blow in the dark: "When I met up with the original Black Jack, I was
slavin' my life away with a pick trying to turn ordinary quartz into pay
dirt. Making a fool of myself, that's what I was doing. Along comes Black
Jack. He needed a man. He picks me up and takes me along with him. I
tried to talk Bible talk. He showed me where I was a fool.

"'All you got to do,' he says to me, 'is to make sure that you ain't
stealing from an honest man. And they's about one gent in three with
money that's come by it honest, in this part of the world. The rest is
just plain thieves, but they been clever enough to cover it up. Pick on
that crew, Pollard, and squeeze 'em till they run money into your hand.
I'll show you how to do it!'

"Well, it come pretty hard to me at first. I didn't see how it was done.
But he showed me. He'd send a scout around to a mining camp. If they was
a crooked wheel in the gambling house that was making a lot of coin,
Black Jack would slide in some night, stick up the works, and clean out
with the loot. If they was some dirty dog that had jumped a claim and was
making a pile of coin out of it, Black Jack would drop out of the sky
onto him and take the gold."

Terry listened, fascinated. He was having the workings of his father's
mind re-created for him and spread plainly before his eyes. And there was
a certain terror and also a certain attractiveness about what he
discovered.

"It sounds, maybe, like an easy thing to do, to just stick on the trail
of them that you know are worse crooks than you. But it ain't. I've tried
it. I've seen Black Jack pass up ten thousand like it was nothing,
because the gent that had it come by it honest. But I can't do it,