Opening the letter, he read laboriously: 

    Snowy Gulch, B.C.

    Dear brother Ezra:—­

I rite this with what I think is my dying hand.  It’s my will too.  I’m at the hotel at Snowy Gulch—­and not much more time.  You know I’ve been hunting a claim.  Well, I found it—­rich a pocket as any body want, worth a quarter million any how and in a district where the Snowy Gulch folks believe there ain’t a grain of gold.

It’s yours.  Come up and get it quick before some thieves up hear jump it.  Lookout for Jeffery Neilson and his gang they seen some of my dust.  I’m too sick to go to recorder in Bradleyburg and record claim.  Get copy of this letter to carry, put this in some safe place.  The only condition is you take good care of Fenris, the pet I raised from a pup.  You’ll find him and my gun at Steve Morris’s.

I felt myself going and just did get hear.  You get supplies horses at Snowy Gulch go up Poor Man Creek through Spruce Pass over to Yuga River.  Go down Yuga River past first rapids along still place to first creek you’ll know it cause there’s an old cabin just below and my canoe landing.  Half mile up, in creek bed, is the pocket and new cabin.  And don’t tell no one in Snowy Gulch who you are and where you going.  Go quick brother Ez and put up a stone for me at Snowy Gulch.

    Your brother

    Hiram Melville.

There was a long pause after Ezram’s voice had died away.  Ben’s eyes glowed in the moonlight.

“And you haven’t heard—­whether your brother is still alive?”

“I got a wire the hotel man sent me.  It reached me weeks before the letter came, and I guess he must have died soon after he wrote it.  I suppose you see what he means when he says to carry a copy of this letter, instead of the original.”

“Of course—­because it constitutes his will, your legal claim.  Just the fact that you are his brother would be claim enough, I should think, but since the claim isn’t recorded, this simplifies matters for you.  You’d better make a copy of it and you can leave it in some safe place.  And of course this claim is what you offered to let me in on.”

“That’s it.  Not much, but all what I got.  What I want to know is—­if it’s a go.”

“Wait just a minute.  You’ve asked me to go in with you on a scheme that looks like a clear quarter of a million, even though I can’t give anything except my time and my work.  You found me in a penitentiary, busted and all in—­a thief and a gangster.  Before we go any further, tell me what service I’ve done you, what obligation you’re under to me, that gives me a right to accept so much from you?”

It might have been in the moonlight that Ezram’s eyes glittered perceptibly.  “You’re in my charge,” he grinned.  “I guess you ain’t got any say comin’.”