about as far as I care to carry you two gents
for nothin',' he says. 'Of course you're two to one, and I can't
do nothing if you see fit to bull the thing through. But I'll say
this: if either one or both of you roosters has got the least smell
of a gentleman about him, he won't have to be told his company
ain't wanted twice.'

"Now, mind you, Ag and me didn't have the first cussed thing--not
grub, nor blankets, nor gun, nor nothing; and this the feller well
knew.

"'Red,' says Aggy, 'what do you say to pulling this thing apart and
seeing what makes it act so?'

"'No,' says I, 'don't touch it--it might be catching. Now, you
whelp!' says I to the driver, 'you tell us if there's a place where
we can get anything to eat around here?' We'd expected to go
hungry until we hit the camp some forty mile further on, where we
knew there'd be plenty for anybody that wanted it.

"'Yes,' says he; 'there's a man running a shack two mile up the
river.'

"'All right,' says I. 'Drive on. You've played us as dirty a
trick as one man can play another. If we ever get a cinch on you,
you can expect we'll pull her till the latigoes snap.'

"He kept shut till he got across the river, where he felt safe.

"'It's all right about that cinch!' he hollers back, grinning.
'Only wait till you get it, yer suckers! Sponges! Beats!
Dead-heads! Yah!'

"Well, a man can't catch a team of horses, and that's all there is
about it, but I want to tell you he was on the anxious seat for a
quarter of a mile. We tried hard.

"When we got back to where we started and could breathe again, we
held a council of war.

"'Now Aggy,' says I, 'we're dumped--what shall we do?'

He sat there awhile looking around him, snapping pebbles with his
thumb.

"'Tell you what it is, Red,' he says at last, 'we might as well go
mining right here. This is likely gravel, and there's a river. If
that bar in front of you had been further in the mountains, it
would have been punched full of holes. It's only because it's on
the road that nobody's taken the trouble to see what was in it.
This road was made by cattle ranchers, that didn't know nothing
about mining, and every miner that's gone over the trail had his
mouth set to get further along as quick as possible--just like us.
Do you see that little hollow running down to the river? Well you
try your luck there. I give you that place as it's the most
probable, and you as a tenderfoot in the business will