Mr. Purdy was on the point of requesting the judge to confine himself to some given spot, when the face of Mr. Turner lighted up with the fire of inspiration. He said: “Now look a here, Anderly, they’s a spot right out back a this here shanty where I think you’d find whuchu want. I been a goin’ to dig there myself fer a long time now, but I’ll jest turn ’er over to you, an’ by gun, you can have whuchu find there.”
Mr. Turner did not state that the spot he referred to was where he had projected a cellar in which to store surplus provisions; that, if there had existed any means of getting said cellar there otherwise than by hard work, he would have had it there long ago; and that there was about as much likelihood of finding elephants’ teeth there as gold. But, nevertheless, this all passed through his mind.
“But, my dear sir,” said Julius, “you are not laboring under the delusion that I want to take any man’s mine and use it to my own advantage, I hope. I couldn’t think of taking what another man had found. I just thought some of you could kind of advise me.”
The absurdity of supposing that Mr. Turner would labor under any circumstances, not even excepting a delusion, was so apparent to the judge that he was moved to smile knowingly; but at an indignant look from Hank Purdy he straightened himself up and stared hard at the mountains, as if he were possessed of some recondite knowledge concerning their origin and manner of construction.
“Wal, I admit it’s mighty gen’rous in me,” said Mr. Turner, with a sublime look of self abnegation upon his honest face, “but I tell you we’r’ none uv us mean around these here diggin’s, not if we know it; and ’sides thet, I got a dozen or so places jest as good as thet ’t I kin go to any time, so I guess you jest better go to work there t’morrow an’ git whuchu kin out uv it.”
Julius was profuse in his earnest expressions of gratitude, but Mr. Turner waved him off and magnanimously said it was nothing—which was quite true.
Then Julius had his supper and was shown to the back room, where he was to pass the night.
Upon Mr. Turner’s explaining his object in inducing Julius to dig back of the hotel, whereby he was to be a new cellar the gainer, he was unsparingly praised for bringing about his object by this poetical idealization of a cold, hard reality, in the mind of Julius, and then the gentlemen drank something, the little dark man, as he ordered his without any water, wishing every one to remember, when Julius Anderly’s true character became known, that he had warned them against him from the first.
As they drank to the completion of the new cellar, Julius was heard in his room, musically entreating some person, evidently a female, to lay her brown head upon his breast, which vocal effort was not favorably received, especially by the little dark man, who muttered, as he ambled off toward his tent, that they “didn’t want no layin’ of heads on breasts around there.”