“Where are you going?” Billy called out, as he began to walk away.
“To finish my sleep and catch up a few hours on all that I have lost in the last three months. Take a nap yourself.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
He undoubtedly thought so, yet when Seyd came out again, having slept the clock round, it was to find Billy curled up and snoring hard under the shade of the palm mat that Caliban had stretched between him and the sun. “Quit your fooling,” he broke in severely on Seyd’s chaffing. “Don’t you know that we are down to our last dollar?”
“Thirty-three dollars and sixty cents Mex,” Seyd gravely corrected. Kicking a chunk of cooled matte, he added: “But we now have this. It ought to stake us for a new start.”
Billy, however, was not to be so easily separated from his grief. “Where are you going to raise capital,” he demanded, “with every spare dollar in California locked up in the Nevada gold fields? If this had happened a year ago, before the Tonopah rush, we might have done it. But now?” He shook a doleful head.
“Well—New York?”
“Worse and more of it. The New Yorkers want all the bacon for killing the pig. Might as well give them the mine at once. No, Bob, it’s all off. We’re done—cooked a lovely brown in our own grease. Why didn’t we guard those piles! Who do you suppose did it? Don Luis?”
Seyd shrugged. “Quien sabe? Doesn’t look like his style. Of one thing, however, we can be certain. Your common peon doesn’t habitually walk around with dynamite in his jeans. If I was going to lay any money, I’d place it on your friend Sebastien. But we haven’t any time to fool on detective work. The question is—what’s to be done?”