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COPYRIGHT BY CHARLES RIBNER’S SONS -
(Continued). Friend Isaac, the bristle-bearded.
SYNOPSIS. Throughout the working day which
CHAPTER I.—Under his grandfather's
will, Stanford Broughton, society idler,
finds his share of the estate, valued at
something like $440,000, lies in a “safe re-
pository,” latitude and longitude de-
scribed, and that is all. It may be identi-
fied by the presence nearby of a brown-
haired, blue-eyed girl, a piebald horse,
and a dog with a split face, half black
and half white. Stanford at first regards
the bequest as a joke, but after considera-
tion sets out to find his legacy.
CHAPTER I1.—On his way to Denver,
the city nearest the meridian described
in his grandfather's will, Stanford hears
from a fellow traveler a story having to
do with a flooded mine.
CHAPTER III.—Thinking things over,
he begins to imagine there may be some-
thing in his grandfather's bequest worth
while, his idea finally centering on the
possibility of a mine, as a “safe reposi-
tory.” Recalling the narrative on the
train, he ascertains that his fellow trav-
eler was a mining engineer, Charles Bul-
lerton. Bullerton refuses him informa-
tion, but from other sources Broughton
learns enough to make him proceed to
Placerville, in the Red desert.
CHAPTER IV.—On the station platform
at Atropia, just as the train pulls out,
Stanford sees what appear to be the iden-
tical horse and dog described in his
grandfather's will. Impressed, he leaves
the train at the next stop, Angels. There
he finds that Atropia was originally
Placerville, his destination. Unable to
secure a conveyance at once to take him
to Placerville, Broughton seizes a con-
struction car and escapes, leaving the im-
pression on the town marshal, Beasley,
that he is slightly demented.
CHAPTER V.—Pursued, he abandons
the car, which is wrecked, and escapes on
foot. In the darkness, he is overtaken
by a girl on horseback, and THE dos.
After he explains his presence, she in-
vites him to her home, at the Old Cinna-
bar mine. to meet her father.
CHAPTER VI1.—Broughton’s hosts are
Hiram Twombly, caretaker of the mine,
and his daughter Jeanie. Seeing the girl,
Stanford is satisfied he has located his
property, but does not reveal his identity.
CHAPTER VIL—Next morning, with
Hiram, he visits the mine. Hiram asks
him to look over the machinery, and he
does so, glad of an excuse to be near
Jeanie, in whom he has become inter-
ested, and he engages in the first real
work he has ever done.
While I was cudgeling my brain in
a vain effort to recall what, if any,
memory association there should be
awakened in me by the mention of an
“Ike” person, this particular Isaac pre-
sented himself at the cabin door and
clumped in with the stiff-legged wali.
of a man who has ridden horseback
far and hard. I knew then why I
should have been able to dig that mem-
ory association. This was Mr. Isaac
Beasley, my Angelic “riend of the over-
grown silver star and the unshaven
countenance.
“Huh!” he grunted, “them griddle-
cakes shore do look mighty righteous
to me! I been ridin’ sense two hours
afore sun-up; wild-goose chase clear
over on t'other side o’ Lost mountain.
Couple o' prospectors blew into Angels
day afore yistidday and said they'd
seen that con-dummed lunatic that got
loose from us and busted up a car fr
the railroad; them yoddleheads said
they’d seen him workin’ in the Lost
Creek placers.”
“A looney?’ said Daddy Hiram, as
innocent as a two-weeks-old lamb.
“Yep; that feller that stole an in-
spection car and got it smashed up
and then took to the hills. You hain’t
seen anything of him, have ye?”
“Nary a lunatic,” said Daddy Hiram
calmly.
His breakfast eaten, Friend Isaac
showed no disposition to hurry away
—much to my chagrin. He took time
to smoke a leisurely pipe with Daddy
Hiram and to ask a lot of indifferent
questions about the drowned mine.
“Hain’'t heard nothin’ fr'm yer own-
ers yit, have ye, Hiram?’ he wanted
to know, after—as it seemed to me—
the subject had been pretty thoroughly
talked to death.
1 heard Daddy’s reply, made as to
one with whom the matter hed been
canvassed before.
“Nothin’ but that clippin’ from some
newspaper back East, tellin’ about Mr.
Dudley’s passin’ out.”
“Kind-a curious somebody don’t tell
ye somethin’, ain't it?” the marshal
put in. “Looks like the heirs ’d be
either fishin’ ’r cuttin’ bait on this
here Cinnabar layout—not as it'd do
‘em any good if they did. Didn't any
jetter come with the newspaper piece?”
“Nary a pen-scratch.”
“Whereabout was the
posted?”
“Washinton.”
“Aha!” said I to myself, “I have you,
Cousin Percy! For some reason best
known to yourself you didn’t want
Daddy Hiram to get hold of Grand-
father Jasper's proper address!”
His pipe smoked out, the marshal
prepared to take horse. Daddy went
with him to the far side of the dump
and the murmur of their voices came
to me in diminishing cadences. After
a bit Daddy came back and called up
to me in the sing-song of the miners
after the final blast has been fired:
“A.a-l1 over, Stannie. I reckon ye
ran come down now and get you some
rreakfast.”
Jeanie served me in silence whan
I took my place at table and the good
old man stood in the doorway, keeping
watch, as I made no doubt, against
a possible second-thought return of
envelope
i
followed he never made the slightest
reference to the episode of the morn-
jng and, truly, I think the whole inci-
dent would have been buried in obliv-
ion by those two simple-minded souls ,
if I hadn’t first spoken of it myself.
i
This I did in the evening of the
same day, when Daddy had gone to
make his entirely useless night round
of the mine property.
' herb tea, and then I'll go and lie down
As on most |
evenings, Jeanie sat at her corner of |
the hearth, knitting, and I was filling
a bedtime pipe.
“Jeanie,” I broke out, “I wish you'd !
tell me why you and your father are |
so good to me. How do you know that
I'm not the crazy criminal that other
people believe me to be? I did steal
the car and get it smashed, you know.” :
“You are not a criminal and I am !
sure you didn’t mean to get the car |
smashed. Besides, you had taken
shelter under our roof.”
| two; for their own flesh and blood
“You are true Bedouins,” I laughed. |
“Is that the code in the West?—your
code?—to defend anybody who has eat-
en salt with you?”
“] should think it would be any-
body’s code.”
“You and your father were expecting
this man Beasley to come here look-
ing for me?”
“Daddy thought he might just hap-
pen along. We are only four miles
from Atropia, you know.”
“And was that the reason you put
the old transit at the window ?—so
you might watch for him?”
“Of course.”
By Jove! Another woman, any oth-
er woman in the world, I thought.
would have let some little shred of
sentiment show; she couldn't have
helped it. But this one didn't. A
boy couldn’t have looked me in the
eyes any more frankly and squarely
than she did when she said “Of
course.” Since I had eaten their bread,
I was, for so long as I chose to stay,
a member of the clan.
. broken head, and laying many injunc-
Itiwas near the end of the fortnight.
and) Daddy Hiram and I had scoured
and rubbed and scraped and reas-
sembled the engine and pumps, and
were finishing the cleaning of the boil-
ers. These were pretty badly rusted
and scaled, and to do the job properly,
we had taken the manhole heads out
of the holes left to give access to the
interior of the shells, and had had a
good-natured squabble as to which of
us should crawl inside to do the scrap-
ing; Daddy insisting upon doing it, be-
cause as he pointed out, he was the
smaller man, and I arguing that I
should because I was the younger and
stronger.
To settle it finally we flipped a coin
—one of those inch-wide copper pen-
nies that Daddy carried for a pocket-
piece—and I won the toss. The job
wasn’t exactly a picnic, but I got along
all right until we came to the last of
the battery. I found that the repair-
ers had at some past time inserted a
couple of extra stay-rods, so that there
was little enough room left in the old
steel shell for a professional “boiler-
monkey to wriggle about in, to say
nothing of a husky young chap who
tipped the beam at around a hundred
and seventy pounds, stripped.
Just the same, I made shift to knock
the worst of the scale off and rattle
it down so that it could be washed
out from below, and was backing out
to make my escape, when I found that
one of the extra stay-rods was loose.
At my asking, Daddy screwed up the
nut on the outside of the boiler head
to tighten the rod, and then passed the
wrench in to me so that I could screw
up the nut on the inside. To this
good day I don’t know just what did
happen, but I guess the big S-wrench
must have slipped off the nut while
I was pulling on it. Anyhow, some-
thing hit me a stunning crack over
the eye, and I promptly faded out,
blink, like a penny candle in a gust |
of wind.
When I came to myself again it was
night, and I was lying undressed and
in a real bed in a room that was total-
ly unfamiliar. In the looking-glass
which hung on the opposite wall I got
a glimpse of myself with a regular
Turk’s turban of white stuff wound
around my head and skew-angled to
cover one eye. When I stirred, Jeanie
popped in from somewhere to ask what |
she could do for me.
“What was it?” I asked; “an earth-
quake?”
“Daddy says you hit yourself with
a wrench. Does it hurt much now?”
“Not more than having a sound tooth !
pulled; no. But I was inside the boil-
er, wasn't I? How did you manage
to get me out?” :
She turned her face away and even
with one eye I could see that she was
trying to hide a smile,
“It was funny,” she confessed,
“though we were both scared stiff at
the time. Daddy called me and I ran
over. You were all doubled up inside
of the boiler, and there wasn’t room
for Daddy to crawl in and straighten
you out. And unless you could be
BRRRE ar Rd
straightened out, we couldn’t pull you
cut.”
«] see. What did you do?—send for
a boiler-monkey ?”
«what is a boiler-monkey?’
“It isn’t a ‘what’; it's a man; usual-
ly the littlest man in the shop.”
“] was the monkey,” she said.
I tried to sit up, but the blinding
headache I had somehow acquired said
No.
“you crawled into that rusty old
coffin?”
She nodded.
“Daddy lent me his overalls and
jumper. It wasn’t hard; but when I
got in and saw how badly you were
hurt :. there wasn’t anything to
laugh at, then. Daddy says you'll be
apt to carry the scar as long as you
live.”
“Honorable scars,” I muttered. “You
straightened me around—TI’1l believe
it if you say so—and then what?”
“Then I got out and we pulled you
out—Daddy and I. I was glad you
didn’t know ; that you were past feel-
ing things, I mean. We must have
Vurt vou frightfully. I don't see how
you ever crawled in through that lit-
tle hote.”
“It’s much easier when you're alive,”
1 offered.
“Im going to bring you a cup of
for a while.”
Since, as I afterward learned, the
dose she gave me was some sort of
home-brewed sleeping draft, I very
nearly slept the clock round. Daddy
came in and helped me into my clothes
—they were eating their noon meal
when I woke up and called—and apart
from being still a bit headachey and
tottery, I was all right again. But
for two whole days they made me sit
around and be waited on, hand and
foot, and coddied and petted, those
they couldn’t have done more.
CHAPTER VIIl
The Laboring Pumps.
On the third day after I had tried
to brain myself in the old boiler I was
pretty nearly as good as ever, and my
two Good Samaritans reluctantly con-
sented to my going back to work,
Jeanie renewing the bandage on my
tions upon Daddy Hiram to send me
right back to the cabin if I didn’t be-
have; “behaving,” in her use of the
word, meaning that I was to take it
easy on the job.
That sounded mighty good to me,
the way she said it. Most men, I fan-
cy, are only overgrown children in the
sense that they like to be fussed over |
by their womankind. Don’t mistake |
me, please; 1 wasn't in love with her
—then, Candidly, I don't think I knew |
what a real love was. But it was
mighty pleasant to live in the same
house with her, and to eat her deli- |
cious cooking; to be with herjevery
day, and to have those undisturbed
evening half-hours with her in front
of the fire, If I had had to get out;
or if there had been another man . . .
but I won't anticipate. i
In due time and after we had coin-
pletely overhauled the rusted and
gummed-up machinery, Daddy and 1
happened upon a day when we were
ready to put fire under the boilers and
we did it. If I should live to be a
hundred years old, I shall never forget
the tense, suppressed excitement that
gripped me as we brought the wood for
the furnaces that bright, hot, July
morning. By eight o'clock we had
ninety pounds of steam pressure on
the boilers, but we held off until it
had climbed to the regular working
pressure of one hundred and twenty.
Then I started the pumps; two big
centrifugal suctions, mounted on a
platform in the shatt mouth and so
arranged that they could be lowered
to follow the water level down—if it
should go down; pumps that each
threw a stream six inches in diameter.
After the pumps were started and
the indicators showed, or seemed to
show, that they were working up to
full capacity, I rigged up a measuring
gauge; a bit of wood for a float, with
a string tied to it, and the string pass-
ing over a pulley in the shafthouse
roof-beaming with a weight on the end |
of it. If the water level should go down, |
the float would sink with it, pulling
the weight up. A smooth board, with
feet, inches and fractions penciled on
it, was stood up beside the weight to
answer for a measuring scale.
At the end of the hour the float
hadn’t moved a hair's breadth; not a
hundredth part of an inch, so far as we
could see.
“I don’t believe the pumps are work-
ing!” I exploded. “Surely they’d make |
some little difference in the level un-
less that shaft's got all the under-
ground water in the world to back it
up. Those indicators must be out of
whack in some way. Where does the
discharge water empty itself?”
Daddy knew this, too.
“Over in the left-hand gulech—into
the creek.” |
“Show me,” I directed. |
We found the discharge from the
pumps a littie way below the end of
the path; a ten-inch pipe which had
been laid underground from the shaft-
house, presumably to keep it from
freezing in winter. The end of the
pipe stuck out over the stream and it
was projecting pretty nearly a solid
ten-inch jet of water. The pumps were
working all right; there was no doubt
about that. I dug up enough of my
college math to figure that two six-
' inch streams would just about fill a
z@-inch pipe, and here it was, running
full and pouring like another torrent
into the gulch. So back we went to
the mine buildings to pile more wood
into the furnaces and to resume our
watching of the indicator and its pen-
cil-marked scale.
Noon caught up with us after a
© while—with nothing doing save that
. as it might be, after all, is it? Who
| about his hard-working year in South
c———————————————C———————————
we were rapidly diminishing our wood- ;
pile. For a solid week we chopped |
down trees and split them up, Daddy ;
and I, and kept the fires roaring under
the boilers and kept those monster i
pumps whirring and grinding away at |
the shaft mouth—night and day, mind |
you; watch on and watch off. And, !
right straight through it all, that little '
indicator weight I had rigged up stood
stock still; never moved the width of !
one of the pencil marks I had drawn |
on its gauge board. ;
By this time my stubbornness was
yielding something to the still more
stubborn fact. If all this pumpin;
hadn’t even started the flood toward
its diminution, truly all the waters un-
der the earth must be backing the un-
failing well of that drowned shaft.
Toward the last I think we kept
on more from force of habit than any- |
thing else, but at the end of the week
[ gave in and consented to let the
fires die down, though it was like puli- |
ing teeth to do it. Something, indeed, |
I brought out of the overtime work.
disappointing as it had heen in the |
qnajor sense’ I was muscled up as
hard as a keg of nails; as strong as
a mule, and the fiecve toll of wood-
chopping and boiler-firing had given
me an appetite for real work that fa.r-
ly made me ache when I thought of
stopping. We thrashed it out that eve-
ning, the three of us before the living
room fire, after Daddy and I had final-
ly stopped the pumps and let the steam
run down.
«I reckon you hain’t no call to take
it so hard, Stannie,” Daddy said, after
I had growled and grouched like a
bear with a sore head over our fail- |
ure. “After all, you must ricollect
that it ain’t no skin off 'm you if the
oi
I
| is
) “ Wi
a
ENN E
| Consented to Let the Fires Die Down.
old Cinnabar stays right where she is
and soaks till kingdom come.”
“No skin off of me?’ I yelped, with
a sort of wild laugh. “Listen—both
of you,” and then I told them the en-
tire heart-breaking story of Cousin
Percy’s letter and my grandfather’s
joke; of my starting out on the fan-
tastic search for the girl, a horse and
a dog—a search which would doubtless
have failed before it had fairly begun
if I hadn’t happened to ride in a Pull-
man smoker with the man, Charles
Bullerton.
I remembered afterward that I had
got just that far—to the naming of
Bullerton—when Barney, the pie-faced
collie, got up from his corner of the
hearth, stalked to the door and began
to growl. The next minute we heard
a horse's sh-r-r-, and Daddy Hiram
rose, pushed the dog aside and opened
the door. Then Jeanie and I, still
sitting before the fire, heard him say
grufily: “Well, hello, Charley Buller-
ton! What in Sam Hill are you doin’
up in this neck o’ woods?”
I turned to look at Jeanie—and
missed. In the moment when I had
glanced aside she had vanished.
When Bullerton came in, which was
after Daddy Hiram had lighted the
lantern and shown him where to put
his horse, he didn’t seem half as much
surprised to find me sitting before the
Twombly house fire as I thought he
might have been.
“Well, well!—look who's here!” he
bantered. “How are you, Broughton?
This old world isn’t so infernally big
would have thought that our next
meeting would be in such an out-of-
the-way corner of the universe as this
I hope you've been well and chipper,
all these weeks.”
I said what I was obliged to, and
wasn’t any too confoundedly cordial
about it, either, I guess.
Bullerton drew up a chair and began
to talk, much as if we'd invited him to, :
America; about the fabulously rich
mines in that far-away Utopia of the
gold-diggers ; about his voyage up from
the Isthmus; about the oddness of his
meeting me on the train, combined
with the more excruciating oddness of
his meeting me again, here in the East-
ern Timanyonis; things like that.
He was just comfortably surging
along in the swing of it when a door
opened behind us and he jumped up
with another “Well, well, look who's
bere!” and when I turned, he was
holding Jeanie’s two hands in his and
wraying over her like a wild ass of the
piains. And, if you'll believe me, that
girl had gone and changed her dress!
That is what she went to do when she
slipped out and left me to stare at her
empty chair, after she had heard her
father say, “Well, hello, Charley Bul-
lerton!”
It was all off with me from that
time on. For what was left of the
evening, Bullerton played a solo. I
got full-up on the performance about
nine o'clock, and climbed my ladder
and went to bed, mufiling my head in
the blankets so that I wouldn't have
to lie there and listen to the bagpipe
drone of Bullerton's voice in the room
below.
I hoped—without the least shadow of
reason for the hope, of course—that
| the next morning would show me a
| hole in the atmosphere in the space
that Bullerton had occupied. But
there was no such luck. He was pres-
ent at the breakfast table, as large
as life and twice as talkative.
1 made my escape from the cabin
! us soon as I could and tramped over
to the mine. A glance into the shaft
showed the black pool in its depths as
placid and untroubled as if we hadn’t
just lifted a million or so cubic feet
of water out of it by hard labor.
In morose discouragement I recalled
| the few things I had learned about
drowned mines while 1 was knocking
shout in the Crippie Creek district
trying to trace Bullerton. Particular-
1y 1 remembered my talk with ililt
the man who had finally put me upon
what had proved to be the right track
in the tracing job. He had talked
quite freely, Sometimes the flood was
only the tapping of an underground
stream, as when one digs a well: in
other cases—and these were most ¢oum-
mon in the Cripple Creek region—
the source of the flood would be found
in a buried lake or reservoir, large or
not so large, as the luck might have
it. If the source were a lake—so Iiil-
ton had said—there was little use in
trying to pump the mine dry.
Mulling over these discouraging bits
of information, I was naturally led
back to the Pullman smoking-room talk
with Bullerton. I remembered, with a
sharp little flick of the memory whip,
that he had given an expert opinion,
which, as it seemed, he had backed up
a year earlier with a thousand dol-
lars of real money—the deposit in the
Omaha bank made to cover my grand-
father’s bargain binder. What he had
said was, “I'm reasonably certain that
I discovered a way in which that mine
can be drained at comparatively smail
expense.”
Had he really discovered & way?—
and with no better data than a study
of the maps? Staring down at the
black pool which Daddy and I hadn’t
been able to lower by so much as a
fraction of an inch in a week’s pump-
ing, T doubted it.
I was stumbling out toward the en-
gine room with my head down and
| my hands in my pockets when I heard
| footsteps coming from the direction of
the cabin beyond the dump. Looking
out, I saw Bullerton sauntering over
toward the shaft-house. Though I
knew that some sort of a wrangle with
him was inevitable, I was perfectly
willing to postpone. it, so I edged in-
to the blacksmith shop and sat down
on the anvil, hoping he might miss me
and go away. But there was nothing
coming to me on that bet.
“I saw your lead when you left the
house,” he began, after he had found
me and had dusted off an empty dyna-
mite box for a seat. “Don’t you think
you've played it rather low down on
me?”
“How so?’
“By taking in my story of this mine
when I told it to you without giving
me a hint that you were the person
most deeply interested—since my old
gentleman was your grandfather.”
«It didn’t strike me that way, and it
doesn’t yet,” I shot back. “I notice
you were mighty careful not to tell
me the name of your old gentieman—
or rather, I should say, you lied about
it when I wired you ’
“An ordinary business precaution,”
he chuckled. “But we needn’t waste
our time bickering over what might
nave been—and wasa’'t. I have a con-
tract with your grandfather which is
legally binding upon you as his heir
to this particular piece of property—
always provided you can prove that
you are his heir. What I'm here to
say is that I'm ready to carry out my
part of the contract: to unwater this
mine. What do you say?”
“How are you going to do it?”
“That, my young friend, is particu-
larly my own affair”
I felt pretty scrappy that morning ;
there is no use in denying it.
“you're not the only pebble on the
' beach, Bullerton,” I said, looking him
squarely in the eye. “What you can
do with this mine, another miding en-
gineer can do quite as well; and the
other man will probably be willing to
do it without asking the fenced-in
earth for his reward.”
“Humph!” he grunted; “so that’s
your play, is it?” Then, after a scowl-
ing pause: “You're licked before you
begin. You're fighting without ammu-
nition, Broughton. You haven't any
money, and you'll look & long time be-
fore you'll find an engineer able to
finance his own experiment on your
drowned proposition.”
“That may be,” I retorted. “But if
you told me the story straight that
night in the Pullman, you can't turn
a wheel until I tell you to go ahead.
So your contract, if you've got one,
doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”
“That point may make a nice little
question for the courts to decide,” he
snapped. “But I don’t want to go to
law about this thing, and neither do
you. As a matter of fact, you haven't
any money to throw away in a legal
scrap. You make me a deed to fifty-
one per cent of the Cinnabar preverty,
just as it stands, and then you may g0
back East and enjoy yourself playing
marbles, or pitch and toss, or red dog
—-whatever your pet diversion may
happen to be. Fifty-one per cent and
you give me a clear field—not stick
around, I mean. That goes as it lies.”
“Huh!” I scoffed. “A while back
you were talking about pulling the law
on me. You can’t make anything like
[ that stand in the courts and you know
it mighty well.”
“Maybe not; but I can make it stand
with you—which is much more to the
purpose. You said a minute ago that
I couldn’t turn a wheel without year
consent. You can’t turn a wheel au
all—without money.”
His rubbing the poverty gibe into me
made me madder than ever and I
thought it was about time to tell him
where he got off,
“Then, by Jove, the wheels needn't
turn!” I countered. “And that lets
you out. If you want to go to law
about that contract—sail in. That's
ali I've got to say.”
\ SEZ
il
THAT)
gy
i]
“}f You Want to Go to Law—Sail In.”
“Oh, hold on!” he protested, with
mock concern. Then he showed me
plainly what he’d been doing in the
interval between his first and this sec-
ond appearance in the Red Desert
region. “I've had time to look you up,
you know. You're engaged to a girl
back East and you can’t marry her
because you haven't money enough.
Half a loaf is better than no bread :
and I'm offering you very nearly the
half loaf. Take a day or so to think
it over. I'm in no hurry.” And with
that he went back to the cabin across
the dump and left me warming the
anvil.
1 guess it will say itself that the
next few days stacked up about as
wretched an interval as I had ever
heen called upon to put over.
Bullerton had a masterful sort of
orip that seemed to give him a stran-
vle-hold upon everything he tackled.
At table and in the evenings before
the fire he monopolized the talk and
{he rest of us sat around like stough-
ton-bottles and let him do it.
it didn’t help matters out much
when Daddy Hiram, chasing me up on
one of the days when I was dodging
Bullerton, gave me the sealed enve-
lope which my grandfather had left
with him. As will be remembered, it
was on the night of Bullerton’s arrival
at the Cinnabar that I had told Daddy
and his daughter who I was, and the
subject hadn’t been again referred to
by any of us. But now Daddy, having
overtaken me on one of the trails
above the mine, sat beside me on a
flat rock and we had it out together,
“You knew who I was from the first,
Daddy?” 1 asked.
“Not right plumb at first, no,” he
qualified. “You see, I didn’t know who
I was looking for. Always reckoned
somebody’d be along, 'f course, but I
hadn't had any idea who 'r when.”
“pm afraid I've been a pretty sorry
disappointment to you,” I muttered. “I
have no money and I don’t know
enough te be any good at the mining
game. And that reminds me: my
grandfather paid you a regular salary
for the caretaking, didn’t he?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Phat has been discontinued since
his death?”
“I reckon so.”
“I have a little income of my own;
not much, but enough for the way
we're living here. It must be under-
stood that I share it with you and
Jeanie, so long as I stay with you.”
“Ain't no need o' your doin’ that,
Stannie. I got a little stake hid out
for a pinch.”
In all this, you will notice, there
was no word said about Bullerton. We
sat in silence for a while, Daddy chew-
ing a spear of grass. After a time he
called attention to the envelope which
I still held unopened in my hands.
“Don’t ye want to know what your
gran’paw says?’ he asked mildly.
At this I slit the end of the envelope.
Its contents were a deed in fee simple
to the Cinnabar and a note to me,
written in Grandfather Jasper's
cramped, old-fashioned handwriting.
In the note he merely said that he was
leaving me a property which had cost
him pretty well up to half a million
and that he hoped I'd brace up and go
to work and make something out of it,
adding that if I hadn’t been such a
hopeless idler all my life he might
have considered the propriety of add-
ing an experimental fund to the gift.
As it was, I must work out my own
salvation—if I were anxious to possess
any of that commodity.
I think it was on the fourth day after
nis arrival that Bullerton cornered me
again and again it was in the deserted
blacksmith shop.
«well, Broughton,” he began abrugt-
ly, seating himself once more upon
the empty dynamite box, “I've. given
you plenty of time to think it over.
Where do you stand now?”
(Continued Next Week).
Ww
a
boy