“I should smile! I stole them horses, pardner! But, Bob, what made you so anxious to know whether Buckeye Jim was dead?”
“Cause it fixes us O. K. The boys up the creek are working his mine. I don’t know whether they’ve got any show of right about it or not, but now Jim’s dead I reckon they’d have hard work to keep it if we war to jump it.”
Do you know what it is to jump a mine? It means simply to seize it without any right, and hold it by force, a thing very often successful when the first claimant has no legal title to the property.
Bob’s proposition interested the others at once, and they began to discuss it eagerly. Stevens asserted that it was the middle one of the three mines at the head of the creek, namely the Aurora, that the boys were working. He confessed that he had not gone into it, but was sure that he was right. There was too much water in the upper tunnel near the cabin, he assured them, to do anything there.
“Don’t you ’spose Morris knows that these boys have jumped Buckeye’s mine?” asked Scotty, who remembered that Bowen partly owned the Aurora.
“Tain’t likely,” Bob answered. “But it will be just as well to keep him from findin’ out they’re in there, if we can, for fear of any interference. I reckon he feels friendly toward ’em by reason of helpin’ him in your El Dorado scrape.”
The very next morning, therefore, the three conspirators were thrown into a quiver of alarm, by seeing both Len and Max in town. Bob met them at the post-office, and loitered around, hoping, even if Morris should appear, that he might be able by some good chance to prevent their meeting. He thus heard Max tell the postmaster that they meant to stay in town until the next day, and took it for granted, from something else which he overheard, that the Scotchman had come in also, leaving the mine and cabin alone over-night.
The moment he heard this, Old Bob hastened to find his partners and to say that now was their opportunity to go up the creek, get a look at the property, and make a plan for capturing it. Scotty and Stevens agreed that this was advisable, and borrowing horses, the three rattled up the road to Panther Creek as fast as possible, since no time ought to be wasted if they were to get back before sundown, and to travel on those mountain trails in the darkness is by no means a comfortable or safe proceeding.