“You say there was somebody else looking for him yesterday?”
“Sure. A big cityfied-lookin’ chap named Plunkett.”
That name conveyed no information to Prawle, who had not heard of the landlord of Sackville’s eyesore, and the prospector wondered if he was an emissary of Otis Clymer.
“Mought I ask what you wanted with thet there land down by ther krik?” inquired the proprietor of the Rocky Gulch Hotel, curiously. “It don’t seem a likely sort of place thet I hev heard of. You hain’t diskivered payin’ dirt, hev you?”
This was asked with undisguised eagerness.
“No,” replied Prawle, with assumed carelessness. “No such luck.”
“Wal, now, I wuz in hopes you had,” said the man, in a tone of disappointment. “’Cause why, these here diggin’s aren’t just what they wuz a year ago. Things look like as if they wuz goin’ ter peter out. Wal, you hain’t sed what you bought Jim’s claim for. You aren’t expectin’ ter build a palis an’ live thar jest for ther fun of ther thing, are you?”
“Well, hardly,” replied Prawle, falling in with the man’s rude humor. “I’ve discovered there’s a peculiar kind of stone near the creek that might be used to advantage in railroad building, and——”
“Oh, I see,” said the landlord of the hotel, thrown off the scent as Prawle intended. “Wal, I wish you luck with it.”
Prawle asked several other inhabitants of Rocky Gulch about Sanders, but each one had the same answer—Jim had not been seen in the Gulch for over two weeks, and they did not know where he was.