“Well, you’re right,” said the sailor, seeing that it would be for his advantage to make terms with “Sneaky Al,” as the red haired Weeks was familiarly called.
“Two hundred dollars is an awful lot of money ter risk,” muttered old Arad, knowing that he was the one who would be expected to furnish the “sinews of war.”
“’Tain’t much compared with mebbe three hundred thousand dollars. I heered Cap’n Tarr say, myself, that there was enough o’ them di’monds, ter make a man fabulously rich,” responded Leroyd quickly. “That’d be a clean hundred thousand for each of us.”
“But ef I furnish the money I’d oughter hev more o’ th’ returns,” declared the farmer, who was quite as sharp as either of his companions.
“Come, we won’t quarrel over that,” the sailor declared, rising again. “But we want to talk this matter over where it’s more quiet like. I’ve got a room here. Let’s go up to it, where we shan’t be disturbed.”
“Now you’re talking sense,” Weeks declared, rising gingerly from the chair in which he had again seated himself.
At that instant Mr. Brady, who had been kept busy at the bar by transient customers for the past half hour, called Leroyd over to him.
“Now, look a-here, Jim,” he said, in a hoarse aside, “wot be you an’ Sneaky Al up to? Dere ain’t goin’ ter be no game played on dat countryman here, see? Ye got me inter ’nough trouble yest’day. Ef I hadn’t a pull in dis ward, dey’d er—nabbed me, sure.”
“Don’t you fret, Jack,” responded Leroyd reassuringly. “We ain’t inter any bunco business. The old man knows what he’s about, ef he does look like a hay-seed. Ef he don’t do us, it’ll be lucky.”
“Well, what’s de game?” Brady demanded.