"Right now you tell us where the gold is. In the morning you take us to the place. And if you make a little mistake and don't take us straight, I'll make you sorry you were ever born!" Deveril and Lynette passed within a few yards of the dugout's nearest front corner; they groped onward up the steep slope; they came in a brief détour to the rear, where the rude timbers supporting the shed roof were at this end embedded in the earth. Here they stopped and lay flat and listened. And they heard Joe mumbling: "If I tell, I tell true. But I don't think I tell. You kick me out; you steal everything; you get rich an' me--I die poor. Maybe better I die and fool you!" "Listen, Joe." Gallup speaking--Gallup, who feared that Joe might be fool enough to die with locked lips rather than be robbed of his new fortune; Gallup, a man who could understand another man doing anything, standing any torture, rather than lose the one golden thing in life. "We'll make you a fair proposition, us three men. You found the gold; all right, you got a right to a share. You can't hog it anyhow; other men will come rushing in as soon as you drop a pick in it; they'll stake claims all around you; more'n likely they'll cop off the very cream of it, and you'll have just a pocket that will peter out on you. We brought Cliff along; he knows pockets and veins and all kind of gold signs, from stock to barrel. Now, you show sense; you take us along; we form a company, just us four. And you get one-fourth the rake-off. And we got the money to develop it; to make a big thing out of it. You ain't got the money and you ain't got the business brains, and you'd lose on it sooner or later, anyhow." Silence. A long silence while three men watched him and while Deveril and Lynette listened. A long silence during which all that strangely blended craft which flowed into Mexicali Joe's veins from a mixture of Latin and Indian ancestry was hard at work ... though this no one could guess now, so immobile was Joe's face, so guarded his tone when he spoke. "That sound fine, Gallup! But how I know you don't cheat me? For why you don't hit me in the head with a pick when I tell? For why you don't take all ... everything?"