“Huh!” grunted the old man. “Jes’ now I’ve come from havin’ a li’l’ round-up with them cusses that was tryin’ to burn ye out. Ain’t scorched none, are ye?”
“We’re all alive yet, but that’s about all you can say for us,” Dick bubbled. “But what has become of the hold-ups? And how did you happen to get here just in the very nick of time?”
It all came out in the old man’s chopped sentences. Three or four days earlier, an outgoing prospector had told him that “Twisty” Atkins, Tom Dowling and Bart Jennison, three desperate men who had all served prison sentences for various crimes, were camping on the trail of three young fellows whom the gossiping prospector had called “vacationers.”
“I knowed, right off, what that meant,” the old man went on, “and I made Bill Jenkins—he was the feller that was tellin’ me all this—carry a telegrapht message over to Nophi for Mr. Billy Starbuck. I writ in that telegrapht that his boys was liken to get into trouble over here, and that he’d better get him a posse and come on in. Then, after I’d waited a day ’r so, and he didn’t come, I got sort o’ nervous, and lit out myself.”
“But how did you know where to find us?” Larry asked.
The old miner’s grin showed his broken teeth.
“I allowed you’d be somewhere inside o’ that circle I’d marked out on the map I gin ye. And this mornin’, as I was cookin’ breakfas’, I heerd the shootin’.”
“But what has become of the hold-ups?” Purdick said, repeating Dick’s question.
“I’ve got two of ’em—‘Twisty’ and Jennison—down yonder in the gulch, laid out so’t they’ll have to be carried mule-back to wherever they’re a-goin’. Dowling was up here on the bench overhead, and he took out when I opened up on him. But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars that he’s carryin’ a li’l’ chunk o’ my lead with him, wherever he’s at.”
All this talk had been carried on at the mouth of the cave, and as yet nothing had been said about the Golden Spider. But now Dick told their old rescuer that they had found James Brock’s wonderful mine; told him also how they had happened to find it, and, briefly, what the hold-ups had been doing to them since they had found it.