“What do you mean?”
“Mean!” he said. “Hell, they just dump the gold in the drill pipe and then pan it back out. Every once in a while they come up with a bunch of suckers. The suckers stand gawking over the gold pan. What they don’t notice is that the drill man has to keep a hand on the rope in order to steady the bit when it’s going up and down. You watch that hand, and every so often you’ll see him dip into his pocket with one hand and take the other hand out of his pocket to steady the drill rope. Watch closer than that, and you can see little colours of gold dribbling down every time he does it — mind you, he’s pretty slick at it. He doesn’t do it so it shows up too big. He’s got it all figured out, and they don’t bring up any gold at all until they get below the place where the old dredger worked. But, brother, you take it from me, when they hit bedrock they put it in plenty rich. You can take the figures they’re getting from their holes and figure the acreage they’ve got lined up, and the mint would have to go out of business. They’d have to dig up the whole darn state of Kentucky to find a place to store the gold.”
“That must take quite a bit of gold.”
“What? To salt the hole?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “It don’t take much. They’re damn fools. They’re goin’ to get caught.”
“How many holes have they put down?”
“Three. They’re on the fourth. They’re just started.”
“Know who’s back of it?”
“Nope. Some crowd from the southern part of the state. They’re sellin’ most of their stock around there.”