"He is the best, or at least one of the best, metallurgical chemists in the district, and it goes without saying that an honest assayer counts for everything in this mining game. Without one, the smelters will skin you alive."
I laughed. "I didn't ask what he was; I asked who he was—or is."
"He is a school-teacher, or college professor, and I'm told he has taught in High Schools and freshwater colleges all over the Middle West," said Barrett, as we topped the hill to our side of the mountain shoulder. And then I got my bucketing of cold water. "His name is Phineas Everton, and his daughter's name is Mary—though everybody calls her Polly."
XIII
For the Sinews of War
Gifford, sitting in the darkness with his back to the windlass and the big old-fashioned holster revolver across his knees, held us up promptly and peremptorily when we came over the spur. Seeing Barrett with me, he knew pretty well what the results of the assay were before we told him. At the edge of the shallow pit we held a council of war—the first of many. Gifford fully agreed with Barrett that the most profound secrecy was the first requisite. Though he was new to the business of gold-mining—as new as either the bank teller or myself—he could prefigure pretty accurately what was before us.
"Here's where we'll have to ride and tie on the snoozing act," was his drawling comment. "We mustn't leave her alone for a single minute, after this; and it's got to be one of us, at that. We couldn't afford to hire a watchman if we had a million dollars."
Under the ride-and-tie proposal I volunteered to stand watch for the remainder of the night; and after the other two had turned in I took Gifford's place, with the windlass for a back rest and Barrett's shot-gun for a weapon.
I was not sorry to have a little time to think; to try in some fashion to readjust the point of view so suddenly snatched from its anchorings in the commonplace and shot high into the empyrean. It was the night of the ninth of June. Three months earlier, to a day, I had been an outcast; a miserable tramp roaming the streets of a great city; broken in mind, body and heart; bitter, discouraged, and so nearly ready to fall in with Kellow's criminal suggestion as actually to let him give me the money which, if I had kept it or spent it as he directed, would have committed me irretrievably to a life of crime.