“‘It ain’t fair to the shipper,’ he says. ‘Suppose it leaks out that he’s payin’ all this extra mileage. What’ll happen to me?’
“‘It don’t never need to leak out,’ I said.
“But O’Connell is hot-headed, an’ he informs me that he’s through. He goes away in a huff, an’ I don’t see him again fer nearly a week. Then he comes over an’ tries to make a dicker with me.
“‘How much cash money will yuh take to show me your route?’ he says, fingerin’ a roll o’ bills. ‘This thing has gone far enough.’
“‘I ain’t in the markey today,’ I told him a little huffy. ‘Yuh can do your own west coast packin’ over any route that yuh like. I won’t even listen to yuh.’
“He offered me fifteen hundred dollars but I refused. Finally he goes away, an’ fer nearly a year packs his own stuff through the Yellowhead, nursin’ a sore spot in his chest. In a way, it was kind o’ hard on me too. It had got so that I depended on the money I received from him fer the work I did. After a while, my capital dwindled down to jus’ a few hundred dollars. I could see I had to go back to work.
“Along about that time, a Nitchie breaks into the warehouse at Fort Point o’ Call an’ steal a lot of valuable fur. One o’ my packers heard it. The thief was a friend o’ his. He had the stuff cached up in the foothills but was afraid to move it for fear he’d get caught.”
Murky ceased speaking and sat for several minutes deep in thought. Then he turned upon Sergeant Richardson.
“Yuh see, I was gettin’ kind o’ desperate, sergeant. This was a big temptation. My money was runnin’ low. I thought it over fer a long time an’ finally made a dicker with the thief. I agreed to take the fur off his hands an’ dispose of it, gettin’ one-third o’ the money fer my trouble.
“We didn’t have no difficulty at all takin’ the fur through the pass, an’ less than three weeks later I had the money it brought safe in my pocket. The man what bought the fur was a free trader who had been in on some shady deals before, an’ I knew he’d keep his mouth shut.