the High Graders (1965) Read Online Free PDF

too, but where there was high-grade ore there woul d always be ways to steal it.
    If what she believed was true, the men wh o controlled the working of the mine must have deliberatel y permitted the miners their chance to high-grade i n order to involve them, and the community itself, in th e crime of high-grading. Then the operators of th e mine simply kept the vastly greater amount o f gold for themselves, allowing only a small amoun t to go through legitimate channels, and this smal l amount was bought from the storekeepers to keep it out o f circulation.
    It required capital, rigid control, an d some shrewd operation to make it work. Once the min e was owned by the operators of the high-grade ring, the n they might take other steps; certainly they mus t realize such an operation could not long continue.
    "I will pay, Mr. Shevlin," the girl wen t on. "I will pay well. I will give you ten pe r cent of all you recover, and if my calculation s are near the truth the recovery might reach a half a million dollars."
    "You'd have to trust me. What's to keep me fro m locating the gold and keeping it for myself?"
    She smiled at him. "Mr. Shevlin, you have a very bad reputation. You are said to have stole n cattle, it is said that you are a gunfighter, that yo u have engaged in public brawls, that you were onc e friendly with the very men who are robbing me. I have hear d all that. Nevertheless, I believe in you."
    She gathered her skirts and stepped to the door.
    "You see, Mr. Shevlin, Brazos was not th e only man who told me you could be trusted. Lon g ago my uncle told my grandfather, when I wa s present, that there was one man in Rafter who could b e trusted under any circumstances. He said that n o matter what anybody said, Mike Shevlin wa s an honorable man, and an honest man."
    Now who the hell would say a thing like that about him?
    Turning away, he walked to the window again to kee p her from seeing how much her words had touched him.
    "Your uncle can't have known me very well," h e said.
    "He thought he did, Mr. Shevlin, and h e believed in you. I think you knew him very well , Mr. Shevlin. His name was Eli Patterson."

    Chapter 3
    The storm had broken. Scattered cloud s raced across the sky, and between them the stars shone like th e lights of far-off towns.
    He stood alone on the wet street, wit h enemies all about him. It was after midnight, an d only a few lights looked out upon th e rain-darkened walks, the muddy streets, and th e blank faces of the false-fronted stores acros s the way.
    Now, at night, it might have been any littl e western town, but it was not just any town. It was a town built on deceit and theft, a tow n corrupted by its own greed, a town that had arrive d at this point without realizing how deep were the depth s into wh it descended.
    Mike Shevlin looked gloomily from under th e black brim of his hat. He looked upon the tow n with no hatred. Here his best friend had been killed , brutally shot down in an alley because he had th e courage to stand against evil. But Mike Shevli n knew all too well how easy it was to accept tha t first dishonest dollar, and he knew all th e excuses a man could give himself.
    After all, a man would say, the gold comes ou t of the ground, why shouldn't I get some of it?
    Everybody else is getting it, why shouldn't I?
    There were a multitude of easy excuses , useful in all such cases; but the trouble was tha t evil can plant a seed, and the seed can grow. Fro m easy acceptance of a minor misdemeanor, one ca n come to acceptance of a minor crime, and from a mino r crime to a major one. And this town had no w accepted robbery on a large scale ... perhap s larger than any one man knew, except for th e leaders. And they had accepted murder.
    Thereby came fear. For murder breed s murder, and those who have killed once for gain, wil l kill again; and those who have agreed to ignore a murder, will ignore another if it is to protec t some small security of their own--property, o