"How much jack did you leave him?" he whispered to the girl.
"I left it all. It's safest. What I copied from the paper will be worth a thousand times what's in that money bag."
"Just the same, I want money now—to-night," Drummond said, and, stooping, pulled the poke from the shirt front of the unconscious miner.
"Take only half of it, then," Lucy pleaded. "Then he'll think he spent that much. Don't be a piker, Al. You've got something big to work for, and you try to spoil it by rolling a stiff for a few dollars."
Drummond grunted, slipped a wad of bills into his trousers pocket, and replaced the poke in the desert rat's shirt.
"All right, Stool," he said to the other man. "You take his head; I'll take his feet."
A little later a train of pack burros moved away from Ragtown into the desert night.
A mile from town the man Stool halted them and waited, and presently heard the chug of a motor. Soon Al Drummond drove up in the last of his five-ton trucks, in the bottom of which, tossed about, lay the still unconscious form of the old prospector.
The two men worked swiftly, and slanted two twelve-inch planks two inches thick from the rear end of the truck to the ground. With ropes about the necks of the desert rat's six burros, they hauled and hammered and coaxed them one by one aboard the truck. Then on into the night they drove, over the vast, black desert.
Seventy-five miles from Ragtown they stopped the car, and unloaded the burros and their snoring master. They rolled the man in his blankets, then set the burros' packs about in orderly array and loosed the little animals to crop the bunch grass that was green and succulent in winter. From one pack bag they took cooking utensils and other articles, and ranged them about on the ground as the old man himself might have done upon making camp.