Brooke admitted that he did, and Saxton nodded.
"Then the thing's quite easy," he said. "You look at the one they've got already, and make another like it. Haven't you found out yet that a man can do 'most anything that another one can?"
"Well," said Brooke, "I'll try it, but that brings us to the question, what else do you expect from me? It is very probable that I shall make an unfortunate mistake for both of us, if you leave me in the dark. I want to understand the position."
Saxton explained it at length, and Brooke leaned back in his chair, glancing abstractedly through the open door as he listened, for his mind took in the details mechanically, while his thoughts were otherwise busy. He saw the dusky forest he had toiled and lost hope in, and then, turning his head a trifle, the comfortless dingy room and Saxton's intent face and eager eyes. He was speaking with little nervous gestures, vehemently, and all the sensibility that the struggle had left in Brooke shrank from the sordidness of the compact he had made with him. The fact that his confederate apparently considered their purpose perfectly legitimate and even commendable, intensified the disgust he felt, but once more he told himself that he could not afford to be particular. There was, it seemed, a price to everything, and if he was ever to regain his status he must let no more opportunities slip past him.
Still the memory of the old house in the English valley, and a certain silver-haired lady who had long ago paced the velvet lawns that swept about it with her white hand upon his shoulder, returned to trouble him. She had endeavored to instil the fine sense of honor that guided her own life into him, and he remembered her wholesome pride and the stories she had told him of the men who had gone forth from that quiet home before him. Most of them had served their nation well, even those who had hewn down the ancient oaks and mortgaged the wheat-land in the reckless Georgian days, and now, when the white-haired lady slept in the still valley, he was about to sell the honor she had held priceless for six thousand dollars in Western Canada. Nevertheless, he strove to persuade himself that the times had changed and the old codes vanished, and sat still listening while Saxton, stained with soil and water from the mine, talked on, and gesticulated with a bleeding hand. He touched upon frontages, ore-leads, record and patents from the Crown, and then stopped abruptly, and looked hard at Brooke.
"Now I think you've got it all," he said.
"Yes," said Brooke, whose face had grown a trifle grim, "I fancy I have. I am to find out, if I can, how far the third drift runs west, and when the driving of it began. Then one of us will stake off a claim on Devine's holding and endeavor, with the support of the other, to hold his own in as tough a struggle as was probably ever undertaken by two men in our position. You see I have met Devine."
Saxton laughed. "I guess he's not going to give us very much trouble. He'll buy us off instead, once we make it plain that we have got the whip hand of him. Your share's six thousand dollars, and if you lay them out as I tell you, you'll go back to England a prosperous man."
Brooke smiled a trifle drily. "I hope so," he said. "Still, I shall have left more than I could buy with a great many dollars behind me in Canada."
"Dollars will buy you anything," said Saxton. "That is, when you have enough of them. They're going to buy me a seat in the Provincial Legislature by and by. Then I'll let the business slide, and start in doing something for the other folks. We've got 'most everything but men here, and I'll bring out your starving deadbeats from England and make them happy—like Strathcona."