Read Online Oliver Strange - Sudden Westerns 06 - Sudden Gold-Seeker(1937) by Oliver Strange - Free Book Online

successful miner offered to play him at poker for the
property, he setting up a certain sum in gold against it.
                 Rillick
accepted and won almost all the other possessed, nearly doubling his own wealth
in one night. After that, he didn’t care if he gave the house away.” When the
guests had retired to their rooms, Paul turned to his sister. “So Rillick gave
you the house?” he said.
                 With
a gesture of impatience she got up, opened a drawer and took out a paper. “I
paid him a thousand dollars for it,” she replied. “Here is the receipt.”
Lesurge hardly looked at it.
                 “Only that?” The woman’s dark eyes flashed. “Only that,” she
repeated. “What sort of a fellow was he?”
                 “Youngish, not bad-looking, and worth half a million.”
                 “Why
didn’t you go?” She flinched as though he had struck her, and then said coldly:
I argued that if a fool—and he was one—could clean up as much as that, we could
treble it. The old man seems half mad; is he really her relative?”
                 “No,
but she believes him to be, which is all that matters,” Paul said. “He’s only
crazy about gold.”
                 “Then
he doesn’t know where the mine is?” Lesurge explained the position and when he
had finished, she said rather scornfully, “Fagan appears to have blundered. You
seem to be fond of half-wits.”
                 “A
blunt instrument is useful at times,” he told her. “Why did you warn the girl?
Have you had trouble?”
                 “Two
days after I arrived here a man grossly insulted me in the street; he was
drunk, and a Mexican at that.”
                 “What
happened?”
                 “I
stabbed him,” she said coolly, and, noting the frown on his face, added, “Oh,
there was no fuss. I paid the funeral expenses and was complimented by leading
citizens on my pluck.
                 These
boors think I’m wonderful.” The contempt in her tone was real enough.
                 Lesurge
nodded his satisfaction. “Excellent,” he said. “We’ll have them eating out of
our hands before we’re through.”
                 “So
the cowboys followed you here?” she asked.
                 “Yes,
but they’ll be too busy scrambling for gold to bother us,” Paul assured her. “And
anyway, Mason is dumb; Green, the black-haired one, might be dangerous; if he
gets into the game we’ll have to deal with him.”
                 “The
girl is pretty—in a way,” she said casually, her eyes upon him.
                 But
Paul Lesurge could play poker. “I suppose she is,” he replied carelessly. “The kind of ‘wild blossom from the prairie’ type that a man with
brains would tire of in a month.”
                 “For
once, I think you are wrong, Paul,” she returned. “What is to happen to her?”
                 “Haven’t
thought about it,” was the nonchalant reply. There Paul Lesurge was guilty of
an error, for the woman was well aware that he always planned ahead, and was
therefore lying.
                 “Who
is the man with the most influence here?” he asked.
                 “Reuben
Stark, owner of the Monte, the largest of the gambling saloons. He has a number
of miners working for him on grubstake terms and that gives him an obedient
following.”
                 “Is
he a straight man?”
                 “Are
there any?” she asked cynically. “No, I’d say he’s as crooked as a dog’s
hind-leg, but he’ll serve your purpose. He rather admires me,” she added.
                 “Splendid!”
Lesurge said. “Anyone else.”
                 “Jean Bizet, who runs the Paris in opposition to Stark. A
French-Canadian, reputed to be just—but