“Long, thin man?”
The other nodded.
“One of the best. He made two trips with us.”
“And he’s dead?”
“Died of fever away back in the interior, where there’s nothing much else except mosquitoes. He and Winfield went in there after gold.”
“Did they get any?” asked the drummer, interested.
The third officer spat disgustedly over the rail.
“You ask Winfield. Or, rather, don’t, because I guess it’s not his pet subject. He told me all about it when he was getting better. There was gold there, all right, in chunks. It only needed to be dug for. And somebody else did the digging. Of all the skin games! It made me pretty hot under the collar, and it wasn’t me that was stung.
“Out there you can’t buy land if you’re a foreigner; you have to lease it from the natives. Poor old Hank leased his bit, all right, and when he’d got to his claim he found somebody else working on it. It seemed there had been a flaw in his agreement and the owners had let it over his head to these other guys, who had slipped them more than what Hank had done.”
“What did he do?”