The Highgrader

"He picks out the best pieces while he is working--the nuggets that are going to run a high per cent. of gold--and pockets them. At night he carries them away."

"But--haven't you any policemen here? Why don't you stop them and search them?"

"The miners' union is too strong. There would be a strike if we tried it. But it has got to come to that soon. The companies will have to join hands for a finish fight. They can't have men hoisted up from their work with a hundred dollars' worth of ore stowed away on them."

"Is it as bad as that, Mr. Bleyer?" asked Lady Farquhar in surprise.

"Sometimes they take two or three hundred dollars' worth at once."

"They don't all steal, do they?" demanded Moya with an edge of sarcasm in her clear voice.

Bleyer laughed grimly. "I'd like to know the names of even a few that don't. I haven't been introduced to them."

"One hundred per cent. dishonest," murmured Moya without conviction.

"I don't guarantee the figures, Miss Dwight." The superintendent added grudgingly: "They don't look at it that way. Bits of high-grade ore are their perquisite, they pretend to think."

Verinder broke in. "They say your friend Kilmeny took ore to the value of two thousand dollars from the Never Quit on one occasion. It ran to that amount by actual smelter test, the story goes. I've always rather doubted it."

"Why--since he is so dishonest?" Moya flung at him.

"Don't think a man could carry away so much at one time. What d'ye think, Bleyer?"

"Depends on how high-grade ore the mine carries. At Cripple Creek we found nearly four thousand on a man once. He was loaded down like a freight car--looked like the fat boy in 'Pickwick Papers.'"

"Should think he'd bulge out with angles where the rock projected," Lady Farquhar suggested.

"The men have it down to a system there. We used to search them as they left work. They carry the ore in all sorts of unexpected places, such as the shoulder padding of their coats, their mouths, their ears, and in slings scattered over the body. The ore is pounded so that it does not bulge."

"Perhaps I'm doing Mr. Kilmeny an injustice, then. Very likely he did get away with two thousand at one time," Verinder jeered with an unpleasant laugh.

"Yes, let's think the worst of everybody that we can, Mr. Verinder," came Moya's quick scornful retort.

The Croesus of Goldbanks stood warming himself with his back to the grate, as smug and dapper a little man as could be found within a day's journey.