please. 'It's Hell that's here and here it will remain.'
And then we said we were short of water--which we were not--and had he
any to spare? But he waved us on with his rifle, never sayin' a word. So
we moved down the gulch a quarter of a mile and went into camp. There
was ore here, too, but nothin' like what Ben Cameron had.

"Hawk was quiet that night--creepin' about among the rocks, but he
didn't say what was on his mind. In the mornin' he started off to talk
to Ben Cameron an' I went with him. The man was still sittin' on his
rock, with the rifle over his knees--been there all night, I reckon. But
he let us come to hailin' distance.

"'Nice claim you got there, pardner,' says Hawk.

"'Is it?' says he.

"'Ain't you afraid of rubbin' some o' that verdigris off onto your
pants,' says Hawk.

"'They're my pants,' says Cameron. 'You ain't here for any good. Get
out!' And he brings his rifle to his hip. We saw he was scared all
right, maybe not so much at what we'd do to him as at sharin' what he'd
found.

"'The Gila Desert ain't _all_ yours, is it, pardner? Or maybe you got a
mortgage on the earth!' says Hawk, very polite. 'You ain't got no
objection to our stakin' alongside of you, have you? Come along, now.
Let's be neighbors. We see what you've got. That's all right. We'll take
your leavin's. We've got a right to them.'

"And so after a while of palaverin' with him, he lets us come up and
look over his claim. It didn't take any eye at all to see what he'd got.
He wasn't much of a man--Ben Cameron--weak-eyed, rum-dum--poor too. You
could see that by his outfit--worse off than we were. Hawk told him we
had a lot of friends with money--big money in the East. Maybe we could
work it to run a railroad out to tap the whole ridge. That kind of got
him and we found he had no friends in this part of the country--so we
sat down to grub together, Ben Cameron, like me, unsuspectin' of what
was to happen.

"My God, Nichols, I can see it all like it had happened yesterday. Hawk
Kennedy stood up as though to look around and then before I knew what he
was about had struck Ben Cameron in the back with his knife.

"It was all over in a minute. Ben Cameron reached for his gun but before
his hand got to it he toppled over sideways and lay quiet.

"I started up to my feet but Hawk had me covered and I knew from what
had happened that he'd shoot, too.

"'Don't make a fuss,' he says. 'Give me your gun.' I knew he had me to
righ