Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/20

4 of the Hoodoos." For he had a healthy American appetite after money and the decent things that money can buy.

He remembered how the Yankee Doodle Glory had come into his possession at the end of a memorable day and night two-handed, stud-poker session with Dixon Harris, the horse wrangler of a neighboring ranch.

Tom had won steadily, hand after hand, pot after pot, until finally Dixon Harris had risen to his feet, had taken a greasy, yellowish, thumb-stained paper from his pocket, and thrown it across the table.

"I am flat, Tom," he had announced. "Thirty seeds to the bow-wows an' next pay day a hell o' a long ways off. Take this here Yankee Doodle Glory an' call it even. Somebody stuck me with it when I wasn't lookin' an' now I'm goin' to stick you, you old son-of-a-gun. Turns about's fair play!"

And Tom Graves had laughed and had taken the title certificate–the mine was patented–in payment of Dixon Harris' gambling debt.

The Yankee Doodle Glory was a standing joke in the community. It had had a variegated, picturesque, and not altogether honest career. It had been sold and re-sold to capitalists from Boston, London, Minneapolis, and New York, abandoned and picked up again, disposed of at auction in Spokane amidst the roaring laughter of those present for thirty-five cents cash ("an' you're paying damned high for what you're getting!" the auctioneer had added facetiously); money had been spent on it lavishly for blasting and timbering, tunneling and assaying, and never a speck of color, neither gold nor silver, neither copper nor galena, had ever been discovered in its frowning, hopeless depths.

Men out there in the Northwest spoke of "passing