By degrees those who had been left in camp were told just how the rescue had been effected; and then Aleck started in to tell something about his experiences.
"I live with my mother and sisters in a town called Logan, down in the northern part of Utah. My father died several years ago, when I was a little shaver. He had just come back home, and told us he had struck it rich, and we would never want again, when he was taken down with a fever; and after being sick a week, he died. The last thing he did in his delirium was to press a little pocket looking glass, with a cracked front, into my hands, and close my fingers on it, like he wanted me to keep it. And we thought it was just imagination that made him do it, and that perhaps he believed he was giving me all the money he saw in his wild dreams.
"Well, as the years went along, I used often to look at that little mirror, just a couple of inches across, and think of my father. We never could find anything among his traps to tell us where the mine he had discovered was located. More'n a few times this here Colonel Kracker would visit us, and tell my mother what a big thing it would be, if only she could find some little chart or rude map among my father's things, to be sort of a clew to the lost mine; but though she searched, and I looked again and again, we just couldn't.
"And one day, would you believe it, somebody broke into our cottage while we were all out, and stole everything belonging to my father, from his six shooter and gun, to the old tattered knapsack that he used to carry, when he was prospecting for pockets of rich ore, or pay dirt anywhere along the creeks."
"The old snake!" muttered Step Hen; for of course every one of them guessed who must have been responsible for this robbery of the widow's home.
Aleck went on.
"And one day, it was only a month ago, as I was sitting there, fiddling with that same little pocket mirror, the back came loose. I was starting to pinch the metal tight again, when I discovered that there was a piece of paper between the glass and the back!"
"The clue to the lost mine?" gasped Giraffe, nearly falling over into the fire in his extravagant delight.
"Yes, that was what it turned out to be," continued the Rawson boy, actually smiling to see how deep an interest his narrative seemed to have for these splendid new friends fortune had raised up for him so opportunely. "My father must have had a return of reason just before he passed away; and not being able to say a single word, he had pressed the glass into my hands, thinking that would be enough. But somehow it had never occurred to me that he knew what he was doing."
"And that's what brings you up here right now, I reckon; you mean to find that hidden mine, and claim it for your mother, and the girls?" asked Thad.