“Gosh, that was crooked!” remarked Jerry audibly.
“Of course it was crooked! But what could we do? We had to pack up and get out. That there mine was later worth millions, although the joke was on the crooks after all, for their lawyer horned in on the property and worked it so that he got most of it in the long run.”
“What did you and the Coulsons do then?”
“We was pretty well discouraged. We just hung around town for a while, but later on we packed up and got clean out of Nevada. We didn’t want to be near anythin’ that’d remind us of how near we’d been to bein’ rich. So we went to Montana.”
“Prospecting?”
“Prospectin’. And there we went through all the disappointments of huntin’ for gold all over again. We managed to get a fellow to grubstake us and we went out into the mountains and spent almost a whole autumn searchin’ high and low for some good ground, but nary a trace of gold did we find. But just as we was about to give up again, Bill Coulson struck it and we figgered that this time we would be able to hold on to it. We had a good block of claims and off one of them I got a nugget that prospectors told me was one of the biggest ever seen in that part of the country.”
“Well,” continued Wilson, “we took mighty good care that we registered our claims right that time, and we stayed there all winter and in the spring got down to business. We mined the place ourselves, the three of us. There was a syndicate made us an offer but it didn’t seem high enough. A fellow named Dawson, who had been prospectin’ with us for a while in Nevada, showed up at the camp one day, down and out. He had been havin’ hard luck too and he was broke, so we took him in with us, for he was a good fellow and he had stood by us when things wasn’t goin’ well in Nevada.”
“Our little mine was all right for a while, but after a time it began to peter out. We had four bags of gold by that time, some of it in big nuggets, but we didn’t know whether to cash in and use the money to buy new machinery and sink a deep shaft or not. We were in our camp one night talkin’ things over and wonderin’ just what to do about it when we heard someone prowlin’ around among the rocks.
“I went to the door and opened it, and just then I saw a flash in the dark and then I heard a gun go off. I jumped back into the cabin quick and I could hear the bullet go plunk into the wood at the side of the door. Next minute there was a regular gunfight under way. A gang of toughs from town had heard about our gold and had come up to rob us.
“Well, sir, they surrounded our camp half the night and it looked as if we was out of luck. There was the four bags of gold, everythin’ we had in the world, and there was them bandits outside, ready to shoot us if we showed our noses out the door. And our ammunition was givin’ out too. We knew we didn’t have much chance.
“Finally, Dawson said the only thing to do was for one of us to try and get outside and hide the gold. There was no use hidin’ it in the cabin, for they’d be sure to find it. He volunteered to try and reach the mine and hide it underground somewhere. So we figgered it out and decided that was our only chance. Mebbe the bandits might catch him and get the gold, but if we kept it in the cabin they’d be sure to get it anyway, so we figgered we’d better risk it.
“Dawson had lots of nerve. That’s one thing I’ll say for him although I’ll never forgive him for what he done afterward. He had nerve, and somehow I could never believe he really meant to double-cross us at the time. We waited until the shootin’ had died down, and along about three o’clock in the mornin’, when everythin’ was mighty dark, Dawson let himself out the back window. He got out all right, and nobody saw him, and how he ever got through the ring of bandits around the place I never could tell. He had the four bags of gold with him, and mighty heavy they were too. The last we knew, he was creepin’ across the rocks toward the shaft. And that was the last we ever saw or heard of him.”
“He ran away?” exclaimed the boys.
“He just cleared out. And he was a fellow any of us would have trusted right to the last. But it only goes to show you can’t trust nobody when there’s forty or fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold in his hands. We never heard of him again.”
“But what about the bandits?”
“After we thought Dawson must have hidden the gold all right, we waited till mornin’ and then hung a white handkerchief out the window and gave ourselves up. The bandits came swarmin’ in—there was about ten of ’em. One of them was only a young chap, ‘Black Pepper’ they called him, for his real name was Pepperill. He was only a young chap, but a tougher and more cold-blooded fellow I never hope to meet. When they searched the cabin and found that Dawson was gone and the gold with him they was
