That leak wasn’t in the mine.
‘I feel a trickle inside, young man—’
Thus, every little while, through the heat of the day, the old man intimated his hurt, and how he felt himself bleeding internally. Elbert’s idea was to set out at once and in a hurry to bring help from Slim Stake Camp, but Mr. Leadley so far had persistently refused to let him go.
‘Things I’ve got to say are more important. You never can tell when I’m apt to start talkin’—don’t go yet. I’m restin’ a little first, that’s all—’
When he dozed, Elbert roamed about outside, but within call. Everything imaginable in the way of canned goods, dried fruits, preserves, were stored in a shed as commodious as the cabin; ample supplies of tobacco, quantities of unused tools. Stocked for a year, the place looked; with at least a ton of baled hay and many bags of grain in the corral-shed. All the carpenter work was made of cedar; hand-tooling everywhere—work of a man who liked to bring out the best with a sharp blade; quaint art about the cabinets and wooden insets in the fireplace.
Down trail to the right from the cabin door was the tunnel entrance to the mine, and ahead out over many tree-tops, a glimpse of the Flats, in a great pit of saffron light. Elbert kept thinking he should go for help in spite of Mr. Leadley’s protestations. A call from the cabin hurried him in shortly after noon.
Twice the injured man’s lips started, before he got words going:
‘Maybe I ain’t goin’ to die, and maybe I am. That’s all right—only there’s some things I mean to say first. It wasn’t only a vacation I brought you here for—that and somethin’ else, though I didn’t expect to be hurried like this, in unburdenin’ my mind. Yes, sir, I took to you the minute you looked so inquirin’ as to what I meant, when I came in that leather-store ... same age and all that, as Bart down in Sonora—and when you hints you’d like to get down there .... Draw up a box to write on, and bring me a little leather sack of papers in the lower cabinet by the fireplace—the key in the wallet here. You’re to write down what I say.’
Reserves of will-power were drawn upon; part of the quaint twang went out of the old man’s speech:
‘I, Robert Leadley, of the Dry Cache mine, near San Forenso, Arizona, in sound mind, so far as I know, but badly hurt from a fallen rock in the tunnel of said mine—my own fault because I knew for a long time there were spots that needed timbering—do hereby confer upon my young friend, Elbert Sartwell, who is writing this at my word, the sole right and authority to manage and administer all property I possess—’