“No,” I said. “There’s a better way.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you think they know how much gold they’re putting in those holes?”
“Sure, they do. The way a proposition like that figures the ground has to test uniform. If you get one hole that runs way up, an’ another hole that runs down, capital gets suspicious. A river don’t deposit gold that way. That gold’s been droppin’ down in that channel for millions of years. Get the idea?”
“All right, that’s the way I hoped it would be. Now, then, they’re keeping track of the gold they take out, aren’t they?”
“Sure.”
“Pete,” I said, “you mentioned that you could salt a claim artistically. What do you mean by it?”
Pete looked at us and said, “You said I could make five hundred bucks. What did you mean by it?”
Ashbury, who was a good judge of character, and had been studying Pete over the tops of his glasses, wordlessly took a wallet from his pocket, and counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills. “That’s what he meant,” he said, and shoved them across to Pete.
Pete picked the bills up, looked at them, twisted them in his fingers, then dropped them and let them lie in the center of the table.