"'Nice claim you got there, pardner,' says Hawk.
"'Is it?' says he.
"'Ain't you afraid of rubbin' some o' that verdigris off onto your pants,' says Hawk.
"'They're my pants,' says Cameron. 'You ain't here for any good. Get out!' And he brings his rifle to his hip. We saw he was scared all right, maybe not so much at what we'd do to him as at sharin' what he'd found.
"'The Gila Desert ain't all yours, is it, pardner? Or maybe you got a mortgage on the earth!' says Hawk, very polite. 'You ain't got no objection to our stakin' alongside of you, have you? Come along, now. Let's be neighbors. We see what you've got. That's all right. We'll take your leavin's. We've got a right to them.'
"And so after a while of palaverin' with him, he lets us come up and look over his claim. It didn't take any eye at all to see what he'd got. He wasn't much of a man—Ben Cameron—weak-eyed, rum-dum—poor too. You could see that by his outfit—worse off than we were. Hawk told him we had a lot of friends with money—big money in the East. Maybe we could work it to run a railroad out to tap the whole ridge. That kind of got him and we found he had no friends in this part of the country—so we sat down to grub together, Ben Cameron, like me, unsuspectin' of what was to happen.
"My God, Nichols, I can see it all like it had happened yesterday. Hawk Kennedy stood up as though to look around and then before I knew what he was about had struck Ben Cameron in the back with his knife.
"It was all over in a minute. Ben Cameron reached for his gun but before his hand got to it he toppled over sideways and lay quiet.
"I started up to my feet but Hawk had me covered and I knew from what had happened that he'd shoot, too.
"'Don't make a fuss,' he says. 'Give me your gun.' I knew he had me to rights and I did what he said. 'Now,' he says, 'it's yours and mine.'"