“A week?” Garnet asked ironically. “You promise well; if you stay here a year or two you’ll make a useful and enterprising citizen. We could get an experienced boss packer for what I offered you.”
“Down here, yes. When he got to where the claims are, he’d almost certainly drop you and turn miner, and you couldn’t blame him. A man deserves a hundred dollars a day merely for living up yonder. But it’s a month I was speaking of. If you want me, you’ll have to come up.”
Garnet laughed.
“I guess I can fix it; but we’ll get our value out of you.”
“That’s a compliment, if you look at it in one way,” Crestwick grinned in reply.
When Garnet had left them, he turned to Lisle.
“Thanks awfully. Of course, it was your idea.”
“Garnet suggested the thing; that’s more flattering, isn’t it?”
Crestwick looked at him, smiling.
“I’m not to be played so easily as I was when I first met you,” he said. “Of course, in a sense, the pay’s no great inducement to me; it’s the idea of being offered it. I’m going to advise old Barnes, my trustee; he was fond of saying that I was fortunate in being left well off because I’d never earn sixpence as long as I lived, until I stopped the thing by offering him ten to one I’d go out and make it in a couple of hours by carrying somebody’s bag from the station. Anyhow, this is the first move.”