"How you goin' tell if I lie?" muttered Joe, something of his stubbornness restored.
"Right now you tell us where the gold is. In the morning you take us to the place. And if you make a little mistake and don't take us straight, I'll make you sorry you were ever born!"
Deveril and Lynette passed within a few yards of the dugout's nearest front corner; they groped onward up the steep slope; they came in a brief détour to the rear, where the rude timbers supporting the shed roof were at this end embedded in the earth. Here they stopped and lay flat and listened. And they heard Joe mumbling: "If I tell, I tell true. But I don't think I tell. You kick me out; you steal everything; you get rich an' me—I die poor. Maybe better I die and fool you!"
"Listen, Joe." Gallup speaking—Gallup, who feared that Joe might be fool enough to die with locked lips rather than be robbed of his new fortune; Gallup, a man who could understand another man doing anything, standing any torture, rather than lose the one golden thing in life. "We'll make you a fair proposition, us three men. You found the gold; all right, you got a right to a share. You can't hog it anyhow; other men will come rushing in as soon as you drop a pick in it; they'll stake claims all around you; more'n likely they'll cop off the very cream of it, and you'll have just a pocket that will peter out on you. We brought Cliff along; he knows pockets and veins and all kind of gold signs, from stock to barrel. Now, you show sense; you take us along; we form a company, just us four. And you get one-fourth the rake-off. And we got the money to develop it; to make a big thing out of it. You ain't got the money and you ain't got the business brains, and you'd lose on it sooner or later, anyhow."
Silence. A long silence while three men watched him and while Deveril and Lynette listened. A long silence during which all that strangely blended craft which flowed into Mexicali Joe's veins from a mixture of Latin and Indian ancestry was hard at work ... though this no one could guess now, so immobile was Joe's face, so guarded his tone when he spoke.
"That sound fine, Gallup! But how I know you don't cheat me? For why you don't hit me in the head with a pick when I tell? For why you don't take all ... everything?"
"I'm telling you why!" cried Gallup. "Look here. Suppose we did that and croaked you and dug a hole and stuck you in. All right. Next thing we pop up with a new gold-mine! And there'll be men to say: 'That ore looks like the ore Mexicali Joe showed that night down to Gallup's house!' And they'll say: 'Where's Joe?' And they'll begin making trouble, all kinds; they'll want to run us out. They'll have us up for killing you. There'll be a lot of talk, and always the chance, as long's we live, they might pin something on us. And what would we make by that sort of work? Only a one-quarter interest in your diggings! Why, man, it ain't worth it! We got too much sense to kill any man for the sake of a little ante like that. Sure, Joe; dead on the level, if you play square with us, we play square with you."
Silence again. A longer silence than before. Then, while Joe must have appeared to hesitate, Taggart said abruptly:
"And if you don't take our proposition and talk fast and straight, I'm going to make you talk! And then you don't get no thanks but a kick and a get-the-hell-out! That's my way, you little greaser."
"Give him time, Jim," pleaded Gallup.