followed the trend of his scheming. There is not much variation in the methods of Mining Promotion, and Westlake was an observer and a conserver of the pith of what he had seen.

"Fifty-one per cent., an' the name's Molly Casey, then," said Sandy.

"What's more, you're to be consulting engineer or whatever they call the fat job, Westlake. I'm dawg-tired. Sam, let's you an' me shack over to our claims. We'll leave Mormon where he is till he gits his sleep out, if you've no objection, marm?"

Sandy, Sam and Mormon returned to the Three Star with the papers drawn and signed and the shares of stock issued that gave twenty-six per cent.

of the Molly property to her and twenty-five to the three partners.

Keith returned to New York with his forty-nine per cent. to weave his plans for the full development of the claims he had acquired.

While he lacked the controlling interest, there was always, he fancied, a chance of division between the four who held control. Either he could get the girl to vote apart from the three partners or he might split them some way or another. But, wisely, he did not count on this. And he took up the task of exploitation with zest, Blake, primed with material and notes gathered on the spot, a ready and expert a.s.sistant.

When Wilson Keith made up his mind there was money in a plan--money for Wilson Keith--he lost no time in planning and carrying out all details.

He loved the excitement of the gamble, he loved to evolve some play for which he could pat himself upon the back and tell himself how much cleverer he was than the public, swimming up to his golden-baited hooks like so many fish. Thornton, expert mining engineer, believed the prospects good for the new camp at Casey Town; but Keith, with Blake, who was a wizard at publicity, delighted most in the way it lent itself to exploitation.

Blake, nosing here and listening there, while Keith satisfied himself as to the legality of Sandy's guardianship of Molly and the powers that had been granted him to look after all her interests, a.s.suring himself of the speciousness of Plimsoll's claim for grubstake interest. Blake, weaving fact into fiction, compiled the romance of Molly Casey, daughter of the wandering prospector, Patrick Casey; her father's trail-chum by mountain and desert; the death of Casey, the rescue of Molly, the strike at Dynamite.

Much about Sandy's part in it all Blake did not use. He learned little and said nothing of Plimsoll's attempt to get the girl under his control, of the wild ride across the county line. Blake's general canniness concentrated wherever his personal interests were concerned and he had made up his mind that Sandy Bourke was a man whom it would not pay to offend. He might never see the story in print, then again he might, and Blake, very likely, would return to Casey Town once in a while with Keith.

But it was a good story. A Sunday feature story if he could strengthen it a little. If the mine made the girl a millionairess it would carry the yarn as sheer news, but Blake wanted the story to help to carry the mine, to bring in the money from the outside to exploit Casey Town and the Keith holdings.

Keith had the capital and was willing enough to put it into developing the Molly Mine if necessary, but it was a business principle of his never to use his own money when he could get hold of some one else's.

His stock in the Molly Mine he meant to hold on to, not to sell, but, with the profits from the sale of his promoter's shares of the "Groups,"

he expected to mine the Molly claims.

He had turned his eyes toward oil of late, scenting quick turns and this took money. His wife took more, his son, just out of college, took all that he could get. Mrs. Keith seemed to regard her husband's bank-account much as the wife of a farmer might regard the spring in the meadow. With the extravagance of the post-war period, the advance in prices, the amounts she spent were staggering even to Keith, who set no limits on his own ability to make money. To suggest retrenchment would not merely have had small effect upon his wife, but any curtailment would infallibly hurt the standing of the Keith investments. New York was full of people with money to invest. Profiteering, easy-come money, a lot of it. Easy-go money, too, when the profiteers, still dazzled by their riches, totally unconscious of real values, would meet Keith, thinking their money an open sesame to equality with such financiers.

Then Keith entertained them, taking them to his clubs--not his best--to his home where he dazzled them, fogged them in an atmosphere where they were ill at ease though striving to cover it; Keith, drawing them aside when the time was ripe, would tell them of their shrewdness, confess a liking, almost an admiration for them--and let them in on the ground floor.

There were the many who could not be touched personally and, for these, Blake prepared the literature and laid his schemes for real newspaper publicity. Submitting them to Keith, the latter approved. Mrs. Keith was to look Molly up at her school, take her into the Keith home on vacations, introduce her into the social whirl. The right newspapermen would see her, meet her, get the story from Blake of her romantic childhood, with photographs of the Western Heiress in the Park on Horseback. There would be drawings by staff artists of the way she and her father appeared wandering through the desert, discovering the claims, her father's grave, anything to round out the human interest.

Moreover, she could be introduced to the right people, that was Mrs.

Keith's end of it.

Then would come the prospectuses with these extracts of the best paragraphs, tied up with views of Casey Town, with engineers' reports, with semi-scientific stuff about sylvanite, a masterpiece of romance and fiction, peppered with fact. The whole to be t.i.tled _White Gold_.

Advertis.e.m.e.nts, headed _White Gold_, offering the shares. Personal letters to those on the carefully selected lists of _Preferred Investors_. Offices of the Casey Town Mining Company with alluring specimens behind gla.s.s cases, with models of mining machinery and of sections of mines, framed maps and drawings, blue-prints, a chunk of sylvanite ore in a railed-off enclosure with the legend of its marvelous value. Many, most, of these lures, had done service in previous enticements of Keith, but they still held good. They were a good deal like the fake mermaids, the skulls and odds and ends in the window of a palmist, all bait, of better quality, more deftly arranged and displayed, part of the fakir's kit, bait for goldfish. Also bra.s.s rails, fine rugs, mahogany furniture, a ticker, busy and pretty stenographers.

Blake submitted his clever campaign, worthy of better things, and Keith approved of it. That the partners of the Three Star as fifty-one per cent, owners, or Molly Casey herself with them, should be consulted or informed, never entered his head.

Of course there was always a chance of the investors realizing heavily if Casey Town turned up big production. Keith hoped it would. Provided he made all the money he wanted, he was always willing to have others get hold of some, especially when he would be regarded by them as the benefactor who had given them the golden opportunity. He would reap the major harvest, and success would open up the way for other fields--perhaps in oil. Keith had some a.s.sociates who rather scoffed at his gold-mining promotion as out-of-date. Oil was quicker, more in the public eye. Every time the price of gasoline or kerosene went up the American automobile-owning public thought of oil, they were primed perpetually toward its possibilities.

But Keith was still in gold. He knew all the technique of that branch of speculation and Blake's campaign was carried out most successfully. Mrs.

Keith descended overwhelmingly upon Molly at her school, chauffeur and footman on the driving seat of her luxurious sedan; gasped a little when she saw that Molly was a beauty, could be made an unusual one with the right dressing, the right setting.

Her brain, which was keen enough in business matters, told her that she could improve her husband's program of using Molly as an attraction to bring investors to the Keith residence. It might be a good thing--Mrs.

Keith was quick at dealing with the future--if her son, Donald, fell in love with Molly, the heiress. She wrote to the Three Star Ranch, to Sandy Bourke, guardian of Molly Casey, without Molly's knowledge. Sandy read the letter aloud to his partners.

DEAR MR. BOURKE:

I feel that I should write this letter to you although I have never met you, rather than my husband, since the question is one that a woman can handle better than a man,--that only a woman can understand and appreciate.

I have seen your Molly and she has entirely captivated me.

She is really wonderful, with wonderful possibilities. She is more than pretty, she is talented and she possesses character in a marked degree that sets her aside from the rest. It is this difference, this broadness of view, perhaps a certain intolerance of conventionality, that make me feel that, much as it has done for her, and that has been largely due to her own endeavors, this school, or any school, is not the place for her best development.

I want to take her into my home, Mr. Bourke. She is practically a woman grown, much more so than the girls with whom she a.s.sociates. This, I suppose, is due to her early experiences. There she would be under my own eye, which will be a maternal one, and she can have private tutoring in what she still lacks. I think she feels the need of the companionship and advice of an older woman, rather than that of the girls at the school.

I wish I could talk with you personally about this. Letters are such inadequate things. But I know, from Mr. Keith, that you have her interests at heart--and so have I. I shall dearly love to have her with me. I have, of course, said absolutely nothing to her about this plan before I hear from you, but I feel confident from what I have seen of her, that she will be happier in a home, with some one, who, however poorly, may take the place of the mother she must have missed all these years.

Let me hear from you soon. If my health and other matters permit, I must try to come out with Molly before very long.

Mr. Keith has seen this letter and approves of my suggestion to have Molly with us.

Most sincerely yours, ELIZABETH VERNON KEITH.

It was a clever letter. There were several touches about it that almost amounted to genius. The hints of Molly's unhappiness so cleverly suggested, the mother suggestion, the need of companionship and advice from an older woman, Molly's intolerance of conventionalities, all went home; though it was some time before the trio entirely absorbed the meaning of the glossy phrases and glib vocabulary. The letter pa.s.sed about in silence after Sandy had read it, Sam and Mormon plowing through the maze of the fashionable script.

"Reckon she's right," said Mormon. "Molly's different. She had a mighty hard time of it along with her old man, compared to what them soft-skinned snips must have had. Stands to reason she c'udn't be like 'em, any mo' than Sam c'ud be easy in his spiketail suit, or me handin'

ice-cream at a swarry. Not that Molly 'ud make no breaks, but their ways w'udn't be her'n, most of the time. How 'bout it, Sam?"

"This Mrs. Keith must live high," said Sam. "She w'udn't be botherin'

about Molly if she didn't see a heap of promise in her. I mind me it must be tough to be herded inter a corral where you got to learn all over ag'in how to handle yore feet an' hands, not to mention forks. This Keith woman's spotted Molly ain't easy at school. The other gals like her, but they ain't her style. She's range bred an' free. Those other fillies have been brought up in loose boxes. They probably don't mean to hurt her feelin's none, but I 'low they snicker once in a while if Molly forgets the right sa.s.shay. An' Molly's proud as they make 'em. Sounds good to me. What you think, Sandy? It's up to you as her guardeen."