There was one more question to be asked, and Philip was afraid to ask it. Yet he forced himself to give it tongue.
“You say you camped with these fellows last night. What kind of a crowd was it?”
The big prospector was staring at the three jacks and two horses as if he were mentally counting them.
“Jist betwixt you and me and the gate-post, it’s a sort o’ tough outfit. Hank Neighbors is headin’ it, and if half o’ what they tell about him is so, he’s plum bad medicine.”
“Not prospectors, then?”
“W-e-l-l, you might call ’em so; but I reckon they’re the kind that lets other folks do most o’ the hard work o’ findin’ and diggin’.”
“You mean they’re ‘jumpers’?”
“Least said’s soonest mended. But if I had a right likely prospect anywheres in these here hills, I’d shore hate like sin to have ’em run acrosst it.”
Philip’s resolve was taken upon the instant. From what had been said he knew precisely where the Neighbors camp was; it was only a few miles below the gulch of the “Little Jean”; so few that the campers may well have heard the crashes of the evening rifle practice. And Bromley was standing guard alone.
“See here,” he began, suddenly reversing all former resolutions of canny secrecy; “I don’t know you—don’t even know your name. But I believe you are an honest man, and I’m going to tell you something: I’m one of the tenderfoots Neighbors is trying to trail.”