"But, we can't leave him there!" and Thure pointed to the body. "Just help me to get him up on the horse in front of me and then we'll get home as soon as possible," and, picking up the little buckskin bag, he slipped the nugget and the map back into it, thrust it into his pocket, and soon, with the help of Bud, was on his horse, with the body of the dead miner in front of him.
Bud now quickly threw the grizzly bearskin back on his horse, jumped into his saddle, and the homeward journey was resumed.
CHAPTER IV
AT THE CONROYAL RANCHO
When Thure, bearing in his arms the dead body of a man, and Bud, with the huge skin of a grizzly bear hanging across the back of his horse behind the saddle, rode into the open court in front of the Conroyal rancho, there was great excitement; and, even before they could dismount, they were surrounded by a crowd of gesticulating, question-shouting women and children and old decrepit men, all wild with curiosity to know what had happened. In the midst of all this excitement, the door of the house was flung open and two young ladies catapulted themselves through the crowd to where Thure and Bud sat on their horses.
"Mercy! What has happened?" and Iola Conroyal, her horrified eyes fixed on the face of the dead miner, came to a sudden halt by the side of Thure, with Ruth Randolph, round-eyed and white-faced, clinging to one of her arms. "Is—is he dead?"
"Yes, he is dead," Thure answered gravely. "Murdered for his gold." Then, seeing how white the faces of the two girls had suddenly grown, he added quickly: "You girls hurry right back into the house and tell your mothers that we found a miner, who had been robbed and stabbed, and started to bring him home with us, but that he died before we got here; and ask them to have some blankets laid on the floor of the sala for the body to lie on and a sheet to cover it. Now, hurry. We'll tell you how it all happened later," and not until the two girls were back in the house did Thure make a move to get rid of his ghastly burden. Then, reverently the body of the dead miner was lowered from the horse, and borne into the large hall-like room of the house known as the sala, and laid down on the blankets there prepared for it, and covered over with a sheet.
In the meantime Bud had thrown the great hide of the grizzly to the ground with the information that it was the skin of El Feroz himself.
"How did you kill him?" "Who shot him?" and, with shouts of wonder and delight, all the men and the boys, who had not gone into the sala with the body of the dead miner, crowded around the skin of the fallen monarch.