“Don’t want them?” Ashbury asked.
“Not until you say the word,” Pete said.
“I’m saying it.”
“Wait until you hear what I got to say.”
“Go ahead,” I told him.
“Well,” Pete said, “I know a couple of pretty smooth ways of salting a gold-dredger claim so that the devil himself can’t figure it out.”
“What are they?”
“Well, now,” Pete said, “in order to really get the idea, I got to tell you a couple of stories. This goes back to the Klondike when a big company was figurin’ on comin’ in there. A guy had a bunch of ground he wanted to sell, and the company didn’t think it was any good, but the bird told such a story they decided to drill it.
“Well, the minute they started drillin’ it, they knew they’d struck a bonanza. Values were there just the way they should be. They started low at the top, and were heavy down on bedrock. They punched hole after hole, and every hole gave ’em the same results. The ground was absolutely uniform. They bought the place, but just before they started dredgin’ somebody got a bright idea and punched down a couple more test holes— The values were so thin you couldn’t see ’em with a magnifying glass.”
“What had happened?” I asked. “Was the claim salted?”