“That shows that the climax of London’s book relating to the Yeehats is straight from the shoulder, doesn’t it?” Jack wound up.
“That part about the Yeehats is all right but how about the gold? Because a tribe of Indians called the Yeehats lived up there doesn’t say that pioneer prospectors actually found the nuggets, got it, piled it up in sacks ready to bring back where they could spend it and then were killed off by the Indians. Mind you, Jack, I’m not sayin’ as how it couldn’t have happened but I’m only sayin’ as how I’d like to know for sure afore we goes, see?”
“Well first of all there’s the Yeehats—” Jack began to explain all over again.
“That part about the Yeehats is all O.K.; there’s no blinkin’ at facts. No one I’ll say, no not even a bookmaker could think up such an outlandish name as Yeehat even to splice it to a redskin for a name, but any one who couldn’t think about gold in chunks would be lonesome if he had a brain,” argued Bill.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” called out Jack. “First of all never call a man who writes books a bookmaker. A man who puts his pen to paper and writes down various things for other folks to read is a maker of books while a man that takes bets at a race track is a bookmaker. Now don’t get these two professions mixed up again.”
“The trouble with you, Jack, is that you can’t see the woods because o’ the trees, as you used to tell me down in Mexico when I picked you up on some point that didn’t have anything to do with the case. What’s the diff I’d like to know, whether he was a maker o’ books as you calls him or a bookmaker as I calls him. Well go on with your ratkillin’.”
“What I was going to say when you sidetracked me was that when a writer writes a book every idea that goes into it really comes from some outside source and consequently all this stuff that we call inspiration and imagination is more or less bunk. This being true, I hold that what London wrote about the prospectors, the gold they found, the moosehide sacks of it they piled up and the Yeehats, were not just mere fleeting fancies which were conjured up in his brain to serve his purpose for the story but hard and fast facts that he had heard about when he was up above there in Alaska.”
“I knows what you say and I guess I knows what you’re talking about, but as against the book that tells about the Yeehats and the sacks o’ gold in the land where the rainbow ends give me the straight tip on the di-am-onds that Jack Heaton got from the cannibal princess where the rainbow begins,” plugged in Bill, still bent on the diamond project.
“Don’t you see, Bill, it will take a mint of money to outfit that diamond hunting expedition—why, we’d have to take a small army with us to cope with those Amazonian savages while as I told you before they’re all Christianized, peace-loving folks in the far north—too cold to be anything else. Why, we couldn’t begin to finance this diamond proposition between us even if we put every dollar we have to our names in it,” Jack drove his argument home and he could see that the force of his logic and oratory was beginning to have the desired effect on his hard-headed pal.
“Couldn’t you get the directors of the American Consolidated Oil Company to take a flyer and back us in the di-am-ond venture,” further persisted Bill.