“Slickest game I ever heard of,” continued Mason.  “Two men came into town—­two poor prospectors, remember—­ran across the Englishman at the hotel—­told the story of their claim:  “Take it or leave it after you look it over,” they said.  Didn’t want but sixty thousand for it; that would give them thirty thousand apiece, after which they’d quit and live on a ranch.  No, they wouldn’t go with him to inspect the mine; there was the map.  He couldn’t miss it; man at the hotel would drive him out there.  There was, of course, a foot of snow on the ground, which was frozen hard, but they had provided for that and had cut a lot of cord-wood, intending to stay till spring.  The Englishman could have the wood to thaw out the ground.

“The Englishman went and found everything as the two prospectors had said; thawed out the soil in half a dozen places; scooped up the dirt and every shovelful panned out about twelve hundred to the ton.  Then he came back and paid the money; that was the last of it.  Began to dig again in the spring—­and not a trace of anything.”

“What was the matter?” asked Breen.  So far his interest in mines had been centred on the stock.

“Oh, the same old swindle,” said Mason, looking around the table, a grim smile on his face—­“only in a different way.”

“Was it salted?” called out a man from the lower end of the table.

“Yes,” replied Mason; “not the mine, but the cord-wood.  The two poor prospectors had bored auger holes in each stick, stuffed ’em full of gold dust and plugged the openings.  It was the ashes that panned out $1,200 to the ton.”

Mason was roaring, as were one or two about him.  Portman looked grave, and so did Breen.  Nothing of that kind had ever soiled their hands; everything with them was open and above-board.  They might start a rumor that the Lode had petered out, throw an avalanche of stock on the market, knock it down ten points, freezing out the helpless (poor Gilbert had been one of them), buy in what was offered and then declare an extra dividend, sending the stock skyward, but anything so low as—­“Oh, very reprehensible—­scandalous in fact.”

Hodges was so moved by the incident that he asked Breen if he would not bring back that Madeira (it had been served now in the pipe-stem glasses which had been crossed in finger-bowls).  This he sipped slowly and thoughtfully, as if the enormity of the crime had quite appalled him.  Mason was no longer a “rough diamond,” but an example of what a “Western training will sometimes do for a man,” he whispered under his breath to Crossbin.

With the departure of the last guest—­one or two of them were a little unsteady; not Mason, we may be sure—­Jack, who had come home and was waiting upstairs in his room for the feast to be over, squared his shoulders, threw up his chin and, like many another crusader bent on straightening the affairs of the world, started out to confront his uncle.  His visor was down, his lance in rest, his banner unfurled, the scarf of the blessed damosel tied in double bow-knot around his trusty right arm.  Both knight and maid were unconscious of the scarf, and yet if the truth be told it was Ruth’s eyes that had swung him into battle.  Now he was ready to fight; to renounce the comforts of life and live on a crust rather than be party to the crimes that were being daily committed under his very eyes!