Eagerly—and a little apprehensively—McGlory looked through the private report. His face grew longer and longer as he read.
“Sufferin’ poorhouses!” he cried at last. “Levitt says, in this report, that the ‘Pauper’s Dream’ isn’t a mine, but a pocket, and that the pocket has been worked out. In other words, pard, my hundred shares of stock are worth just about what they’ll bring for scrap paper. And the colonel had me worked up till I thought I was going to be a millionaire! Riddle: Where was Moses when the light went out?”
McGlory fell back on the grass and kicked up his heels dejectedly.
“Can’t you see through the dodge your Tucson colonel is working, Joe?” asked Matt.
“Dodge?” echoed McGlory. “The ‘Pauper’s Dream’ is just a hole in the ground. We can’t any of us dodge that.”
“The colonel,” went on Matt quietly, “is paying Levitt to make a false report to the syndicate. To-night the syndicate meets and decides whether or not it will buy the ‘Pauper’s Dream.’ Levitt’s false report has already been submitted, I suppose, and read. You show up at the meeting with the two bars of bullion, and a sworn statement from the colonel that they came out of the ten-stamp mill on the ‘Dream’ during one week’s run. That clinches the proposition. The syndicate, relying on Levitt’s honesty, and, incidentally, on the colonel’s, pay over a big sum for a worthless hole in the ground, and——”
The cowboy leaped erect, flushed and excited.
“And the colonel,” he cried, “divides the proceeds among the stockholders! That gives me a big profit on my five hundred. Oh, well, I reckon I’ve got my dipper right side up during this rain.”
McGlory chuckled. Matt stared at him as though he hardly believed what he heard.
“Pard,” said Matt quietly, “it’s a game of out-and-out robbery.”