“But suppose the vein should take a sudden dip to the right—you don’t want them burrowing under your hill——”
“They won’t burrow under my hill,” he said grimly. “I should persuade them that there was an even richer vein on their left.”
“Is there?”
“I have reason to think so. They naturally would want to avoid the expenses of a lawsuit, and of course they would waste a lot of time sinking a shaft or driving across. Their lease would be pretty well up by the time——”
“You are cold-blooded! What of me? I should be making nothing, either.”
“You’d make it all later on. How much do you expect to spend in Europe anyway? You must have made a thousand dollars a day since the first carload of ore was smelted.”
She was on the point of replying that a woman could not have enough money in Europe, when she remembered the conspiracy to make him believe that a thousand dollars would cover the expenses of his wife.
“Oh, it is merely that I don’t like being one of the pawns in your game,” she said.
“You’d have all the more later on. Ore doesn’t run away.”
“How can you stay away from your mine? I feel—after all that you have told me!—that you are wild to get at it?”