ure-thing game? It's stacked for us all to lose out
in the end. What's the use of being finniky while we live--as long as
even the Almighty's dealing brace?"

Culver was impatient. "Well?"

"I won't beat around the chapparal," said McCoppet. "It ain't my way."
Nevertheless, with much finesse and art he contrived to put his
proposition in a manner to rob it of many of its ugly features.
However, he made the business plain.

"You see," he concluded, "the old reservation line might actually be
wrong--and all you'd have to do would be to put it right. That's what
we want--we want the line put right."

Culver was more angered than before. He understood the conspiracy
thoroughly. No detail of its cleverness escaped him.

"If you thought you could trade on my personal unpleasantness with an
owner of the 'Laughing Water' claim," he said hotly, "you have made the
mistake of your life. I wish you good-day."

He rose to go. McCoppet rose and stopped him.

"Don't get feverish," said he. "It don't pay. I ain't requesting this
service from you for just your feelings against a man. There's plenty
in this for us all."

"You mean bribe money, I suppose," said Culver no less aggressively
than before. "Is that what you mean?"

"Don't call it hard names," begged the gambler. "It's just a
retainer--say twenty thousand dollars."

Culver burned to the top of his ears. He looked at McCoppet intently
with an expression the gambler could not interpret.

"Just to change that line a thousand feet," urged the man of gambling
propensities. "I'll make it twenty-five."

Still Culver made no response. With all his other hateful attributes
of character he was tempered steel on incorruptibility. He was not
even momentarily tempted to avenge himself thus on Van Buren.

McCoppet thought he had him wavering. He attempted to push him over
the brink.

"Say," said he persuasively, lowering his voice to a tone of the
confidential, "I can strain a little more out of one of my partners and
make it thirty thousand dollars." He had no intention of employing a
cent of his own. Bostwick was to pay all these expenses. "Thirty
thousand dollars, cash," he repeated, "the minute you finish your
work--and make it look like a Government _correction_ of the line."

Culver broke forth on him with accumulated wrath.

"You damnable puppy!" he said in a futile effort to be adequate to the
situation. "You sneak! Of all the accursed
int