"
"I cannot object to that. You have three hundred thousand dollars in
dust deposited with me. Go to Mr. Atsheler and draw it at once."
The man fumed impotently up and down. "Can't I get that other five
hundred? Great God, man! I've paid for it! You don't intend me to
starve?"
"Look here, Melton." Jacob Welse paused to knock the ash from his
cigar. "At this very moment what are you working for? What are you
trying to get?"
"A thousand pounds of grub."
"For your own stomach?"
The Bonanzo king nodded his head.
"Just so." The lines showed more sharply on Jacob Welse's forehead.
"You are working for your own stomach. I am working for the stomachs
of twenty thousand."
"But you filled Tim McReady's thousand pounds yesterday all right."
"The scale-down did not go into effect until to-day."
"But why am I the one to get it in the neck hard?"
"Why didn't you come yesterday, and Tim McReady to-day?"
Melton's face went blank, and Jacob Welse answered his own question
with shrugging shoulders.
"That's the way it stands, Melton. No favoritism. If you hold me
responsible for Tim McReady, I shall hold you responsible for not
coming yesterday. Better we both throw it upon Providence. You went
through the Forty Mile Famine. You are a white man. A Bonanzo
property, or a block of Bonanzo properties, does not entitle you to a
pound more than the oldest penniless 'sour-dough' or the newest baby
born.
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