But at this the big man shook his head.
“Nope, I reckon I can’t let you do that. I ain’t tried to live honest for fifty years to begin bein’ a ‘fence’ for crooks at my time o’ life. If them guns are yours, you take ’em.”
There was some little haggling over this part of it, Dick saying that the storekeeper wasn’t to blame, and all that. But the big man was immovable; he had bought stolen goods, and it was up to him to pay the penalty. So he made them take the guns without money and without price, and threw in the cartridge belts and the ammunition, which, it seemed, had been sold with the rifles.
What with all this chaffering and buying and talking, and the time it took Larry and Dick to write letters to their folks in Brewster (which letters, as may be imagined, didn’t say anything about the hardships of the past three days), it was the middle of the forenoon before they got a start up the perfectly good trail, considerably past noon when they stopped to eat on top of the range, and quite late at night before they left the trail and made camp in a wooded ravine not very far from the place where they had located the vanadium deposit, though much higher up the mountain. And on all that long faring they had neither seen nor heard any signs of the three hold-ups who, according to the Natrolia storekeeper’s account, had preceded them over the same trail not more than twenty-four hours earlier.
Around the camp-fire that night they canvassed the situation as it had been revealed to them by the events of the past few days, and determined upon their course of action.
“It’s all tom-foolishness of the worst kind,” was the way Larry the practical summed it up. “These crooks are going upon the supposition that we know something that we don’t know. If they could be convinced that we don’t know anything more about this mythical gold mine than the man in the moon, and that we haven’t the slightest intention of trying to find it, they’d drop us like a hot cake.”
“That is all true enough,” Dick cut in. “But how are we going to convince them?”
“We can’t, unless they’ll show up and give us a chance to talk to them. As long as they’re not convinced, I suppose they’ll go on dogging us around. I hate to have to turn in every night with the feeling that we may wake up in the morning to find that we’ve been robbed again, but I guess there is no help for it.”
It was little Purdick who suggested the helpful plan.
“We mustn’t take any chances,” he said; “and, since there are three of us, we needn’t. You two bunk down and I’ll take the first night watch. At midnight I’ll wake you, Dick, and at three o’clock you can call Larry. It runs in my mind that we’ve been sleeping too much, anyway.”