“Cinch,” he said. “The engineers know down to a cubic inch how much dirt had been inside the casing by the time it was punched down to bedrock. They got the gold from each hole. They weighed it out carefully, and punched down holes every so many feet.”
“And they didn’t get a great deal of gold from any one hole?”
“Nope, just colours.”
I waited a while, then said, as though thinking out loud, “It would seem easy to doctor the results on that kind of a prospect.”
He took the pipe from his mouth, looked at me a minute, clamped his lips together in a firm, straight line, and said nothing.
“This the only place you prospected?” I asked.
“Nope. After I got to know the game,” he said, “they took me all over the country. I prospected up in the Klondike where the ground was frozen so solid you had to thaw it out with steam pipes before you could get a hole down. I was down in South America prospectin’. I went all over the country — then I came back and worked on dredgers.”
“Saved your money?” I asked.
“Not a damn cent.”
“But you’re not working now?”