“Sure I’ll play it right, the way you want it. But I don’t see we need act like ther’ was spooks around waitin’ to jump in on us before the register’s fixed.”
Wilder smiled back at the protesting man.
“But ther’ are,” he said. “If you’d the experience I’ve had of this blamed old North you’d be scared to death for our ‘strike.’ It’s a ghost-haunted country this, and most of the spooks have got a kind of wireless of their own that ’ud beat anything we Christian folk ever heard tell of. Ther’s six months of winter ahead, and most of that we’ll be on the trail, or fixing things. It just needs one half-breed pelt hunter to get wise to the game happening around, or a stray bunch of Euralian murderers, and we’d have haf the north on us before the Commissioner could sign our ‘briefs.’ No, boy, get it from me, and just sit around till daylight comes again, an’ dream of the hooch you’re going to drink to the luck of the Kid. It’s the Kid’s luck that’s handed us this thing. It’s the luck her father reckoned was to be hers. And by no sort of crazy act are we going to queer it. I’m taking your scow, and beating it down stream. Clarence’ll feel like gettin’ to home.”
The grinning eyes of Mike followed the tall figure of his leader, with the youth, Clarence, striding beside him, as it vanished in the darkness on its way to the water’s edge. And as they passed from view he turned to the man who displayed no desire to quit the comfort of the fire.
“I’d guessed he’d fallen for it two summers back,” he said. “You can locate it with both eyes shut, an’ cotton batten stuffed in your brain box. That gal had him fast by the back of the neck on sight. The Kid, eh? It’s not Bill Wilder’s way of playing safe on a gold ‘strike.’ That gal’s got him scared to death for the plum he guesses to hand her. No, sirree,” he went on, with a shake of his disreputable head, “the Jezebels o’ Placer for mine, an’ a bunch o’ hooch you could drown a battleship in. It’s easy game that don’t hand you a nightmare, if it’s liable to empty your sack o’ dust. That Kid! What’s he goin’ to do?”
Chilcoot shrugged. Mike was not the man he felt like opening out to.
“He ain’t crazy enough to—marry her?” Mike went on contemptuously. “No. He’s no fool kid.”
A deep flush mounted to the veteran’s temples. His deepset eyes sparkled as he surveyed the other through the smoke of the fire.
“You best ask Bill the things you want to know,” he said coldly. “It don’t matter what you think. It don’t matter what any darn fool thinks. Bill’s mostly spent his life playin’ the game as he sees it. An’ I guess he’ll go right on doin’ the same. And the game he plays is a right game. An’ he’s as ready to hand it out to a hooch-soused no-account, as he is to a gal with a dandy pair of blue eyes.”