“Borrow?” sniffed Dextry. “Folks don’t lend money in Alaska.”
They relapsed into a moody silence.
“I met a feller this mornin’ that’s workin’ on the Midas,” the old man resumed. “He came in town fer a pair of gum boots, an’ he says they’ve run into awful rich ground—so rich that they have to clean up every morning when the night shift goes off ’cause the riffles clog with gold.”
“Think of it!” Glenister growled. “If we had even a part of one of those clean-ups we could send Wheaton outside.”
In the midst of his bitterness a thought struck him. He made as though to speak, then closed his mouth; but his partner’s eyes were on him, filled with a suppressed but growing fire. Dextry lowered his voice cautiously:
“There’ll be twenty thousand dollars in them sluices to-night at midnight.”
Glenister stared back while his pulse pounded at something that lay in the other’s words.
“It belongs to us,” the young man said. “There wouldn’t be anything wrong about it, would there?”
Dextry sneered. “Wrong! Right! Them is fine an’ soundin’ titles in a mess like this. What do they mean? I tell you, at midnight to-night Alec McNamara will have twenty thousand dollars of our money—”
“God! What would happen if they caught us?” whispered the younger, following out his thought. “They’d never let us get off the claim alive. He couldn’t find a better excuse to shoot us down and get rid of us. If we came up before this Judge for trial, we’d go to Sitka for twenty years.”