“I heerd it, last winter, down at Nophi. I reckon nobody hain’t looked in the right place.”
“Where is ‘the right place’?”
Daddy Longbeard shook his head.
“I’m too old to go skyhootin’ round the mount’ins lookin’ for somebody else’s mine, when I got one o’ my own,” he said evasively.
“But could you find the Golden Spider, if you should look?” Dick queried eagerly.
“Maybe,” was the short reply, and there wasn’t another word added to it.
“Did you know that my uncle, Mr. William Starbuck, took care of James Brock for the little while he lived, and that Brock gave him the mine?”
“Yep; I heerd that, too.”
Without knowing at all why it should be so, Dick felt that he was treading upon forbidden ground in questioning his host about James Brock’s mine, so he stopped short, and, just for a diversion, began to examine, by the better light of the cabin lamp, the piece of rock picked up in the “fault.” In appearance it was a little like a fragment of steel-gray limestone, yet it seemed heavier than any non-metallic rock.
[“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?”] he asked.