“You ain't,” Saltman answered. “An' if you have you got to show it. Anyway, here's where we relocate. Come on, fellows.”
Saltman, stepping across the dead-line, had turned to encourage a following, when the police lieutenant's voice rang out and stopped the forward surge of the great mass.
“Hold on there! You can't do that, you know!”
“Can't, eh?” said Bill Saltman. “The law says a fake location can be relocated, don't it?”
“Thet's right, Bill! Stay with it!” the crowd cheered from the safe side of the line.
“It's the law, ain't it?” Saltman demanded truculently of the lieutenant.
“It may be the law,” came the steady answer. “But I can't and won't allow a mob of five thousand men to attempt to jump two claims. It would be a dangerous riot, and we're here to see there is no riot. Here, now, on this spot, the Northwest police constitute the law. The next man who crosses that line will be shot. You, Bill Saltman, step back across it.”
Saltman obeyed reluctantly. But an ominous restlessness became apparent in the mass of men, irregularly packed and scattered as it was over a landscape that was mostly up-and-down.
“Heavens,” the lieutenant whispered to Smoke. “Look at them like flies on the edge of the cliff there. Any disorder in that mass would force hundreds of them over.”
Smoke shuddered and got up. “I'm willing to play fair, fellows. If you insist on town lots, I'll sell them to you, one hundred apiece, and you can raffle locations when the survey is made.” With raised hand he stilled the movement of disgust. “Don't move, anybody. If you do, there'll be hundreds of you shoved over the bluff. The situation is dangerous.”