"Why don't you want to move all the posts?" he asked.

"We couldn't square that with your record," was the candid answer.

"Moving one will swing you across instead of along the lead, and will let in our new location. I'm telling you this, because you'll probably be reasonable now that you understand the thing. Light out and don't make trouble, and you'll still hold quite a strip on the lead."

"Give us a minute or two to think it over," said Devine.

"In the meanwhile you'll stop just where you are," Saunders broke in.

The man waved his hand as though he conceded that point, and Devine turned to his companion.

"I've only one excuse to make. When I staked off the claims, I was in a feverish hurry to prove the lead and get down and record," he said.

"Now, that's not an educated man, but he's got the hang of this thing as clearly as a surveyor could have done. It's evident that the man who hired him has drilled it into him, and, what is more, has warned him that he's to make no unnecessary trouble. We're to be bounced out of rather more than half our claim, but it's to be done as quietly as possible. He explained the matter in the expectation that we'd pull out and leave the field to them."

"You've hit it," said Saunders. "Don't answer. Let him speak again.

We've got to gain time."

They waited several minutes in tense anxiety, for, after all, it was conceivable that, diplomacy failing, the jumper would adopt more forcible means. Then the man waved his hand.

"You've got to decide what you're going to do," he said.

Devine proceeded to urge every reason he could think of, and held him in play a little longer, until finally the jumper lost his patience.

"Oh," he said, "you make me tired! Light out and be done with it!

We're going to pull up that post."

Saunders thrust forward the rifle barrel so that the moonlight sparkled on it.

"Then," he said grimly, "come right along and shift it."

Instead of doing so, the man jumped back into the shadow, which was perhaps a very natural proceeding. Then there was oppressive silence for a few minutes. Devine, who could not hear anything, felt horribly anxious as to what their opponents might be doing. Suddenly there was a fresh rustling among the undergrowth, and Saunders thrust the rifle into his companion's hands.

"Crawling in at the back of us! Let them see you on the opposite side!" he said.

Devine wriggled through the fern, and, though he knew that this was rash, stood up where the moonlight fell upon him, with the long barrel glinting in front of him. He fancied, though he could not be certain, that he saw a shadowy figure flit back among the trees, and in any case the rustling died away again. After that he crawled back to Saunders, for, as he admitted afterward, he did not like standing on the other side of that thicket alone.

He subsequently repeated the maneuver several times, and Saunders once or twice answered the jumpers' warnings with a sardonic invitation to remove the post. Neither of them afterward was sure how long the horrible tension lasted, though they agreed that a very little more of it would probably have broken down their nerve; but at length a faint sound came out of the shadows down the valley. It rapidly grew louder, and when it resolved itself into such a smashing of undergrowth as might have been made by a body of men, Saunders sprang up and waved his rifle toward where he supposed the jumpers to be.

"You'd better git," he said. "The boys from the settlement will head you off inside five minutes."

There was no answer, and it appeared that the jumpers had already departed as silently as possible. A little later the men from the settlement came limping in, and the foremost of them cl.u.s.tered round Devine, who sat just outside the fern, while Saunders, whose face showed a trifle drawn in the moonlight, stood still clutching the rifle.

"What's the matter? You're not looking pert, the pair of you," said one of them.

"Give me a cigar, if you've got one," said Devine. "Saunders will tell you about the thing. I've done quite enough talking for one night."

Saunders told the story tersely, and afterward snapped the magazine of his rifle up and down with a dramatic gesture.

"Held them off with that, and not a blame ca'tridge in the thing," he said.

CHAPTER XXVII

SAUNDERS TAKES PRECAUTIONS

The men from the settlement had been three weeks in camp. Saunders sat with his back to a big fir and a little hammer in his hand. There was a pile of shattered quartz at one side of him and another smaller heap of fragments of the same material lying on an empty flour-bag at his feet. Devine, who had just announced that dinner was almost ready, leaned against a neighboring fir, looking on with a suggestive grin; and a big, gaunt, old-time prospector, with a grim, bronzed face, was carefully poising one of the quartz lumps in a h.o.r.n.y hand. Saunders, who had been at work since daylight that morning, had paid the latter six dollars for his services, and admitted that he was highly satisfied with the result. He was then engaged in manufacturing specimens.

There was already a change in the forest surrounding the lonely camp.

The willows had been hewn down, great firs lay in swaths, with some of their mighty branches burnt, and a track of ruin stretched back from Saunders' tent to the side of the range. The Grenfell Consolidated Mine, three separate claims, occupied what was supposed to be the richest of the land. It was certainly the most accessible portion, for payable milling ore was already being extracted from an open cut. It was not the fault of Saunders that the Consolidated did not occupy the whole of it, but the law allows each free miner only so many feet of frontage, and the Gold Commissioner had shown himself proof against the surveyor's reasoning that, as Grenfell had found the mine, a fourth location should be recorded in the name of his executors. A dead man, as the Commissioner pointed out, could not record a mineral claim.

The men from the settlement had, however, promptly staked off every remaining rod of ground along the lead, and, though the spot was remote from anywhere, another band was busily engaged in an attempt to trace it back across the dried-up lake. How they had heard of it at all was not very evident, but as the eagles gather round the carca.s.s and the flies about the fallen deer, so men with shovels and axes appear as by enchantment when gold is struck. Distance counts as nothing, and neither thundering rivers nor waterless deserts can deter them.

Saunders listened with great contentment to the ringing of the axes and the sharp clink of the drills. Men who labor strenuously from dawn to dark in the invigorating mountain air consume provisions freely, and, as the storekeeper was quite aware, those engaged on that lode would be compelled to purchase their pork and tea and flour from him.

"It was quite a smart idea to give Jim a commission on the sales, though I was kind of wondering if he'd have the sense to stay where he is and run the store," he said. "If he hasn't been fool enough to outfit the boys on credit he must have been raking in money."

Then he took up the lump of stone the prospector handed him and knocked most of it to pieces with the hammer; after which he handed one or two of the fragments to Devine, who grinned more broadly.

"Since Weston wants more specimens I guess he's got to have them," he explained. "I don't know any reason why we shouldn't send him the best we can. This lot should a.s.say out, anyway, several ounces to the ton."

The prospector made a little grave sign of agreement, for this was a game to which he was more or less accustomed. Lode ore now and then is of somewhat uniform quality, but at times it varies in richness in a rather striking manner; and the storekeeper had spent six or seven hours picking out the most promising specimens. From these he had trimmed off every fragment in which, as far as he could discern, the precious metal was not present, with the result that any mineralogist to whom they might be handed could certify to the richness of the Grenfell Consolidated. Saunders was a business man, and quite aware that the vendor of any kind of goods, when asked for samples, does not, as a rule, submit indifferent ones.

"I guess," he added, probably referring to prospective investors, "this lot ought to fetch them. You asked the boys to come along, Devine?"

Devine said he had done so, and in a few more minutes several little groups of men, in dilapidated long boots and somewhat ragged duck, who had ceased work for their mid-day meal, gathered round the fir. They waited mildly curious when Saunders rose and made a sign that he required their attention, which they were perhaps the more willing to give because they were all his customers, and bills are apt to run up in a bush ranching community.

"Boys," said Saunders, "I want to point out that instead of owning gold-mines most of you would now be shoveling on the railroads or humping fir trees at the sawmills, if it hadn't been for me."

Some of them laughed, and some of them admitted that there was a certain truth in this, for the bush rancher who buys uncleared land usually spends several years in very strenuous labor before it produces enough for him to live on, and in the meanwhile he must either go away and endeavor to earn a few dollars every now and then or else fall into the hands of the nearest storekeeper.

"Our friend is a philanthropist," said one of them, who spoke clean, colloquial English. "We all admit his favors, but he doesn't mention that he puts them in the bill."

"And he doesn't charge anything extra for insects in his flour," said another man.

There was a little laughter, but Saunders gazed at them reproachfully.

"If you think it's easy making money out of the kind of crowd you are, all you have to do is to start a store and see. But that wasn't quite what I meant to say," he explained. "Anyway, I put the whole of you right on to this lead."

"You were quite a long while doing it," interjected one of the audience.

Saunders waved his hand.

"Am I a blame fool?" he asked. "I've no use for an inquisitive, grasping crowd worrying round my gold-mine until I've got things securely fixed. Still, you drove off those jumpers, for which you have my thanks; and I want in due time to get back the money most of you owe me."

"You can count on that, boys," said another of them. "It's a dead sure thing."

The storekeeper disregarded this.