Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/49

Rh shared hundreds without a selfish thought will kill for millions. It would be easy, in such wild places as the treasure lay, for three men to go in and only one to come out. Explanations would not be asked for. The desert took toll. The simplest story would pass muster best.

Water might be lacking, food down to the last ration. One would be weaker than the rest. Temptation would walk beside them, step for step. A moment of delirium or passion, induced by circumstance, and a bullet would leave enough for the survivor to conserve life, leave him the heir to the murdered. Such things had happened. Gold was the devil's lure.

But Lyman had foreseen. Each must look after the care of the other. Healy and Stone must play fair with Lefty, must preserve his life at all hazards, or lose everything. With the placer found, the greater prize was still in Stone's keeping. Healy and Lefty must play guardians to him at whatever cost. Each share of the secret, as it was progressively divulged, left its owner of less consequence. That Lyman had set Healy as the first thus to lose rank, showed, Stone thought, that he had trusted him the least. And, inversely, that he trusted Stone the most. It was to Stone that the dead man had really looked to see that the search for his daughter was seriously inducted and her half of all the treasure kept intact. It was this trust that Stone proceeded to make sacred in his mind as an offset to the hardening influence of the lust of gold.