"How are you, Rick?" said the horseman familiarly. "What's going on?"

"Haven't _you_ heard?--_you_?" interrogated Rickart. "I thought it was funny you were loafing along so leisurely. Didn't you know to-day was the day for the rush?"

"I did," said Van. "What about it?"

"Not much," his friend replied, "except your claim has been jumped by McCoppet and one J. Searle Bostwick, who got on to the fact that the reservation line included all your ground."

Van looked his incredulity.

"What's the joke?" he said. "I bite. What's the answer?"

"Joke?" the cashier echoed. "Joke? They had the line surveyed through, yesterday, and Lawrence confirmed their tip. Your claim, I tell you, was on reservation ground, and McCoppet had his crowd on deck at six o'clock this morning. They staked it out, according to law, as the first men on the job after the Government threw it open--and there they are."

Van leaned against the counter carelessly, and looked at his friend unmoved.

"Who told you the story?" he inquired. "Who brought it into camp?"

"Why a dozen men--all mad to think they never got on," said Rickart, not without heat. "It's an outrage, Van! You might have fought them off if you'd been on deck, and made the location yourself! Where have you been?"

Van smiled. The neatness of the whole arrangement began to be presented to his mind.

"Oh, I was out of the way all right," he said. "My friends took care of that."

"I thought there was something in the wind, all along," imparted the little cashier. "Bostwick and McCoppet have been thicker than thieves for a week. But the money they needed wasn't Bostwick's. I wired to New York to get his standing--and he's got about as much as a pin. But the girl stood in, you bet! She's got enough--and dug up thirty thousand bucks to handle the crowd's expenses."

Van straightened up slowly.

"The girl?"

"Miss Kent--engaged to Bostwick--you ought to know," replied the man behind the counter. "She's put up the dough and I guess she's in the game, for she turned it all over like a man."

Van laughed, suddenly, almost terribly.

"Oh, h.e.l.l, Rick, come out and git a drink!" he said. "Here," as he noted a bottle in the desk, "give me some of that!"

Rickart gave him the bottle and a gla.s.s. He poured a stiff amber draught and raised it on high, a wild, fevered look in his eyes.

"Here's to the G.o.ds of law and order!" he said. "Here's to faith, hope, and charity. Here's to friendship, honor, and loyalty. Here's to the gallant little minority that love their neighbors as themselves.

Give me perfidy or give me death! Hurray for treason, strategy, and spoils!"

He drank the liquid fire at one reckless gulp, and laughing again, in ghastly humor, lurched suddenly out at the open door and across to the nearest saloon.

Rickart, in sudden apprehension for the "boy" he genuinely loved, called out to him shrilly, but in vain. Then he scurried to the telephone, rang up the office of the sheriff, and presently had a deputy on the wire.

"Say, friend," he called, "if Bostwick or McCoppet should return to camp to-night, warn them to keep off the street. Van Buren's in, and I don't want the boy to mix himself in trouble."

"All right," came the answer, "I'm on."

In less than an hour the town was "on." Men returning by the scores and dozens, nineteen out of every twenty exhausted, angered with disappointment, and clamorous for refreshments, filled the streets, saloons, and eating houses, all of them talking of the "Laughing Water"

claim, and all of them ready to sympathize with Van--especially at his expense.

His night was a mixture of wildness, outflamings of satire on the virtues, witty defiance of the fates, and recklessness of everything save reference to women. Not a word escaped his lips whereby his keenest, most delighted listener could have probed to the heart of his mood. To the loss of his claim was attributed all his pyrotechnics, and no one, unless it was Rickart, was aware of the old proverbial "woman in the case," who had planted the sting that stung.

Rickart, like a worried animal, following the footsteps of his master, sought vainly all night to head Van off and quiet him down in bed. At two in the morning, at McCoppet's gambling hall, where Van perhaps expected to encounter the jumpers of his claim, the little cashier succeeded at last in commanding Van's attention. Van had a gla.s.s of stuff in his hand--stuff too strong to be scathed by all the pure food enactments in the world.

"Look here, boy," said Rickart, clutching the horseman's wrist in his hand, "do you know that Gettysburg, and Nap, and Dave are camping on the desert, waiting for you to come home?"

Van looked at him steadily. He was far from being dizzied in his brain. Since the blow received at the hands of Beth had not sufficed to make him utterly witless, then nothing drinkable could overcome his reason.

"_Home_?" he said. "Waiting for me to come _home_."

Suddenly wrenching his hand from Rickart's grip he hurled the gla.s.s of liquor with all his might against the mirror of the bar. The crash rose high above the din of human voices. A radiating star was abruptly created in the firmament of gla.s.s, and Van was starting for the door.

The barkeeper scarcely turned his head. He was serving half a dozen men, and he said: "Gents, what's your poison?"

A crowd of half-intoxicated revelers started for Van and attempted to haul him back. He flung them off like a lot of pestiferous puppies, and cleared the door.

He went straight to the hay-yard, saddled his horse, and headed up over the mountains. He had eaten no dinner; he wanted none. The fresh, clean air began its work of restoration.

It was daylight when he reached the camp his partners had made on the desert. Napoleon and Gettysburg were drunk. Discouraged by his long delay, homeless, and utterly disheartened, they had readily succ.u.mbed to the conveniently bottled sympathy of friends.

No sooner had the horseman alighted at the camp than Napoleon flung himself upon him. He was weeping.

"What did I sh-sh-sh-sh-(whistle) shay?" he interrogated brokenly, "home from a foreign--quoth the r-r-r-r-r-(whistle) raven--NEVER MORE!"

Gettysburg waxed apologetic, as he held his gla.s.s eye in his hand.

"Didn't mean to git in thish condition, Van--didn't go to do it," he imparted confidentially. "Serpent that lurks in the glash."

Van resumed his paternal role with a meed of ready forgiveness.

"Let him who hath an untainted breath cast the first bottle," he said.

Even old Dave, thought sober, was disqualified, and Algy was asleep.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

THE PRIMITIVE LAW

Bostwick and McCoppet had made ample provision against attack at the claim. Their miners, who set to work at once to enlarge the facilities for extracting the gold from the ground, were gun-fighters first and toilers afterward. The place was guarded night and day, visitors being ordered off with a strictness exceptionally rigid.

Van and his partners were down and out. They had saved almost nothing of the gold extracted from the sand, since the bulk of their treasure had fallen, by "right of law" into the hands of the jumpers.

Bostwick avoided Van as he would a plague. There was never a day or night that fear did not possess him, when he thought of a possible encounter; yet Van had planned no deed of violence and could not have told what the results would be should he and Bostwick meet.

In his customary way of vigor, the horseman had begun a semi-legal inquiry the first day succeeding the rush. He interviewed Lawrence, the Government representative, since Culver's removal from the scene.

Lawrence was prepared for the visit. He expressed his regrets at the flight Van's fortunes had taken. Bostwick had come, he said, with authority from Washington, ordering the new survey. No expectation had been entertained, he was sure, that the old, "somewhat imaginary" and "decidedly vague" reservation line would be disturbed, or that any notable properties would be involved. Naturally, after the line was run, establishing the inclusion of the "Laughing Water" claim, and much other ground, in the reservation tract, Mr. Bostwick had been justified in summary action. It was the law of human kind to reach for all coveted things.