Still, what do you want to leave the country for, anyway?"

Damer set his lips, and drummed with his fingers on the table. Then he
made a little deprecatory gesture, and glanced at Hallam.

"You'll hear it all by and by, but there's one point where you're
wrong," he said. "Now, I'm not scared too easily, but I kind of feel
it in me I'll make nothing but trouble for myself by worrying Alton.
Still, it's not the man himself I'm afraid of. I've met tougher ones,
and come out ahead of them."

Hallam sat silent a moment, for he knew the prospectors and survey
packers who passed their lives amidst the desolate ranges and in the
shadowy bush and their superstitions.

"You have had trouble with him before?" he said.

"Yes," said Damer, "I have. He cut my partner down with an axe back
there in Washington. It was in the big rush in the Baker foothills,
and we had a hard crowd standing in with us; but I had to pull out, and
Alton and another man made most of five thousand dollars out of the
claim I left."

"The Bluebird?" said Hallam reflectively. "I remember that rush.
Alton did himself well. Wasn't there a man called Nailer mixed up in
the affair?"

"There was," said Damer, who seemed to shiver a little. "He was my
partner. We'd have had the claim, and Alton wouldn't have worried
anybody again, if Nailer had kept his nerve that night. Something went