make money enough to marry a girl I grew up with back there in Iowa. And now—my God! What will she think when she hears of this!”

He rested his head in his arms on the table by which he sat and for a moment gave way to despair.

“There! There! Don’t take it to heart, son,” Goliath rumbled, laying his huge hand on the prisoner’s bent shoulders. “That girl is too good to hold anything against you if you’re proved innocent, and my pardner and me are goin’ to do that, or go the limit tryin’ to do it.”

But David sat apparently unmoved and with his eyes fixed absently on the window beyond.

“Come, come!” he said finally. “Pull yourself together and answer some more questions. Do you know a man named Shaughnessy, or one named Pinder, or one named MacPharlane?”

Ray looked up and appeared perplexed by this line of interrogation as he answered, “Why, yes. I know all three of them. They’re all of them good friends of mine. Mr. Shaughnessy wanted to buy my claim but I wouldn’t sell it at any price he would give. The best he would offer was a thousand dollars. Then Mr. Pinder came and told me confidentially that his ground, which is above mine, was no good and that he was going to sell to Shaughnessy for five hundred and advised me to sell out. After that Mr. MacPharlane came and I didn’t like him quite so well. He told me confidentially that Shaughnessy was a bad man to cross, and said that I ought to make friends with such a man rather than try to go against him in anything he was after, and intimated that Shaughnessy would make trouble for me if I didn’t sell. But of course I didn’t believe that and told him so in mighty plain language. He sort of lost his temper and let it out that the reason Shaughnessy wanted my claim was that he’s got those on both sides of my ground and, as I understand it, wants to get a solid unbroken string of claims which he’s going to sell to some capitalists back East, or make a stock company out of and sell stock; or something like that. But of course one can’t believe anything one hears from a fellow like that MacPharlane. I was too wise for that; and, besides, Shaughnessy doesn’t own them all because Pinder has a lot of ground—which proves that what MacPharlane said was a lie.”

David sat with a dry smile on his face as he listened to this, and Goliath merely scowled in open-mouthed astonishment.

“Yes, and that’s not all of it, either,” Ray asserted. “Mr. Shaughnessy sent me a letter that I got only 

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