“That’s it. Garrish and Lew had their argument about five o’clock. Then Lew went down to the bunkhouse, and a little later had his supper. After that he got some kind of a message and went up the mountainside where they had reported some kind of a landslide a few days before. That was the last seen of Lew by any one of our men.”
“Gee! you don’t suppose he was swallowed up by the landslide?” exclaimed Randy.
“There wasn’t no landslide when Lew went there. That happened several days before. Besides, me and some other men searched the whole vicinity and didn’t find no trace of Lew.”
“But he might have been caught in a new slide and buried out of sight,” said Andy.
“It’s possible, my lad. But I don’t think so. Lew Billings was a very careful man, and he wouldn’t go prowling around no loose dirt or rocks unless he knew what he was doing. In all the years he’s been mining and prospecting, I never knew him to get caught in any such way as that.”
“Well, what’s your idea, Butts? Give it to me straight,” came sharply from Tom Rover. “We’re both friends of Lew Billings, so there is no use in beating about the bush.”
“Well, it ain’t for me to say what happened to Lew,” returned the old miner doggedly. “I told you about the argument he had with Peter Garrish. Maybe that had something to do with it, and maybe it didn’t.”
“Well, Lew Billings is my friend and Peter Garrish is not,” answered Tom Rover bluntly. “This looks like some sort of foul play to me.”
“Oh, Dad, you don’t think they would——” Andy broke off short, hardly daring to go on.
“I don’t know what to think, Andy,” was his father’s sober reply. “This is rather a wild country, you know; and I have told you my opinion of Garrish and his crowd before.”