“Your father’s in here,” he said. “Come along.”
They followed the man into the bedroom, and there they saw Fenton Hardy lying on a small cot. He sat up in bed as they entered, and held out his hand.
“Hello, sons!” he greeted them, with his cheerful smile. “Glad to see you.”
When greetings had been exchanged, Hank Shale took the boys’ coats and hats and began setting the table for supper. Soon the cabin was redolent with the fragrant odor of coffee. While Hank was busy in the other room, the boys had a chance to talk with their father.
“But how did you get hurt, Dad?” asked Frank.
Fenton Hardy leaned back on his pillow with a sigh.
“I cracked two of my ribs,” he told them. “Tumbled down off a big rock back in the mountains, and now I’m laid up until the ribs mend again. I’m thankful it wasn’t a great deal worse.”
“We thought perhaps someone had shot you.”
“No, it wasn’t that bad. I was chasing a fellow at the time, and if it hadn’t been for falling off the rock I would have caught him. So my good friend Hank Shale insisted that I come to his cabin until my ribs set again. It isn’t very serious, but it will keep me indoors for a while. That’s why I sent for you.”
“You want us to take up the case where you left off?”
Their father nodded.
“I’ll be able to help you considerably, even if I am laid up,” he said. “But what delayed you? We expected you here yesterday.”
The Hardy boys glanced at one another.
“You must have enemies that knew we were coming, Dad,” Frank said. “They tried to sidetrack us in Chicago. We were delayed a whole day there.”
“How was that?”
The boys then told their father of their meeting with the man who called himself Hopkins, of being locked in the compartment on the wrong train, of their fight on the road and of their eventual return to Chicago. When they told him of their simple disguise on the trip westward he nodded approval. When they told him of the rough-looking man who had searched the train for them at the mining village he frowned.
“Just as I expected,” he remarked. “Someone must have got their hands on a copy of that telegram I sent you.”
“The operator wouldn’t give it out.”
“No. But they may have tapped the wires. They would know that if I sent a message it would be to bring someone out here to help me. And this gang I have been fighting are capable of anything.”
“Who are they?”
“It’s a long story, boys. But seeing that you’re going to be working on the case, I may as well give you all the information I have. This case concerns a quantity of gold that was stolen from three miners. One of these men, called Bart Dawson—”
“Bart Dawson!” exclaimed Frank and Joe simultaneously.
Their father looked at them in surprise.
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Why, that’s the man Jadbury Wilson mentioned!” Frank exclaimed.
“And who, may I ask, is Jadbury Wilson?”
“We’ll tell you later, Dad. It may not be the same fellow, but he mentioned a miner named Bart Dawson. Go on with the story, and then we can tell you about Wilson.”
“Well, this chap Dawson called me out here on the case and told me that the gold was stolen from them by a gang of outlaws who have been terrorizing this district for years. The outlaws are known as Black Pepper’s Gang.”
“Black Pepper! And his real name is Jack Pepperill.”
“You seem to know as much about these fellows as I do myself,” said the detective, in surprise.
“We’ll tell you how we happened to hear about him. It’s the same man all right. Go ahead.”
“Black Pepper’s gang stole the gold from these miners. I discovered that before I’d been working on the case two days. We laid a trap for two members of the gang and managed to capture them. Then we threatened them with imprisonment if they didn’t tell where the gold had gone to. They declared that one member of the gang had deserted and had taken the gold with him. The gold was in four bags, and although the outlaws gave chase and finally caught this man, the bags had disappeared. Try as they might, they could not get the fellow to admit where he had hidden it. He denied the theft utterly, said he had seen nothing of the gold, and that night he escaped.
“The outlaws were of the opinion that the gold had been hidden somewhere in a deserted mine shaft. That was the story the two rascals told us, and it was while I was checking up on this story that I was attacked by Black Pepper himself. I managed to fight him off and disarmed him, but he got away so I chased him and it was while I was chasing him that I fell off the rock and cracked my ribs.”
“And that’s how the case stands now?”
“That’s how it stands now. I don’t know whether to believe the two outlaws we captured or not. They may have been telling the truth. The gold may have really been stolen by the chap who deserted them. They said he later escaped from them and that they thought he had probably gone back to where he had hidden the gold and made away with it.”
“In that case there wouldn’t be much chance of getting it again.”
“It’s that circumstance that makes me suspicious of the story. If the deserter had recovered the gold and cleared out, the outlaws would likely give up hunting for it and they would certainly give up bothering me. But they are still in the vicinity and I have an idea they know just where the gold is and are waiting for a chance to get their hands on it. I think this story about the chap deserting from the gang and making away with the loot is false. They just
