“But I hold the option on the ground,” insisted Otis.
“Pooh! What good is it to you? It ain’t in your name, and if it was you haven’t the money to complete the deal. What you want to do with that option is to destroy it; then it won’t turn up to put us in a hole, may be. I’m goin’ to look up Jim Sanders right away. If he’s the soak you say he is, I shan’t have much trouble in gettin’ a bill of sale for that hill out of him. Now let us settle the thing right here. Are we even partners, or are we not?”
“You’ve got me where the shoe pinches, so I have to agree,” said Clymer, reluctantly.
“Now you’re talkin’ sensibly. I never like to go into a deal where the other man has the bulge on me. I’m treatin’ you perfectly fair, for money counts every time, and it’ll take money to put this thing through. You don’t know what trouble we may be up against if that fellow Prawle turns up out here and makes a squeal. Without me at your back you would be lost. Now that we’re equal partners in the enterprise I’ll see you out of it same as myself, no matter what the consequences happen to be. So shake hands on it.”
Otis Clymer saw that Plunkett was really master of the situation, and he had sense enough to understand that he couldn’t do a thing without his companion’s backing, so he held out his hand in an apparently cordial way, and the compact between the two was sealed then and there.
Plunkett produced a big flat bottle from one of his hip pockets, and they both drank success to the scheme in which they were embarked.
Then they took the back track, which brought them to the trail a mile distant, and the trail landed them in Rocky Gulch in the course of an hour.
The Gulch was a settlement of perhaps three hundred inhabitants.
It was not greatly different from some hundreds of other mining camps which have from time to time sprung up in the western wilderness in a night, flourished for a brief time, and then disappeared as the occasion for their existence passed away.
It had its stores, saloons, assay offices, so-called hotels, and all the business establishments that characterize such places.