“You’re all short sports,” he asserted drunkenly, waving his hand insultingly at the crowd. “You’re cheap guys–you can’t bear to lose.”
“Hey!” broke in the barkeeper, “I said I’d take you up. I’ll get the thousand dollars, all right.”
“Oh, you will, eh?” murmured Wunpost and then he shook himself together. “Oh–sure! Yes, all right! Come on, we’ll start right now!”
102CHAPTER XI
THE STINGING LIZARD
In a certain stratum of society, now about to become extinct, it is considered quite au fait to roll a drunk if circumstances will permit. And it was from this particular stratum that the barkeeper at The Mint had derived his moral concepts. Therefore he considered it no crime, no betrayal of a trust, to borrow the thousand dollars with which he was to pay John C. Calhoun from that prince of opportunists, Judson Eells. It is not every banker that will thrust a thousand dollar bill–and the only one he has on hand–upon a member of the bungstarters’ brotherhood; but a word in his ear from Pisen-face Lynch convinced Fellowes that it would be well to run straight. Fate had snatched him from behind the bar to carry out a part not unconnected with certain schemes of Judson Eells and any tendency to run out on his trusting backers would be visited with summary punishment. At least that was what he gathered in the brief moment they had together before Lynch gave him the money and disappeared.
As for John C. Calhoun, a close student of inebriety 103might have noticed that he became sober too quick; but he invested their departure in such a wealth of mystery that the barkeeper was more than satisfied. A short ways out of town Wunpost turned out into the rocks and milled around for an hour; and then, when their trail was hopelessly lost, he led the way into the hills. Being a stranger in the country Fellowes could not say what wash it was, but they passed up some wash and from that into another one; and so on until he was lost; and the most he could do was to drop a few white beans from the pocketful that Lynch had provided. The night was very dark and they rode on interminably, camping at dawn in a shut-in canyon; and so on for three nights until his mind became a blank as far as direction was concerned. His liberal supply of beans had been exhausted the first night and since then they had passed over a hundred rocky hog-backs and down a thousand boulder-strewn canyons. As to the whereabouts of Blackwater he had no more idea than a cat that has been carried in a bag; and he lacked that intimate sense of direction which often enables the cat to come back. He was lost, and a little scared, when Wunpost stopped in a gulch and showed him a neat pile of rocks.
“There’s my monument,” he said, “ain’t that a neat piece of work? I learned how to make them from a surveyor. This tobacco can here contains my notice of location–that was a steer when I said it wasn’t staked. Git down and help yourself!”
He assisted his companion, who was slightly 104saddle-sore, to alight and inspect the monument and then he waited expectantly.
“Oh, the mine! The mine!” cried Wunpost gaily. “Come along–have you got your sack? Well, bring along a sack and we’ll fill it so full of gold it’ll bust and spill out going home. Be a nice way to mark the trail, if you should want to come back sometime–and by the way, have you got that thousand dollar bill?”