Mason flashed Della Street a significant glance, entered the house and went at once to the telephone. A few moments later, he heard Paul Drake’s voice on the wire. “Hello, Perry. Are you sober?”
“Yes,” Mason said shortly.
“All right,” Drake said. “Remember, I asked you first. Now listen, Perry, I’m a little foggy, but I think a fish is nibbling at your bait.”
“Go ahead.”
“Man by the name of Hayward Small, a spindly chap with a gift of gab. Has a way of trying to look right through you. Know him?”
“Yes.”
“Is he the fish you want?”
“If he’s taking the bait, he is.”
“Someone,” Drake said, “has leaned on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Against his left eye. It’s a beauty.”
“A shiner?”
“A mouse, a shanty.”
“What’s his proposition?”
“Says he knows that the mine I’ve discovered is on the property of the Come-Back Mining Syndicate, that he has a pull with the company; if I’ll take him into partnership on a fifty-fifty basis he’ll guarantee to get us a thirty-three percent interest as our share, and I’ll cut with him.”
“If you accept the proposition, what does he want to do?”
“I don’t know, but he’s taking me to San Roberto with him if it’s a deal. I’m on my road to Los Angeles with Harvey Brady. What do I do?”
“Does he know you’re telephoning?”
“Thinks I’m telephoning a girl in Los Angeles. It’s a booth in a restaurant. I’ve ridden this far with him.”
“Okay,” Mason said. “Accept the proposition and come on down.”
“What do I do when he wants the information?”
Mason said, “Tell him you’ll draw him a map and give him the exact location when you get to San Roberto.”
“And not before?” Drake asked.
“Not unless you want to get poisoned,” Mason said and hung up.
Mrs. Sims said, “Mr. Moffgat telephoned. Seems like the company wants to settle that case. He says he can’t make a proposition directly to me because it wouldn’t be ethical, but he says we can settle.”
“Yes,” Mason announced, smiling, “I feel quite certain he wants to settle it. Where’s your husband?”
“He’s in the kitchen.”
Mason went out to where Pete Sims was sitting slumped dejectedly in a kitchen chair.
“Oh, it’s you,” Pete said.
Mason nodded. “I want to talk with you, Pete.”
“What about?”
“About Bob.”
Pete squirmed. “Bob don’t ever cause me nothing but trouble.”
Mason said, “Come with me. You haven’t seen anything yet. Bring your typewriter and brief case, Della.”
And Mason led the worried, sheepish man up the back stairs and into the room Banning Clarke had used in his lifetime.
“Sit down, Pete.”
Pete sat down. “What do you want?”
“I want to know something about claim salting.”
“What about it? I ain’t ever done any, but I know how it’s done.”
“You load a shotgun shell with little nuggets of gold?” Mason asked, “and then fire it into a ledge of quartz, and...”
Pete Sims shuddered.
“What’s the matter?” Mason asked.
“That’s crude, Mr. Mason. You don’t do it that way at all.”
“How do you do it, Pete?”
“Well, it’s what Hayward Small would call a psychological proposition. You’ve got to make the sucker try to slip something over on you!”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mason said, glancing out of the corner of his eye to make certain Della Street was taking down the questions and answers.
“Well, it’s like this, Mr. Mason. People are pretty well educated nowadays. They’re getting smart. You try to sell them a gold brick, or try to shoot gold into a ledge of quartz, and chances are like as not they’ll have read about it or seen it in a movie somewhere and just give you the horselaugh. In fact, you try to sell anybody a mining claim and he gets suspicious right away. If he knows mines, what you tell him don’t make any difference, and if he don’t know mines, he’s suspicious of everything.”
Quite obviously, Pete Sims was vastly relieved that Mason was asking for information rather than making direct accusations or demanding explanations. That relief made him talkative.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mason said.
“Well, Mr. Mason, you work it this way. You get the sucker all lined up, then you fix it so the sucker is the one that’s trying to sell you.”
Mason said, “You didn’t work it that way with Jim Bradisson, Pete.”
Pete shifted his position in the chair. “You don’t know that whole story, Mr. Mason.”
“What is the story, Pete?”
Pete shook his head doggedly.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“I’ve told you all I know,” Pete said, his manner changing from glib friendliness to surly reticence.
“All right, Pete. No offense. Let’s go back to discussing generalities. How can you make the sucker try to slip something over on you?”
“There’s lots of ways.”
“Can you tell me one?”
“I’ll give you the basic idea back of the whole thing,” Pete said. “You pretend to be the innocent guy and let the sucker be the smart guy. You’re just an innocent, ignorant son of the desert, and the city slicker decides you’re so dumb it would be a shame to cut you in on any profits.”
“I don’t see how you could work that, Pete.”
Sims once more warmed to his subject. “You’ve got to be ingenious, Mr. Mason. You’ve got to do a lot of thinking, and you’ve got to have imagination. That’s why lots of people think I’m lazy. When I’m sitting around doing nothing is when I’m thinking, when I’m... I guess I’m doin’ a lot of talking, Mr. Mason.”
“That’s all right, Pete. You’re among friends,” Mason said. “I’m interested in how you can get the city slicker to try to take advantage of you.”
“They’ll do it every time. You be simple and take them out and show them some property that you want them to buy. You get enthusiastic about that property and show them all the good points. They keep drawing back into their shell. Then about lunch time you take ’em around to some property that you tell ’em belongs to you, or belongs to a friend of yours, and sit down there to eat lunch. Then you make an excuse to wander away, and you’ve planted something that the sucker can find for himself, something that makes it look like the claim is lousy with gold. You get me, Mr. Mason? He finds it while you’re gone. When you come back, he never says to you, ‘Look, Pete, we’ve struck it rich right on your own claim.’ — I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Mason. I’ve been salting claims for twenty years and I’ve never had one of these birds pull that line on me yet.”
“How do you get the customer looking around?” Mason asked.
“Shucks, they’ll all do it. Tell ’em a claim’s rich and they’d ought to buy it, and they take only a halfway interest in it. But take ’em down to some place that looks sort of promising with nice colored rock on it and tell ’em it’s no good — and then walk away and leave ’em, and they start prowling. They’ll do it every time. That’s one thing about a sucker in the desert — he always thinks he knows more than the old-time mining men.”
Mason nodded.
“Well,” Pete went on, “that’s the way it’s put across. He begins looking around. You’ve got some rocks that’s so rich the gold is just stuck in them in chunks. You’ve blasted away a section of rock outcropping and grafted these little pieces of rock into place. If you’re good with dynamite and mixing up a little rock cement, there’s nothing to it. You can put those pieces in place so they look as though they’d been there since the Year One.