“None o' your blame business!” was the explosive counter-shot.
“Perhaps it isn't,” said Adams mildly. “Just the same, I'm thirsting to know. Call it vulgar curiosity if you like.”
“All right, you can know, and be cussed to you. We're goin' to work our claim. Got anything to say against it?”
“Oh! no,” rejoined Adams; and when the twain had disappeared in the upper darkness he went down the grade with Branagan and took his place on the man-loaded flats for the run to the construction camp, thinking more of the lately-arrived car with its complement of armed men than of the two miners who had calmly announced their intention of working a placer claim on a high mountain, without water, and in the dead of winter! By which it will be seen that Mr. Morton P. Adams, C. E. M. I. T. Boston, had something yet to learn in the matter of practical field work.
By the time Ah Foo had served him his solitary supper in the dinkey he had quite forgotten the incident of the mysterious placer miners. Worse than this, it had never occurred to him to connect their movements with the Rajah's plan of campaign. On the other hand, he was thinking altogether of the carload of armed men, and trying to devise some means of finding out how they were to be employed in furthering the Rajah's designs.
The means suggested themselves after supper, and he went alone over to Argentine to spend a half-hour in the bar of the dance-hall listening to the gossip of the place. When he had learned what he wanted to know, he forthfared to meet Winton at the incoming train.
“We are in for it now,” he said, when they had crossed the creek to the dinkey and the Chinaman was bringing Winton's belated supper. “The Rajah has imported a carload of armed mercenaries, and he is going to clean us all out to-morrow: arrest everybody from the gang foremen up.”
Winton's eyebrows lifted. “So? that is a pretty large contract. Has he men enough to do it?”
“Not so many men. But they are sworn-in deputies, with the sheriff of Ute County in command—a posse, in fact. So he has the law on his side.”
“Which is more than he had when he set a thug on me this afternoon at Carbonate,” said Winton sourly; and he told Adams about the misunderstanding in the lobby of the Buckingham. His friend whistled under his breath. “By Jove! that's pretty rough. Do you suppose the Rajah dictated any such Lucretia Borgia thing as that?”