Many of these suits were based upon cross-claims--contentions that we were overlapping other properties--and most of these we were able to compromise by buying off the litigants. By this means we acquired the entire area of the original triangle. When the news of our strike reached Nebraska, the owners of the Mary Mattock sought to break their sale to us on the ground that we had stacked the cards against them. But our lawyers were too shrewd to be caught in such a flimsy net as this. At Benedict's suggestion we drove a drainage tunnel on the purchased property and unwatered the three shafts which the Nebraskans had sunk; an expedient which enabled us to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that the Mary Mattock, at the time of its abandonment by its original owners, was nothing more than a series of prospect holes, and that the property was valueless save for a dumping ground. Through all these bickerings and compromisings the Lawrenceburg fight held on, giving us the most trouble and costing the most money. Blackwell proved himself to be a scrapper of sorts, leaving no expedient untried in his attempts to tie us up and put us out of business. Shortly after we began developing in earnest, he put a shaft-sinking force on the nearest of the Lawrenceburg upper claims on the hillside above us, hoping, as we supposed, to flood us out by tapping one of the numerous underground water bodies with which the region abounds and turning it loose on us. At least, we could imagine no other reason for the move, since the growing dump at this upper working was entirely barren of ore, and remained so. On our own part we were able to get back at Blackwell only in small ways. When he tried to shut us out of our wagon road right-of-way in the gulch, we beat him in the courts and made him pay damages for obstructing us. Later, when his upper dump began to encroach upon our ground, we sued him again and got more damages, with a peremptory order from the court to vacate. Still later we took Phineas Everton away from him. The assayer had had some disagreement with Blackwell, the nature of which was not explained, but which I, for one, could easily understand, and Everton, apologetic now for his early suspicion of us, had told Barrett that he was open to a proposal. The proposal was promptly made and we installed Everton as our assayer and expert in the town offices, fitting up a laboratory for him which lacked nothing that money could buy in the way of furnishings and equipment.