“We want a minimum of five hundred thousand; as much more for accidents.  Where does this cousin of yours live?  In Abingdon?”

“In Vesper—­seven miles from Abingdon.  He’s a lawyer.”

“Is he all right?”

“Why, yes—­I guess so.  When I was a boy I thought he was a wonderful chap—­rather made a hero of him.”

“When you was a boy?” echoed Johnson; a quizzical twinkle assisted the query.

“Oh, well—­when he was a boy.”

“He’s older than you, then?”

“Nearly twice as old.  My father was the youngest son of an old-fashioned family, and I was his youngest.  Uncle Roy—­Oscar’s father—­was dad’s oldest brother, and Oscar was a first and only.”

Pete shook his head.

“I’m sorry about that, too.  I’d be better pleased if he was round your age.  No offense to you, Stan; but I’d name no places to your cousin if I were you.  When we get legal possession let him come out and see for himself—­leadin’ a capitalist, if possible.”

“Oscar’s all right, I guess,” protested Stan.

“But you can’t do more than guess?  Name him no names, then.  I wish he was younger,” said Peter with a melancholy expression.  “The world has a foolish old saying:  ‘The good die young.’  That’s all wrong, Stanley.  It isn’t true.  The young die good!”

CHAPTER V

Something Dewing, owner of Cobre’s Emporium of Chance, sat in his room in the Admiral Dewey Hotel.  It was a large and pleasant room, refitted and over-furnished by Mr. Dewing at the expense of his fellow townsmen, grateful or otherwise.  It is well to mention here that, upon the tongues of the scurrile, “Something,” as a praise-name and over-name for Mr. Dewing, suffered a sea change to “Surething”—­Surething Dewing; just as the Admiral Dewey Hotel was less favorably known as “Stagger Inn.”

Mr. Dewing’s eye rested dreamily upon the picture, much praised of connoisseurs, framed by his window—­the sharp encircling contours of Cobre Mountain; the wedge of tawny desert beyond Farewell Gap.  Rousing himself from such contemplation, he broke a silence, sour and unduly prolonged.

“Four o’clock, and all’s ill!  Johnson is not the man to be cheated out of a fortune without putting up a fight.  Young Mitchell himself is neither fool nor weakling.  He can shoot, too.  We have had no news.  Therefore—­a conclusion that will not have escaped your sagacity—­something has gone amiss with our little expeditionary force in the Gavilan.  Johnson is quite the Paladin; but he could hardly exterminate such a bunch as that.  It is my firm conviction that we are now, on this pleasant afternoon, double-crossed in a good and workmanlike manner.

“The Johnson-Mitchell firm is now Johnson, Mitchell & Company, our late friends, or the survivors, being the Company.”

These remarks were addressed to the elder of Mr. Dewing’s two table mates.  But it was Eric Anderson, tall and lean and lowering, who made answer.