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CHAPTER 15

      SOMETIMES A man just has to go into business for himself. He's driven to it.

      Deputy Sheriff Dipp, who considered himself no fool, and who often said that the size of a man's brain had nothing to do with how tall he was or how much fat he lugged around, was at the end of his string. He was tired of doing Sheriff Amhearst's dirty work. It was time he started working for himself!

      Yesterday after Amhearst had kicked him out of the saloon while he was drinking with Hopper and that other man, Dipp had walked along the river, and smelled hot metal a ways back in the trees. He'd followed his nose and crept up on the place where the miners smelted their gold in a what appeared to be a forge of some kind with a bellows.

      He watched them while. With handkerchiefs around their noses and mouths, they added gold-loaded quicksilver to a pot near the fire, keeping away from the smoke while the mercury boiled off. Then they poured the molten gold into an ingot mold and let it cool.

      Dipp had watched them make three ingots and carefully brand each one with dies they hit into the gold with a hammer. Then they poured a little water on them to cool them down, wiped them off so they gleamed beautiful and yellow, and put them in saddlebags.

      A few minutes after they rode off, Dipp came out of hiding and walked around the crude smelter, but there were no little souvenirs of gold lying about.

      He walked back to the saloon where they were all drunk inside, laughing and joking and completely ignoring him. He mounted up and rode back to town, thinking so hard he gave himself a headache.

      He envisioned a big trunk full of the gold ingots — maybe a whole houseful buried someplace, or stacked in a tent. There would be too much to carry, but he would be satisfied with, say, 250 pounds, which his horse could easily handle. If the horse couldn't carry him in addition to the gold, he'd gladly walk alongside. That much gold would be enough to set him up handsomely someplace else, in a civilized town.

      Riding along upstream toward the mining camp, Dipp smiled hugely, all out of proportion to his size. He'd made up his mind that he was going to get his hands on that gold — a lot of gold. On his chest was his badge, and on his hip was his gun. As a soldier he had killed his share of men, and it was something he didn't mind doing at all. He would be a rich man or he would die trying.

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