"Say, you're a white man!" Bill looked full at him and grinned appreciation. But he did not confide further in the storekeeper, nevertheless. "Don't let anybody hang around my pets, and don't say who's to own the burros. You buy 'em, and I'll buy 'em from you, same as I do bacon. And be careful, pickin' that man, will yuh? I want one that can swing something besides his tongue." "I getcha, Bill. How about booze?" "All right--if he can do without for a month or two at a stretch. I don't pack any jugs into the desert, as you maybe know." "That's why I asked. Town's full of good men, but they are mostly booze-punishers. Well--how long you expect to be in town?" "Just until I'm hooked up with what I need." "Well--I can get yuh out to-morrow, maybe." "Just in case you happen to run shy,----" Bill wrote a check on a Reno bank and handed it over. "Any balance, either way, we'll straighten up before I leave." He purloined a handful of withered lettuce leaves and dropped them into the box for Sister Mitchell and Luella, and went out to idle here and there through town and discover, if he could, just how much damage Luella had done to his plans. CHAPTER FOUR GOOD, LIVELY PROSPECT Jim Lambert had known Bill Dale since the beginning of the boom that had broken Bill's father,--broken him mentally and financially. Jim was a broker in Goldfield and sold real estate and underwrote fire insurance as a side line. Lately, the side line had become the chief industry, since mines had begun to close down and adventurers were drifting on to later excitements. Bill did not care much for Jim Lambert. Although he never troubled to explain to himself his indifference that edged close to dislike, he had no definite distrust of the man. Yet Jim Lambert had been active in his father's Myrtle Mine boom and had professed to suffer when the bubble burst. Bill's father had complained vaguely that Jim Lambert was largely responsible for the bursting of the bubble, but Bill had not paid much attention to that talk. He knew his dad too well. His dad always blamed some one for his misfortunes,--some one other than himself. Bill's nature was built of stiffer material. When his plans went wrong, Bill set all his energies to work planning the next move and wasted little thought upon the reason for his last failure; unless, to be sure, in that reason lay his safety in the future. Thus, Bill flatly refused to help his father play the game of find-the-guilty-party. He went to work and earned and saved all he could out of it, and when he had enough to keep him going for five years, he set out deliberately to spend that five years in finding a mine.