The seer pushed his turban back on his forehead and picked up the newspaper clipping again. It was from the front page of the final afternoon edition of a San Francisco daily.
CLEMENTINE VALLEY, CALIF, [by a staff correspondent]— There’s a lot of gold still lying around the long-abandoned Lucky Nugget mine near here if someone will just come along with the right kind of divining rod, water witch, or a sensitive nose. Professor Simeon Tattersall not only says that the gold is there, but asserts freely that he has the gadget that will find it. Said gadget, his own invention, he modestly styles the Tattersall Magnetic Prospector, and he plans to demonstrate its worth at the Lucky Nugget Thursday morning at 10:30 P.S.T.—
“Say!” bleated the soothsayer. “Ain’t this Lucky Nugget mine the same one you sold that old Phelan dame?”
“It is,” said Mr Rochborne concisely. “What I want to know now, Rube, is who this Tattersall is and why he picks the Lucky Nugget to demonstrate his screwball gadget, just three weeks after we made a deal with it.”
“It says here he thinks there’s gold in it,” said the swami brightly.
“Baloney!” said Mr Rochborne. “There isn’t a nickel’s worth of gold in that mine and hasn’t been since 1907. There’s something about this Tattersall that smells.”
“He sounds mighty suspicious to me,” agreed the oracle sagely.
Mr Rochborne favored him with a look of contempt and got to his feet. He was a large man with hulking shoulders and a tanned kindly face, of the type which inspires instant trust in dogs, children, and old ladies.
“One thing I’d bet on — there’s no such person as Professor Simeon Tattersall. There never was a name like that. There couldn’t be.”
“What’re you going to do about it, Mel?” asked the sage.