“No.”
“Not dead? You said she is buried. How can a person be buried and not be dead?”
Frank began to think it possible the boy was rather “daffy.”
“There—there’s lots to the story,” came painfully from the boy. “I can’t tell you all. The letter said she was buried—buried so deep that Bernard Belmont could never find her. That letter was from Uncle Carter.”
“Uncle Carter?”
“My father’s brother, Carter Morris. He lives somewhere in the mountains west of Lake Tahoe. He has a mine up there, and he is very queer. He thinks everybody wants to steal his mine, and he will let no one know where it is located. They say the ore he has brought here into Carson is of marvelous richness. Men have tried to follow him, but he has always succeeded in flinging them off the trail. Never have they tracked him to his mine.”
“Then he is something of a hermit?”
“Yes, he is a hermit, and my sister is with him. He wrote that she was buried deep in the earth—that must be in his mine.”
“How did your sister come to be with him?”
“I helped her—I helped her get away!” panted the boy, excitedly. “I knew they meant to kill us both!”