"Good stuff you're giving us," he commented, when the article was finished. "Mighty good stuff."
"Your tip put me on to a good lead all right," Dave acknowledged. "And now The Times is chasing me hard. They had a story this morning that the —— railway is buying a right-of-way up the river."
"Remember what I told you the other day? Stories start from nowhere. It's just like putting a match to tinder. Now we're off."
Conward smoked a few minutes in silence, but Dave could not fail to see the excitement under his calm exterior. He had, as he said, decided to "sit in" in the biggest game ever played. The intoxication of sudden wealth had already fired his blood.
He slipped a bill to Dave. "For your services in that little transaction," he explained.
Elden held the bill in his fingers, gingerly, as though it might carry infection, as in very truth it did. He realized that he stood at a turning point—that everything the future held for him might rest on his present decision. There remained in him not a little of the fine, stern honour of the ranchmen of the open range; an honour curious, sometimes terrible, in its interpretation of right and wrong, but a fine, stern honour none the less. And he instinctively felt that to accept this money would compromise him forever more. And yet—others did it. He had no doubt of that. Conward would laugh at such scruples. And Conward had more friends than he had. Everybody liked Conward. It seemed to Dave that he, only, distrusted him. But that, also, as Dave said to himself, lay in the point of view. He granted that he had no more right to impose his standard of morals upon Conward than the preacher had to impose an arbitrary belief upon him. And as he turned the bill in his fingers he noticed that it was for one hundred dollars. He had thought it was ten.
"I can't take that much," he exclaimed. "It isn't fair."
"Fair enough," said Conward, well pleased that Dave should be impressed by his generosity. "Fair enough," he repeated. "It's just ten per cent. of my profit."
"You mean you made a thousand dollars on that deal?"
"Exactly that. And that will look like a peanut to what we are going to make later on."