Someone had entered the outside door. Neither Culver nor Van heard the sound. Culver rolled over, scrambled to his feet, and with his face and neck engorged with rage, came rushing at the horseman like a fury. "You blackguard!" he screamed, "I'll tear out your heart for that! I'll kill you like----" "Shut up!" Van commanded quietly, stopping the onrush of his angered foe by putting his hand against the surveyor's face and sending him reeling as before. "Don't tell me what you'll do to me--or to anyone else in this camp! And if ever I hear of you opening your mouth again as you did here a moment ago, I'll tie a knot so hard in your carcass you'll have to be buried in a hat box!" He glanced towards the doorway. A stranger stood on the threshold. Bowing, Van passed him and left the place, too angered to think either of the maps or of his knife. Culver, raging like a maniac, bowled headlong into the visitor, in his effort to overtake the horseman, but found himself baffled and took out his wrath in foul vituperation that presently drove the stranger from the place. CHAPTER XVIII WHEREIN MATTERS THICKEN The stranger who had witnessed the trouble at Culver's office had come there at the instance of McCoppet. It was, therefore, to McCoppet that he carried the intelligence of what had taken place, so far as he had seen. The gambler was exceedingly pleased. That Culver would now be ready, as never before, to receive a proposition whereby the owners of the "Laughing Water" claim could be deprived of their ground, he was well convinced. For reasons best known to himself and skillfully concealed from all acquaintances, McCoppet had remained practically in hiding since the moment in which he had beheld that half-breed Piute Indian in the saloon. He remained out of sight even now, dispatching a messenger to Culver, in the afternoon, requesting his presence for a conference for the total undoing of Van Buren. Culver, who in ordinary circumstances might have refused this request with haughty insolence, responded to the summons rather sooner than McCoppet had expected. He was still red with anger, and meditating personal violence to Van at the earliest possible meeting. McCoppet, with his smokeless cigar in his mouth, and his great opal sentient with fire, received his visitor in the little private den to which Bostwick had been taken. "How are you, Culver?" he said off-handedly. "I wanted to have a little talk. I sent a man up to your shop a while ago, and he told me you fired Van Buren out of the place on the run." "That's nobody's business but mine," said Culver aggressively. "If that is all you care to talk about----" "Don't roil up," interrupted the gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and make a lifetime winning." Culver looked at him sharply. "It must be something crooked."