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Updated: June 11, 2025
His guess was so far from the truth that I was more than willing to help it along. If the Lawrenceburg people could only be persuaded that our imaginary coup was to be postponed until the bottom of our shaft should be out of sight from the surface, we were measurably safe. "We may ask you to prove your charge when the proper time comes, Mr. Everton," I suggested.
"Here's hopin'," he said, with true Western magnanimity; then, with a jerk of his head toward the thin column of stack smoke rising on the still morning air from the Lawrenceburg: "I know this here ground, up one side and down the other. Them fellers down yander 'll be grabbin' fer ye, pronto, soon as they know you've struck pay." "Why should they?"
With every precaution taken a dragging pine-tree coupled on behind the load to serve instead of the squealing brakes, and many injunctions to the driver to take it easy and to do his swearing internally the outfit made more noise than a threshing-machine bumping down the gulch. We kept pace with it, Barrett and I, following along the crest of the spur with an apprehensive eye on the Lawrenceburg.
The Lawrenceburg lawyers are offering to compromise. They say that their owners are tired of dragging the quarrel through the courts, and they offer to buy us out, lock, stock and barrel, for five million dollars." "After they've committed every crime in the calendar to smash us? Not for a single minute!" I exploded. "Right you are, Jimmie! I knew you'd be with me!" he agreed defiantly.
"No; but we can acquire the outer corners of our triangle, sooner or later. We can buy of these new stakers after they find that they haven't room enough to swing a cat on their little garden patches. The big fight is going to be with the Lawrenceburg. Benedict has been digging into that, and he says we are up against a bunch that will fight to the last ditch.
"They may think they've got the straight of it now, but there's no law against their changing their minds mighty suddenly. Suppose Everton shows up his bit of a sample, and they both take a second whirl at the thing and pull down a guess that it isn't stolen Lawrenceburg ore, after all? We've got to improve upon this pick-a-back ore shipment of ours, some way, and do it mighty quick."
The Lawrenceburg people will doubtless claim that mistakes were made in their surveys, as perhaps there were. They've got a first-class fighting man for a superintendent; as I happen to know: a man who won't stick at anything to carry his end." "But it's our strike," I urged. "It's ours if we can hold it," was the sober reply.
"I know the maps well enough. We cover everything up to the head of the gulch, just as I say, joining with the original Lawrenceburg locations on the other side of the spur." Then, suddenly: "Who's your friend?" Barrett introduced me briefly as Jim Bertrand, late of the Colorado Midland construction force. Blackwell nodded and looked toward the shack. "Any more of you?" he asked.
It was a business-like letter addressed to Barrett and Gifford, going fully into the situation from the point of view of a man needing ready money, and urging the acceptance of the Lawrenceburg offer, not wholly for the personal reason upon which Whitredge had been enlarging, but emphatically as a prudent business measure an alternative to the possible loss of everything.
From Indianapolis we started General Lew Wallace with a good brigade of minute-men, and with high hopes that at either Madison or Lawrenceburg, farther up the river, he might "capture them." The people ahead were asked by telegraph to coöperate.
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