“I reckon the mine’s there yet, just where he left it,” Jim answered, “but Dick went luny, crossin’ the desert, and wandered around so long in the heat without water that when he was picked up he was ravin’ crazy and he didn’t get his senses back before he died. All anybody knows about his mine is what he said while he was luny, and you can’t put much stock in that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Wellesly. “I had the story from the man who took care of him before he died, the prospector I spoke of just now—I think his name was Frank, Bill Frank. He said that the old man was conscious part of the time and told him a good deal about the strike—enough, I should think, to make it possible to find the place again.”
Haney and Jim were looking at him with intent faces, their interest thoroughly aroused. Wellesly decided to draw on his imagination for any necessary or interesting details that the prospector had not told him.
“What did he say,” Jim demanded, “and why didn’t he go after it himself?”
“As I remember it, he said that during his delirium Winters talked constantly of his rich find, that he seemed to be going over the whole thing again. He would exclaim, ‘There, just look at that! As big as my fist and solid gold!’ ‘Look at that seam! There’s ten thousand dollars there if there’s a cent!’ and many other such things. He would jump up in bed and yell in his excitement. If he was really repeating what he had seen and done while he was working his strike, Bill Frank said that he must have taken out a big pile, probably up near a hundred thousand dollars. That he really had found gold was proved by the nuggets in his pockets.”
“Did Winters tell him what he’d done with the ore?” Jim demanded. He was evidently becoming very much interested.
“Frank told me that at the very last he seemed to be rational. He realized that he was about to die and tried to tell Frank how to find the gold he had taken out. He said he had hidden it in several places and had tried to conceal the lead in which he had worked. It is likely that the strike, whatever it was, had upset his head a little and made him do queer things before he got lost and heat-crazed on the desert.”
“Well, did this man tell you where he’d hid the dust?”
“Do you know where it is?”
“My informant, Bill Frank, said that Winters was very weak when he came to his senses and could only whisper a few disconnected sentences before he died, and part of those,” Wellesly went on, smiling at the recollection, “Frank said ‘the darn fool wasted on gratitude.’ But he gathered that the Winters mine was somewhere in the southern part of the Oro Fino mountains, not far from a canyon where there was good water, and that he had hidden the nuggets and dust and rich rock that he had taken out, in tin cans and kettles and bottles in another canyon not far away.”