safer for me to keep my
distance from the girl who remembered the boy Bertrand, and partly
because I wished to draw the assayer away from our dump, I took Everton
over to the shack and we sat together on the door-step. For some little
time I couldn't make out what he was driving at in his talk, but finally
it came out, by inference, at least. Somebody--Blackwell, perhaps--had
started the story that we were planning a raid on the Lawrenceburg.

"How could that be?" I asked, remembering that, only the day before,
Everton had asserted that we were already trespassers on Lawrenceburg
property.

"It is an old trick," he commented, rather sorrowfully, I fancied. "In
all the older locations there have been bits of ground missed in the
criss-crossing of the claims. Some one of you three has been sharp
enough to find one of those bits just here."

"Well; supposing we have--what then?" I asked.

He was silent for a half-minute or so. Barrett had led Mary Everton to
the shoulder of the spur where the view of the distant town was
unobstructed, and Gifford was still in the shaft.

"I don't know you, Mr. Bertrand," my seatmate began slowly, "and I
shouldn't venture to set up any standard of right and wrong in your
behalf. But that young man out yonder with my daughter: I've known him a
long time, and I knew his people. It is a thousand pities to drag him
into your undertaking."

"There has been no especial 'dragging' that I am aware of; and I don't
know why you should be sorry for Barrett," I returned rather tartly.

"I am sorry because Robert Barrett has hitherto lived an upright and
honest life. He had excellent prospects in the bank, and it seems a
great pity that he has seen fit to throw them away."

By this time I was entirely at sea. "You will have to make it
plainer--much plainer," I told him.

"I have been hoping you wouldn't force me to call it by its ugly name,"
was the sober rejoinder. "It is blackmail, Mr. Bertrand; criminal
blackmail, as I think you must know."

"That is a pretty serious charge for you to make, isn't it?"

"Not more serious than the occasion warrants. You three have discovered
this little scrap of unclaimed ground in the middle of the Lawrenceburg
property. You are digging; and presently, when you are down far enough
so that your operations cannot be observed from the shaft mouth, you will
announce that you have struck the Lawrenceburg ore body. In that event,
as you have doubtl