“The sucker sticks the sample of rock in his pocket and when you come back he starts asking you a lot of casual questions about the title to the property, when your option expires, and all that. Then, next thing you know, he’s sneaking around behind your back, trying to double-cross you and get the property. Or if you’ve told him you own it outright, he starts telling you about how this is such a swell place for a desert cabin; he’s never been in a place that seemed more restful to him, and all that sort of stuff. Since the thing doesn’t amount to so much as a mine, he’d like to buy it for a cabin site — or he says he has a friend who has bad sinus trouble, and he would like to get this place for his friend.
“If you’d been the one who discovered the chunk of ore the sucker would have been suspicious. He’d have wanted to call in a couple of mining engineers and had you give him bank references before he’d even listen to you. But when he discovers it, and thinks he’s slipping one over on you, he becomes the salesman and you’re the customer. That’s all there is to it. It’s his own baby and he’s putting it across.”
“A most interesting example of practical and applied psychology,” Mason said. “I think, Sims, I can use that in my business.”
“Well, Mr. Mason, if that’s all you want, I’ll be getting back. But that’s the secret of the whole business. You’ve got to get the sucker trying to sell you.”
“Just a minute,” Mason said. “Before you go, Pete, there’s just one more question I want to ask.”
Pete sat on the extreme edge of the chair. “Go right ahead, Mr. Mason.”
Mason said, “You planted that six-gun on Banning Clarke, didn’t you, Pete?”
“Why, what do you mean?”
Mason said, “You salted that group of your wife’s claims. You sold them to Jim Bradisson. Then, after the corporation commenced its action for fraud, you realized you were in hot water, so you thought you might as well have a second string to your bow. You fixed things so Banning Clarke would think the famous Lost Goler Mine was situated on properties controlled by the Shooting Star Group, didn’t you?”
“Why, Mr. Mason!” Sims exclaimed reproachfully.
“And in order to do that,” Mason went on, “you found this old six-gun somewhere and etched the name Goler on the handle. But what you overlooked, Pete, was the fact that you have a very distinctive method of printing a capital G. And the printing you put on that bag of arsenic — ‘GUARD CAREFULLY’ — had the same capital G as was on the handle of the gun.”
For a moment, Pete looked Mason squarely in the eyes, then his eyes slithered away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.
Mason turned to Della Street, “All right, Della, go get the sheriff. Tell him to bring up that bag of arsenic. We’ll get that gun and compare the printing...”
“No, no, no!” Sims exclaimed. “Don’t do that. Now don’t go off half-cocked like this, Mr. Mason. Don’t bring that sheriff into it again.”
Mason grinned. “Make up your mind, Pete.”
Sims heaved a long sigh. “Give me a cigarette.”
Mason gave him one, and Sims lighted it. All the resistance seemed to have oozed out of him. “All right,” he said. “I did it. That’s what happened.”
“Now tell us about the arsenic,” Mason said.
“It’s just like I told the sheriff. I got that for...”
“For what?” Mason asked as Sims hesitated.
“Just for experimenting.” Sims twisted his position in the chair.
“Perhaps you’d better get the sheriff after all, Della.”
Pete might not have heard. He went on as though he had never balked at the question in the first place. “This lost mines business could be quite a racket, Mr. Mason. I realized that when I saw the way Banning Clarke fell for that six-gun business. I’d been a fool — going around salting claims and juggling samples and all of that kind of business. All you’ve got to do is see that people know about some of these famous lost mines, and then leave just a little clue that will make ’em think they’ve got hold of a lost mine. You pretend that you don’t know a thing in the world about the significance of it or what it is. You get me?”
Mason nodded.
“Now on that Shooting Star claim,” Pete went on, “the time I sold it to Jim Bradisson I certainly went at it crude. I’ll tell you the truth. I was pretty well plastered at the time, and Jim kept shooting off his mouth about what a big mining executive he was — and he was so damned easy I just didn’t take any pains to cover my tracks.
“But when I realized I needed to fix it up so he wouldn’t yell he’d been stuck, I tumbled onto this idea of planting a six-shooter and letting Banning Clarke find it and tell Jim. I’d found this old six-shooter out in the desert quite a while back. I simply etched the name Goler on the handle and rubbed wet tea leaves over it until the printing looked good and old. Then I planted it down by a little spring that’s on the property, leaving just a few inches of the muzzle sticking up, the rest of it buried in the sand. I got Banning Clarke out there with me. That was before his heart got so bad he couldn’t travel at all, but it was bad enough so he had to keep quiet. I told him I wanted to do just a little prospecting around, and I knew he’d go over to the spring and sit down. I’d planted a whole bunch of nuggets in the spring right near the gun. Well, there was nothing to it. As soon as I came back, I saw the gun wasn’t there, and Clarke was so excited he could hardly talk. I pretended I didn’t notice nothing.
“I thought Clarke, being a stockholder in the company, would see that they didn’t make any squawk about the deal I’d handed them, but Clarke got so sold on the idea he’d uncovered the lost Goler Diggings that he actually wanted my wife to get the claims back. He thought she was entitled to them more than the corporation, I guess. Well, there I was, in a devil of a fix, Mr. Mason.
“Later on, I managed to see that Jim Bradisson got tipped off that Clarke had discovered the Lost Goler Diggings. Clarke hadn’t been out in the desert for six months before that time he’d been with me. I thought Bradisson would be smart enough to put two and two together and figure the mine must be located on the Shooting Star Group. But Jim wasn’t smart at all. He went ahead with the fraud action, and darned if Banning didn’t get you to fight the lawsuit. By that time, it was all mixed up. I didn’t know just what he was doing. I see it now. He was trying to have ‘Nell put up enough fight in the case so that Jim wouldn’t get suspicious and decide to hang onto that property. — Now, that’s the absolute truth.”
“And this arsenic?” Mason asked.
“Well, if you want to know the real low-down, Mr. Mason, I decided to go into this lost mines as a racket. I guess I’m just a miserable, no-good skunk. But don’t get me wrong. I ain’t reformin’ none. I’m scared stiff now, but I know myself well enough to know I’ll keep right on being a claim-salter.
“If you was someone else I’d pull an act about being sorry, and make such a swell job of it I’d even convince myself... I used to be a damn good liar, Mr. Mason. That was before I met Hayward Small and he tried to hypnotize me, and told me a lot about these here secondary personalities. I pretended he’d hypnotized me. I don’t know but what maybe he did, at that. And then I rung in this secondary personality.
“Well, it just ruined me as a liar, Mr. Mason. It was so easy blaming things on Bob, I got all out of practice on real good lying. It came to me with a shock when that lawyer tied me all up in knots the way he did.