"I have a sort of provisional arrangement with Mr. Conaughy, our president, and I can quit the bank without notice and explain afterward," he said. "I'm going right back with you to-night. Three of us will be none too many to handle this thing when the news gets out."
We went to his room first and loaded up with blankets, working clothes, a shot-gun and a generous supply of fixed ammunition. On the long tramp up the mountain, Barrett, who was older in the district than either Gifford or myself, told me what we might expect.
"You needn't think we are going to be allowed to dig that hole without the toughest kind of a fight, Jimmie," he predicted. "The minute the news gets loose, we shall be swamped with 'interferences,' relocations, law-suits, process servers and constables, to say nothing of the strong-hands and claim-jumpers. The Lawrenceburg people will doubtless claim that mistakes were made in their surveys, as perhaps there were. They've got a first-class fighting man for a superintendent; as I happen to know: a man who won't stick at anything to carry his end."
"But it's our strike," I urged.
"It's ours if we can hold it," was the sober reply. "Our best play is to keep the thing absolutely dark until we can dig out enough money to give us a fighting fund. That's where we're lame. Our bit of capital won't go anywhere when they drag us into the courts."
Our shortest way to the new claim led us in sight of the Lawrenceburg workings. They were running night shifts, and though it was now well along in the small hours, the plant was in full swing. Like most of the mines within trolley distance of the towns, it had no miners' village, the men going back and forth at the shift-changing hours. But the superintendent lived at the plant, and there were a few bunk houses and one other detached cottage.
There was a light in one room of this cottage as we passed, and Barrett called my attention to it.
"There's a man in that shack that I hope we may be able to get, if we ever grow big enough to hire him," he said. Then he added, quite irrelevantly: "He has a daughter, and I'm telling you right now, Jimmie, she's a peach."
I let the reference to the daughter go by default.
"Who is this gentleman that we ought to be able to hire?" I asked.