The sheriff wilted. He led Black Pepper to a cell, where Slim Briggs was sitting despondently. When Slim saw the leader of the gang being ushered in he shook his head in sympathy and groaned.
The door clanged.
“That fixes Black Pepper!” declared Bart Dawson, with satisfaction. “Now come on back to the cabin and tell us all about it. I’m just about dyin’ of curiosity.”
Dawson and the Hardy boys left the jail and had to fight their way through the crowd that surged about the doorway. Questions were hurled at them as they started up the street. Was it true that Black Pepper had been captured at last? Who caught him? What was he in for? How did it all happen, anyway?
“Tell ye all tomorrow,” promised Bart Dawson, leading the boys on up the hill. “I’m not very clear about it just yet, myself.”
So the Hardy boys returned to Hank Shale’s cabin on the hill, there to tell the tale of their hazardous adventures and the successful outcome of their search for the hidden gold.
XXIV
Bart Dawson Explains
Sitting beside the fire in Hank Shale’s cabin, the Hardy boys told their story. They were interrupted frequently by ejaculations of “Ye don’t say!” and, “Well I’ll be switched!” from the two old miners, and occasionally their father smiled in approval.
When they had finished, Bart Dawson slapped his knee.
“I never heard the beat of it!” he declared. “Ye went up on that there mountain and got lost and attacked by wolves and fell down the shaft and got held up by Black Pepper, and yet here ye are, and there’s the gold. I never heard the beat!”
“Neither did I!” affirmed Hank Shale slowly.
“There’s the gold,” laughed Frank, indicating the four sacks on the table.
“Coulson will be tickled to death,” declared Bart Dawson. “He never expected either of us to see it again.”
“There’s a question we wanted to ask you,” put in Frank. “Are you sure there isn’t anybody else but Mr. Coulson sharing the gold with you?”
Fenton Hardy looked up startled. He could not imagine what this was leading to. As for Bart Dawson, he looked blank.
“Not that I know of,” he said.
“Are you quite sure?”
“I’m certain sure. There’s Coulson’s brother did own a share of it, but he’s dead, and there’s Jadbury Wilson, my old pardner, but he’s dead, too. That leaves only me and Coulson.”
“Are you sure Wilson is dead?”
“Last we heard of him he was. He went East, they say, and died out there. I sure wish he could be here tonight. Poor old Jad—he worked so hard for his share of that gold, and never got none of it.”
“Jadbury Wilson isn’t dead.”
“What?” shouted Bart Dawson, leaping to his feet. “Say them words again, lad! Do ye know for sure? Is Jad Wilson still livin’?”
“He’s staying at our house in Bayport right now,” declared Joe.
Fenton Hardy looked more surprised than ever. The case was taking an angle he had never anticipated.
“If I’m sure Jad Wilson is still alive I’ll be the happiest man in the world!” declared Bart Dawson. “But how do ye know? Tell me about him.”
The Hardy boys thereupon told of their meeting with Jadbury Wilson and of the story he had told of his gold-mining days in the West.
“So he thinks that you stole the gold from him and went away with it,” concluded Frank.
“I don’t blame him for thinkin’ that!” said Dawson heartily. “I don’t blame him a bit! When I come back to Lucky Bottom I made it my business to trace up my old pardners, but the only one I could find was Coulson, and he told me his brother and Jad Wilson was dead.”
“But what had happened to the gold?”
“I’m comin’ to that. When the outlaws attacked our camp, the others sent me out to hide the gold. And I hid it. I was just gettin’ away when a stray bullet hit me, and I’ll be hanged if I didn’t go clean off my head. I didn’t remember nothin’. I must have wandered away from Lucky Bottom altogether, for when I come to myself I was miles and miles away, up in northern Montana, and I couldn’t remember one thing of my life up to that time. It had been wiped clean out of my memory. I had papers on me that had my name written on them, but I didn’t know where I had come from or nothin’.”
“I have heard of such cases,” said Fenton Hardy.
“I had clean lost my memory. I didn’t even know I had ever been in Lucky Bottom. Everythin’ was blank up to the time I come to myself. Then, a few months ago, a doctor told me he thought he could fix me up, and I had an operation and—click! I remembered everythin’. I remembered Lucky Bottom and our mine, and how I had hidden the gold. It all come back to me. So I came back to Lucky Bottom and dug up the gold again and tried to find my pardners, and Coulson and I was ready to split it up between us, seein’ we thought his brother and Jad Wilson was dead, when the outlaws stole it on us. So that’s how it happened.”
Frank and Joe had listened entranced.
“Why, that explains everything!” Frank declared. “It clears it all up. We couldn’t believe you had been crooked, although—” he stopped in confusion.
“Although it looked mighty like it, eh?” finished Bart Dawson, with a smile. “Well, I don’t blame ye for bein’ suspicious. And now, if you’ll take me back East with ye, I’ll meet my old pardner, Jad Wilson, again, and he’ll get his share of the gold. It should be enough to keep him in comfort for all the rest of his life.”
“He’s been having a pretty tough
