He made two trips with us."
"And he's dead?"
"Died of fever away back in the interior, where there's nothing much
else except mosquitoes. He and Winfield went in there after gold."
"Did they get any?" asked the drummer, interested.
The third officer spat disgustedly over the rail.
"You ask Winfield. Or, rather, don't, because I guess it's not his pet
subject. He told me all about it when he was getting better. There was
gold there, all right, in chunks. It only needed to be dug for. And
somebody else did the digging. Of all the skin games! It made me pretty
hot under the collar, and it wasn't _me_ that was stung.
"Out there you can't buy land if you're a foreigner; you have to lease
it from the natives. Poor old Hank leased his bit, all right, and when
he'd got to his claim he found somebody else working on it. It seemed
there had been a flaw in his agreement and the owners had let it over
his head to these other guys, who had slipped them more than what Hank
had done."
"What did he do?"
"He couldn't do anything. They were the right side of the law, or what
they call law out there. There was nothing to do except beat it back
again three hundred miles to the coast. That's where they got the fever
which finished Hank. So you can understand," concluded the third
officer, "that Mr. Winfield isn't in what you can call a sunny mood.
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