"Oh, that's what gives them their 'ceptional vally, is it, young man?" sneered Rampike. "Wal, I guess they ought to have a 'ceptional vally' to make it worth while working them there;" and Rampike, who was now standing by the Nugget claim alongside the bed of the creek, pointed upwards to where the bluffs, two hundred feet high, hung precipitously over their heads.
It was no good arguing, no good swearing that the map must be wrong, that Cruickshank had marked the wrong lots, that there was a mistake somewhere.
"Just one of the colonel's mistakes, that's what it is. Come and see the gold Commissioner, he'll straighten it out for you," retorted Rampike, hurrying the three off into the presence of a big handsome man, whose genial ways and handsome face made "the judge" a great favourite with the miners.
All he could do he did, and was ready to go far beyond the obligations of his office in his desire to help Cruickshank's victims. It was a very common kind of fraud after all. The colonel had drawn a sufficiently accurate map of the Williams Creek valley; he had even given accurately every name upon that map, and moreover the claims which he had sold to Corbett & Co. adjoined the Nugget claim, and had been regularly taken up and bonded by his partner and himself. Cruickshank's story indeed was true in every particular.
Gold was being taken out of the Nugget mine at the rate of several lbs. per diem; why should it not be taken out of the claims which it adjoined?
There was only one objection to Cruickshank's map,—he had not drawn it in relief. There was only one objection to Corbett's claim—the surface of it would have adjoined the surface of the Nugget claim had they both been upon the same level, only,—only, you see, they were not. There was a trifling difference of two hundred and fifty feet in the altitude of the Nugget claim and the bluff adjoining it, and Corbett's claim was on the top of that bluff. Now a claim on the top of a bluff, where no river could ever have run to deposit gold, and whither no water could be brought to wash for gold, was not considered worth two thousand dollars even in Cariboo.
CHAPTER XIII. THE BULLET'S MESSAGE.
"Wal, those'll maybe make vallible building lots when Williams Creek has growed as big as 'Frisco, but somehow trade in building lots ain't brisk here just now."