nd then where'd
you be with your home stake?"

"Well, I guess there hasn't been one for over twelve years," answered
Billy snapping her fingers enticingly to his dog, "and besides, it's so
hot the trucks can't gull up the canyon--it makes their radiators boil.
But we've got it all sacked and when Father gets his payment I'm going
inside, to school. Isn't it fine, after all they said about Dad--calling
him crazy and everything else--and now his mine is worth lots and lots
of money! I knew all the time he would win! And Eells has been up here
and offered us forty thousand dollars, but Father wouldn't even consider
it."

She stepped over boldly and picked up the dog, who wriggled frantically
and tried to lick her face, and Wunpost stood mumbling to himself. So
now it was her father who was getting all the credit for this wonderful
stroke of luck; and he and the others who had called old Cole crazy were
proven by the event to be fools. And yet he had packed ore for over two
weeks to salt the Stinging Lizard for Eells!

"Put your mules in the corral and come up to breakfast!" cried Billy
starting off for the house; and then she dropped his dog, which ran
capering along behind her--and Wunpost had named it Good Luck! If she
stole his dog on top of everything else, he would learn about women from
her.

There was a cordial welcome at the house from Mrs. Campbell, who was
radiant with joy over their good fortune; but Wunpost avoided the
subject of the sale of his mine, for of course she must know it was
salted. Anyone would know that after they had dug down a ways for
Wunpost had simply quarried out a vein of rotten quartz and filled the
resultant fissure with high grade. But there is something in Latin about
_caveat emptor_, which is short for "Let the buyer beware!" and if
Judson Eells was so foolish as to build his road first that was
certainly no fault of Wunpost's. All he had done was to locate the hole,
and then Judson Eells had jumped it; and if, as a result thereof,
Wunpost had trimmed him of twenty thousand, that was nothing to what
Eells had done to him. And yet every time he met Mrs. Campbell's eye he
felt that she had her reservations about him. He was a mine-salter, a
crook, the same as Eells was a crook; but she welcomed him all the same.
Perhaps she held it to his credit that he had given Billy a full half
when he had discovered the Willie Meena Mine; but it might be, of
course, that she was this way with eve