o hard in your carcass
you'll have to be buried in a hat box!"

He glanced towards the doorway. A stranger stood on the threshold.
Bowing, Van passed him and left the place, too angered to think either
of the maps or of his knife.

Culver, raging like a maniac, bowled headlong into the visitor, in his
effort to overtake the horseman, but found himself baffled and took out
his wrath in foul vituperation that presently drove the stranger from
the place.

CHAPTER XVIII

WHEREIN MATTERS THICKEN

The stranger who had witnessed the trouble at Culver's office had come
there at the instance of McCoppet. It was, therefore, to McCoppet that
he carried the intelligence of what had taken place, so far as he had
seen.

The gambler was exceedingly pleased. That Culver would now be ready,
as never before, to receive a proposition whereby the owners of the
"Laughing Water" claim could be deprived of their ground, he was well
convinced.

For reasons best known to himself and skillfully concealed from all
acquaintances, McCoppet had remained practically in hiding since the
moment in which he had beheld that half-breed Piute Indian in the
saloon. He remained out of sight even now, dispatching a messenger to
Culver, in the afternoon, requesting his presence for a conference for
the total undoing of Van Buren.

Culver, who in ordinary circumstances might have refused this request
with haughty insolence, responded to the summons rather sooner than
McCoppet had expected. He was still red with anger, and meditating
personal violence to Van at the earliest possible meeting.

McCoppet, with his smokeless cigar in his mouth, and his great opal
sentient with fire, received his visitor in the little private den to
which Bostwick had been taken.

"How are you, Culver?" he said off-handedly.

"I wanted to have a little talk. I sent a man up to your shop a while
ago, and he told me you fired Van Buren out of the place on the run."

"That's nobody's business but mine," said Culver aggressively. "If
that is all you care to talk about----"

"Don't roil up," interrupted the gambler. "I don't even know what the
fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you
here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and make a
lifetime winning."

Culver looked at him sharply.

"It must be something crooked."

"Nothing's crooked that works out straight," said McCoppet. "What's
life anyhow but a s