“Our friend is a philanthropist,” said one of them, who spoke clean, colloquial English. “We all admit his favors, but he doesn’t mention that he puts them in the bill.”
“And he doesn’t charge anything extra for insects in his flour,” said another man.
There was a little laughter, but Saunders gazed at them reproachfully.
“If you think it’s easy making money out of the kind of crowd you are, all you have to do is to start a store and see. But that wasn’t quite what I meant to say,” he explained. “Anyway, I put the whole of you right on to this lead.”
“You were quite a long while doing it,” interjected one of the audience.
Saunders waved his hand.
“Am I a blame fool?” he asked. “I’ve no use for an inquisitive, grasping crowd worrying round my gold-mine until I’ve got things securely fixed. Still, you drove off those jumpers, for which you have my thanks; and I want in due time to get back the money most of you owe me.”
“You can count on that, boys,” said another of them. “It’s a dead sure thing.”
The storekeeper disregarded this.
“Well,” he continued, “we’ll get to the point of it. It’s kind of easy finding a gold-mine when you’ve a friend of my kind to put you on to it, but it’s quite often a blame hard thing to keep it. Now, you’ll have men from the cities wanting to buy you up, offering you a few hundred dollars for the claims you’ve struck, and if you’re fools you’ll take it. If not, you’ll hold off until the Grenfell Consols go up on the market and then give us first call on buying the lot. If we can’t take the deal you’ll get six or eight times as much in Vancouver as you would if you let go now.”