“And glad I’ll be to see that he gets his share. As for you, Mr. Hardy,” went on Dawson, turning to the detective. “I promised you a good fee if ye’d take this case for me and I promised you a reward if the gold was found. Two thousand dollars, I said, and two thousand dollars you’ll get as soon as I can get these nuggets and the gold dust changed into real money.”
“I won’t take it all,” said Fenton Hardy. “My boys did the real work.”
“That’s up to you. It was your case and you can do what you like with the money. But,” Dawson declared with emphasis, “if ye don’t divvy up with these two lads—!”
“Don’t worry,” laughed the detective. “I have no intention of letting them work for nothing. I want to share the reward with them.”
“Well, that’s fine, then. And they get five hundred dollars for capturin’ Black Pepper—don’t forget that.” Bart Dawson turned to the Hardy boys. “Ye ought to have a nice fat bank account when you go back East.”
“It begins to look that way,” agreed Frank, with a pleased smile.
“You’ve done good work,” said Fenton Hardy. “You’ve cleaned up this case in record time and, to tell the truth, I hardly expected you would be successful, because you were up against a mighty difficult undertaking and you didn’t have very much to work on. You deserve everything that is coming to you in the way of reward. You’ve done me credit.”
“Hearing you say that is reward enough,” said Frank, and Joe nodded his head in agreement.
“Real detectives, both of ’em,” said Hank Shale, puffing at his pipe.
Colophon
Hunting for Hidden Gold
was published in 1928 by
Franklin W. Dixon.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Elizabeth Miller-Boldt,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2024 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Hunting for Hidden Gold,
a painting completed in 1928 by
Walter S. Rogers.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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