“Why do you make all this trouble, Bob?” Max asked—“What did you expect you’d get out of it?”
“Reckoned I’d get a good mine. I lowed you wasn’t staying up here for nothin’.”
“And you thought it was the Aurora I was at work in?”
“To be sure; where else? this is no good!”
“Isn’t it? Well, we’ll see about that. At any rate the Aurora is worthless, and I have merely been using that as a runway to get to the back end of this mine easily, through a cross-cut. We’re not working the Aurora, we’re working the Last Chance. You could a’ jumped that all day and we wouldn’t have objected enough to fight, but when you came over here we had to.”
“And you’ve won the turn,” said Bob dejectedly.
“Yes I’ve won, just as I did once before, Bob,—maybe you remember—when a couple of burglars tired to crawl into my window.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Bob replied, in a dogged tone.
“Don’t you? Well now, Bob, this makes twice you escaped being shot in your rascalities with me, and if you ever see your way out of this present scrape, I’m thinking you’d better leave the gulch.”
“Leave; you bet I’ll leave. I ’low you wouldn’t be none too friendly, but that there Scotty would murder me the first day he got loose, though this bust-up aint no more my fault ’n’ ’tis his’n.”