“Now what?” he growled.
“Do you know anything about the right way of relocating a claim?” I asked. “Anything in law about it?”
“It’s more likely to be described in the thieves’ catechism,” he snarled. “I have never owned a copy!”.
That’s all the help I got from him!
Well, if I didn’t know much about the regular way, I reckoned I could make considerable trouble in town by blundering along with a little way of my own. So I tiptoed down-stairs.
Apparently Royal City had quit the job and gone to sleep. The hotel office was dark, and when I stepped forth into the night there was no glimmer of light anywhere. Even the lanterns that served as the city’s municipal lighting-plant in the streets had burned out or had been blown out. It was a case of grope, but I had looked about carefully when I went shopping and had a pretty good memory for locations.
There was a little pile of laths at the corner of the hotel. I had noticed them when I had lurked in the shadows with Judge Kingsley. I picked up a lath and wrote on its side, well up toward one end, “Relocated. Dragg.” Then I pushed the lath down into the mud at the corner of the hotel and tied to it the end of the ball of twine. With several laths under my arm I proceeded a few paces, unwinding the twine, and pushed another lath down and knotted my string about its end. Thus I circumnavigated the hotel, sticking down marked laths, knotting about them the twine. In this fashion I calculated I had declared on one Dragg a re-location of the hotel site—or rather made it seem that Dragg had tried on a clumsy trick to jump a land claim.
With footsteps muffled by the mud of Royal City, moving unseen in the night, I was truly a generous cuss. I located nothing for myself. I took the “Imperial Emporium” for Pratt, and re-located the site of the “Imperial Hotel” for Dawlin. Then I stole back into the tavern, taking off my muddy shoes at the door.
That slatted bed and the snores pealing everywhere kept me awake nearly all night, and next morning I was down before anybody else was stirring. In the gray dawn out slouched from an inner room the landlord, yawning, growling, blinking—beginning his day’s duties in a distinctly grouchy frame of mind.
“What time does the stage-coach leave for Breed City?” I asked.