Gold Part 58

For just about two cents I'd bust your fool necks for you--every one of you!" I glared vindictively at them. "Do you suppose I'd make any such proposition to any of you--to ask you to sneak off like a whipped cur leaving me to take the----"

"Hold on, Frank," interposed Talbot soothingly. "I didn't mean----"

"Didn't you?" I cried. "Well, what in h.e.l.l did you mean? Weren't you trying to make me out a quitter?" I had succeeded in working loose my heavy gold belt, and I dashed it on the table in front of them. "There!

Now you send for some gold scales, right now, and you divide that up!

Right here! d.a.m.n it all, boys," I ended, with what to a cynical bystander would have seemed rather a funny slump into the pathetic, "I thought we were all real friends! You've hurt my feelings!"

It was very young, and very ridiculous--and perhaps (I can say it from the vantage of fifty years) just a little touching. At any rate, when I had finished, my comrades were looking in all directions, and Talbot cleared his throat a number of times before he replied.

"Why, Frank," he said gently, at last, "of course we'll take it--we never dreamed--of course--it was stupid of us, I'll admit. Naturally, I see just how you feel----"

"It comes to about seven hundred apiece, don't it?" drawled Yank.

The commonplace remark saved the situation from bathos, as I am now certain shrewd old Yank knew it would.

"What are you going to do with your shares, boys?" asked Talbot after a while. "Going back home, or mining? Speak up, Yank."

Yank spat accurately out the open window.

"I've been figgering," he replied. "And when you come right down to it, what's the use of going back? Ain't it just an idee we got that it's the proper thing to do? What's the matter with this country, anyway--barring mining?"

"Barring mining?" echoed Talbot.

"To h.e.l.l with mining!" said Yank; "it's all right for a vacation, but it ain't noways a white man's stiddy work. Well, we had our vacation."

"Then you're not going back to the mines?"

"Not any!" stated Yank emphatically.

"Nor home?"

"No."

"What then?"

"I'm going to take up a farm up thar whar the Pine boys is settled, and I'm going to enjoy life reasonable. Thar's good soil, and thar's water; thar's pleasant prospects, and lots of game and fish. What more does a man want? And what makes me sick is that it's been thar all the time and it's only just this minute I've come to see it."

"Mines for you, Johnny, or home?" asked Talbot.

"Me, home?" cried Johnny; "why----" he checked himself, and added more quietly. "No, I'm not going home. There's nothing there for me but a good time, when you come right down to it. And mines? It strikes me that fresh gold is easy to get, but almighty hard to keep."

"You never said a truer word than that, Johnny," I put in.

"Besides which, I quit mining some time ago, as you remember," went on Johnny, "due to an artistic aversion to hard work," he added.

"Any plans?" asked Talbot.

"I think I'll just drift up to Sonoma and talk things over with Danny Randall," replied Johnny vaguely. "He had some sort of an idea of extending this express service next year."

"And you?" Talbot turned to me.

"I," said I, firmly, "am going to turn over my share in a business partners.h.i.+p with you; and in the meantime I expect to get a job driving team with John McGlynn for enough to pay the board bill while you rustle. And that goes!" I added warningly.

"Thank you, Frank," replied Talbot, and I thought I saw his bright eye dim. He held silent for a moment. "Do you know," he said suddenly, "I believe we're on the right track. It isn't the gold. That is a bait, a glittering bait, that attracts the world to these sh.o.r.es. It's the country. The gold brings them, and out of the hordes that come, some, like us, will stick. And after the gold is dug and scattered and all but forgotten, we will find that we have fallen heirs to an empire."

THE END

GOLD

Other Books by the Same Author

The Claim Jumpers The Westerners The Blazed Trail Arizona Night Blazed Trail Stories The Cabin Camp and Trail Conjuror's House The Forest The Rules of the Game The Riverman The Silent Places The Adventures of Bobby Orde The Mountains The Pa.s.s The Magic Forest The Sign at Six The Land of Footprints African Camp Fires The Mystery (with Samuel Hopkins Adams)