Casey went over and cranked the Ford, grimly determined to make the coffee pot lie for him if necessary.-He backed the car down the draw a good seventy-five yards, to where a wrinkle in the bank hid him from the breakfast camp.-He stopped there and left the engine running while he straddled out over the side and went forward to the dip of the front fender to see if the Ford were still visible to Mack Nolan.-He was glad to find that by crouching and sighting across the fender he could just see the campfire and the top of Nolan's hat beyond it.-The man need only lift his head off his arm to see that the Ford was standing just around the turn of the draw.
"The corner was never yet so tight that Casey Ryan couldn't find a crack somewhere to crawl through," he told himself vaingloriously. "An' I hope to thunder the feller sleeps long an' sleeps solid!"
For fifteen minutes the mind of Casey Ryan was at ease.-He had found a shovel in the car, placed conveniently at the side where it could be used for just such an emergency as this.-For fifteen minutes he had been using that shovel in a shelving bank of loose gravel just under an outcropping of rhyolite a rod or so behind the car and well out of sight of Nolan.
He was beginning to consider his excavation almost deep enough to bury two ten-gallon kegs and forty bottles of whisky, when the shadow of a head and shoulders fell across the hole.-Casey did not lift the dirt and rocks he had on his shovel.-He froze to a tense quiet, goggling at the shadow.
"What are yuh doing, Casey?-Trying to outdig a badger?" Mack Nolan's chuckle was friendliness itself.
Casey's head snapped around so that he could cock an eye up at Nolan. He grinned mechanically.-"Naw.-Picked up a rich-lookin' piece uh float. Thought I'd just see if it didn't mebby come from this ledge."
Mack Nolan stepped forward interestedly and looked at the ledge.
"Where's the piece you found?" he very naturally inquired.-"The formation just here wouldn't lead me to expect gold-bearing rock; but of course, anything is possible with gold.-Let's have a look at the specimen."
Casey had once tried to bluff a stranger with two deuces and a pair of fives, and two full stacks of blue chips pushed to the center to back the bluff.-The stranger had called him, with three queens and a pair of jacks.-Casey felt like that now.
He had laughed over his loss then, and he grinned now and reached carelessly to the bank beside him as if he fully expected to lay his hand on the specimen of gold-bearing rock.-He went so far as to utter a surprised oath when he failed to find it.-He felt in his pockets.-He went forward and scanned the top of the ledge almost convincingly.-He turned and stood a-straddle, his hands on his hips, and gazed on the pile of dirt he had thrown out of the hole.-Last, he pushed his hat back so that with the next movement he could push it forward again over his eyebrow.
"Now if that there lump uh high-grade ain't went an' slid down the bank an' got covered up with the muck!" he exclaimed disgustedly. "I'm a son of a gun if Fate ain't playin' agin'
Casey Ryan with a flock uh aces under its vest!"
Mack Nolan laughed, and Casey slanted a look his way.-"Thought I left you takin, a nap," he said brazenly.-"What's the matter?
Didn't your breakfast set good?"
Mack Nolan laughed again.-It was evident that he found Casey Ryan very amusing.
"The breakfast was fine," he replied easily.-"A couple of lizards got to playing tag over me.-That woke me up, and the sun was so hot I just thought I'd come down and crawl into the car and go to sleep there.-Go ahead with your prospecting, Casey--I won't bother you."
Casey went on with his digging, but his heart was not in it. With every laggard shovelful of dirt, he glanced over his shoulder apprehensively, watching Mack Nolan crawl into the back of the car and settle himself, with an audible sigh of satisfaction, on top of the load.-He had one wild, wicked impulse to lengthen the hole and make it serve as a grave for more than bootleg whisky; but it was an impulse born of desperation, and it died almost before it had lived.