“Nobody knows. Brock had no maps, and he couldn’t describe the locality well enough to enable any one to find it. I don’t know how plentiful the ore is, but it is wonderfully rich, as you can see for yourselves,” and from a drawer in his desk he took a small piece of disintegrated quartz, shot through and held together by a wire-like mass of the precious metal.
As one person, the three boys crowded around the desk to examine the beautiful specimen, and none of them heard the office door open or knew that there was an intruder present until Mr. Starbuck suddenly covered the bit of quartz with his hand and said: “Well, my man—what can I do for you?”
As one person again, they all three wheeled and saw the man who had come in so quietly that none of them had heard him. Tramp or beggar, or whatever he was, he seemed to be an object of pity, dirty, unshaven, and a cripple, walking with a crutch and with one leg drawn up in a curiously twisted deformity. And he had a face—as Dick afterward phrased it—that would scare the rats out of a corn bin.
“I’m lookin’ f’r Mister Bradley, th’ employmint man,” was the way the intruder accounted for himself.
Mr. Starbuck shook his head. “Mr. Bradley’s office is on the floor below,” he replied; and at that, the man hobbled out, leaving the door open when he passed into the corridor.
Dick Maxwell was again consulting his watch. “We have a few minutes more, Uncle Billy,” he said hurriedly. “Is that all you can tell us about the lost mine?”
“Not quite all. James Brock told me how he came to discover the vein. He had camped one evening at the foot of a small cliff with a crevice in it. The cliff faced the east, and in the morning he saw that the crevice was curtained with a great wheel of a spider-web, and in the center of the web was an immense spider with a body that looked, with the sun shining on it, as if it were made out of pure gold. Brock took it as an omen. He dug in the crevice and found his mine, which he called ‘The Golden Spider.’ So there is your bit of romance. Find the Golden Spider and maybe you will all come back rich.”
“But if we should find it, it wouldn’t be ours,” put in little Purdick, speaking for the first time.
“I’ll make my right and title over to the three of you,” said the grub-staking uncle, with the quizzical smile again wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. “When old Jimmie Brock found he wasn’t going to live, he made me this little pencil sketch of the place”—taking a folded paper from the drawer which had held the specimen—“and told me to go and take his bonanza for my own—made me his heir, in fact.”
“And you never found it?” Dick asked.