"Jadbury Wilson isn't dead."
"What?" shouted Bart Dawson, leaping to his feet. "Say them words again, lad! Do ye know for sure? Is Jad Wilson still livin'?"
"He's staying at our house in Bayport right now," declared Joe.
Fenton Hardy looked more surprised than ever. The case was taking an angle he had never anticipated.
"If I'm sure Jad Wilson is still alive I'll be the happiest man in the world!" declared Bart Dawson. "But how do ye know? Tell me about him."
The Hardy boys thereupon told of their meeting with Jadbury Wilson and of the story he had told of his gold-mining days in the West.
"So he thinks that you stole the gold from him and went away with it," concluded Frank.
"I don't blame him for thinkin' that!" said Dawson heartily. "I don't blame him a bit! When I come back to Lucky Bottom I made it my business to trace up my old pardners, but the only one I could find was Coulson, and he told me his brother and Jad Wilson was dead."
"But what had happened to the gold?"
"I'm comin' to that. When the outlaws attacked our camp, the others sent me out to hide the gold. And I hid it. I was just gettin' away when a stray bullet hit me, and I'll be hanged if I didn't go clean off my head. I didn't remember nothin'. I must have wandered away from Lucky Bottom altogether, for when I come to myself I was miles and miles away, up in northern Montana, and I couldn't remember one thing of my life up to that time. It had been wiped clean out of my memory. I had papers on me that had my name written on them, but I didn't know where I had come from or nothin'."