ieve the courts were
being "approached" by the enemy. It was absolutely essential that
"these parties should be bought off," and quite a sum would be
necessary. The First National Bank of Argenta (which had once been
robbed of a great sum by road-agents, who were run down and captured by
officers and men of the --th, and the money recovered) ought in all
conscience to be grateful to its benefactors, yet when Graham, McCrea,
and Major Lawrence wrote, begging advice in the premises, the bank was
non-committal. Some of its customers were among the litigants, as was
later discovered. And so it resulted that not until near the end of
June did it dawn upon the officers involved that the whole matter was
nothing more nor less than a well-conceived, but rascally, scheme to
"milk them dry," as was the expression, secure their shares at a
sacrifice, or drive them out entirely.

And they, the absentees, were only seven against seventy or more, who
were experienced in all the crafts and devices by which mines have been
dug at the expense of the many and then made to enrich the few.

It was late at night when the fellow-travellers reached Denver. McCrea
was depressed and silent, Geordie eager to push ahead. The former had
had time to think over the situation, and in Chicago, while waiting for
the Pacific express to start, he had had a fifteen-minute talk with a
relative, a Western business man, to whom mining and undermining were
matters well understood, and what this expert said had filled him with
dismay. "You've simply been bled until you could bleed no more," said
he. "Now they've no further use for you. What they want is your stock
at five cents on the dollar, to sell to some new gudgeon at fifty. Why
on earth, Mac, when you were considering this, didn't you consult me?"
Why, indeed! Like many another man, Mac's eyes had been blinded, his
ears deafened to everything but the wiles of the charmer. But with
Geordie it was different. He had come because his father was bound to
the wheel of duty and could not. Moreover, barring inexperience and
youth, Geordie was better fitted to go and do than was his father, the
doctor.

He would waste no time with agents. He would employ no lawyer--that was
simply waste of both time and money. Of the former they had little and
of the latter even less. But his brain was active and fertile. He had
slept but little on their swift westward way until after crossing the
Mississippi. His mother's gri