“Any man can work,” he answered doggedly. “He don’t have ter rob graves. I ain’t superstitious, Turner. But it’s durn funny old Whipple dies with them words on his lips: ‘In a grave that’s decked with gold.’ An’ here he is in a grave full of it. If there’s anything in sperits, maybe the old man’s hovering around and laughin’ to beat the dickens. Struck it at last--when it can’t do him no good!” “It’s an excellent joke, no doubt,” returned the engineer unsmilingly. “But the real joke would be on us if we left thousands of dollars--after all the hardships we’ve gone through this summer. Left it for the next couple of prospectors to wash up and put it in their buckskin pokes. No, sir!” McAdams scowlingly flipped his thumb at the epitaph. “Didn’t you write that there po’try to skeer the next man off from tamperin’ with the grave? Maybe the next guy, even if he ain’t got the decency of a pig to let a grave alone, will be scairt out by the curse.” “Oh, of course,” returned the engineer, ironically. ‘Prospectors are that way. Men that have got the nerve to take their lives in their hands in a wilderness like this--they’re going to be scared off by a verse they can’t even understand. With gold glittering under their hands. Why not advertise it? Write the other verse under it--tell ’em it’s a grave that’s decked with gold, for fear it’s a cloudy day when they pass by and they don’t catch a gleam in the dirt. Sure, let them have it!” “You’re gittin’ sarcastic, now, ain’t you? Well, you kin, if you like.” McAdams folded his arms. His jaw was set. “This man Whipple didn’t amount to much in this country, so fur as success goes, though he always stood fer law and order. But old-timers that knew him tell me he’s been some punkins back in the States in early days. One of the best Injun fighters in the West, and known and trusted by the gov’ment men that come after Custer. If he was back in Montana, now, the old-timers’d plant him proper and give him a headstone with what he done cut on it, ’stead of a moldy old poem from this feller Shakespeare. Just because he cashes in away up here a thousand miles from nowheres is no reason why we oughter treat him like a dead animal. No, siree! Not by a darn sight.” “Do as you damn please!” barked Turner, enraged. “Help me, or I’ll take it all!” He stripped off his coat and walked to the pack mule that bore the short-handled shovel, thrust under the lashing. When he turned he looked into the muzzle of a revolver. “You’ll take it all!” echoed Aleck McAdams. “Every one of the five chambers if you tech this grave. You won’t listen ta reason. You’ll listen to _this_, if it talks!” Turner went white. “Partners, heh! This is the way you treat a partner because he don’t agree with you!”