I said: “My business is to help people in trouble. What can I do for you?”
“Jest this. We want to go back to that country and fetch out the rest of that stuff. We’ve got to get a lot o’ burros and some wagons, and some full-blooded Indians and some good ponies and rifles. There’s a town, a little place, about ten miles from where this half-breed has hid the stuff. My plan is to take the Indians to this place and then Zamora and me to start off in the night with two or three burros. We’ll go at night so’s no feller’ll foller us. We’ll get the stuff, pile it on the burros, and bring it all away at the same time. If we give them Indians $10 apiece and a new rifle and plenty of whiskey they’d be drunker’n owls before night. Then we can ship the stuff on a railroad and bring it here. Now, we’ve got to get about $2,500 or $3,000 to get the things we want; and we want to raise it on the price of the stuff we’ve got along with us. Now, will you help us? I believe we can trust you, ’cause you look square and straight.”
I endeavored to blush at the childlike compliment, and said:
“What can I do? I never had $3,000 in my life, and never expect to have.”
“Mebbe you know somebody that’ll help us.”
“Where is the gold and the half-breed?”
“Down on that street where they’re puttin’ up a big brick building.”
“On Olive street. Why don’t you take the gold and sell it outright?[outright?]”
“Now, that’s jest where the stubbornness of that half-breed comes in. He’s sick in bed. Got the worst kind of a cold, on his lungs, I guess, and he won’t let that chunk go out of his sight. He’s afraid that if we take that stuff to find out how fine it is somebody’ll foller us, and we’ll never get out of this town alive. You know them fellers is awful suspicious. What I want you to do if you’re willin’ to help us, is to jest come down and take a bit of this stuff and see how fine it is, and mebbe you can find some way to help us out.”
Curiosity mingled with benevolence. I was anxious to see this mass of gold and talk with this suspicious half-breed. While going to Fourteenth and Olive streets, where the treasure rested under the sleepless eye of the non-confiding son of the forest, my innocent miner would turn his soft and girlish eyes upon my face and speak with wonder and awe of the height of the houses[houses] and the crowded condition of the streets. I was ushered into a darkened room with much mystery, where a human figure was lying in bed, with his face muffled up in the bed clothes. Like Claude Melnotte, he had not found the raw atmosphere of St. Louis like “the soft air of his native South.” Between his half-suppressed groans he uttered a few words in Spanish and my guide answered in the same musical tongue. After locking the door and looking cautiously about, my friend drew from under the mattress at the foot of the bed something wrapped in the fragment of an old bed-comforter. In a moment a mass of metal weighing about thirty pounds and shaped like a bar of washing soap was revealed. Evidently a pure gold brick.