Then he sat on the edge of the bunk with his own tin cup. "I guess," he said, "that tenderfoot was careless."
"Threw dynamite at a chipmunk."
"There's a hole," said Shorty, "where we had our forge."
"How much will that cost Rams?"
"Don't know yet. It's our first capitalist, so it's lucky it wasn't put out of business, eh? That arm should tie it down six weeks, while we sell it wild-cats. We've got a dandy bunch of wild-cat claims, and they might cost a Friburg expert—"
"He's that."
"Say fifty thousand dollars. Thanks, old man. We're grateful."
III
My blood came by inheritance, my vices by contagion. My blood was wholesome, healing me rapidly from the start, and as to contagion of vice, or any kind of foulness, there really was no room in that little shack. I do believe most heartily that unhappy people infect their homes with selfishness, nagging, peevishness, rancor, melancholia, murder, which like the microbes of disease, are living evils, the devils which our Lord Christ found such sport in hunting. But where Shorty and Broach kept house there was only room for fairies, and they swarmed. I know, because fairies are so exactly like children in the way they love noise and mess. Think how delighted they are in hiding things which humans leave lying about! These prospectors, for instance, had mislaid everything they had not really lost.
But if fairies are merely untidy, squirrels are dissolute. A pair of them lived in the roof, who kept a squirrel maid to help them scatter flour, nuts and cinders. She had lost an eye, and never threw anything straight.