Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/53

Rh good-looking women who know how to wear good clothes—without the ability to entertain my friends and, if needs be, assist them, life is not worth the living. Sybaritic, I grant you. I've just been grinding a pit through a porphyry dike in the Grape Vine Mountains, just over the line in Nevada, hoping to find gold underneath it. I was going to stick with that game. I was beginning to knit up the ravels of my constitution and then this thing came along and I realized how utterly sick I was of Skyfields. There's nothing romantic about pounding a drill or holding one. Labourer's work, under much less exciting conditions than the Dago has who is tearing up a New York street. Never a smell of gold to cheer you on, only a belief, that grows hopeless at times, that you'll find it after you get through the porphyry.

"When I gamble I like to gamble with the stakes in sight. I've smelled gold on this trip, seen it and heard of it; a wall of white quartz, studded as thick with gold as the sky is with stars along the Milky Way, points of gold on milky quartz, reaching far up into the darkness. And I've seen bits of the wall. Brought a gleam into your eyes, didn't it? I'll show you the specimens and the quills full of raw gold from the sandbars. It's all there, Redfern, mystery and riches, a dying man's secret; the desert, peril from savages and, according to you, from my own companions."

"One of whom," said Redfern, "looks as if he would cheerfully garrote you for ten dollars, while the other, Healy, would probably hire him to do it."