Hunting for hidden gold

by Franklin W. Dixon

"What happened?"

"Those smooth chaps went back to town and got a slick lawyer to work with them and one night they come out and jumped our claims. Of course we laughed at 'em, for we knew we'd been there first, but we soon found out what we was up against. That lawyer made out that we hadn't registered our claims right, and he dragged out the case until all our money was gone and we couldn't afford to fight it any longer. And the judge gave a decision against us and we lost our mine."

"Gosh, that was crooked!" remarked Jerry audibly.

"Of course it was crooked! But what could we do? We had to pack up and get out. That there mine was later worth millions, although the joke was on the crooks after all, for their lawyer horned in on the property and worked it so that he got most of it in the long run."

"What did you and the Coulsons do then?"

"We was pretty well discouraged. We just hung around town for a while, but later on we packed up and got clean out of Nevada. We didn't want to be near anythin' that'd remind us of how near we'd been to bein' rich. So we went to Montana."

"Prospecting?"

"Prospectin'. And there we went through all the disappointments of huntin' for gold all over again. We managed to get a fellow to grubstake us and we went out into the mountains and spent almost a whole autumn searchin' high and low for some good ground, but nary a trace of gold did we find. But just as we was about to give up again, Bill Coulson struck it and we figgered that this time we would be able to hold on to it. We had a good block of claims and off one of them I got a nugget that prospectors told me was one of the biggest ever seen in that part of the country."

"Well," continued Wilson, "we took mighty good care that we registered our claims right that time, and we stayed there all winter and in the spring got down to business. We mined the place ourselves, the three of us. There was a syndicate made us an offer but it didn't seem high enough. A fellow named Dawson, who had been prospectin' with us for a while in Nevada, showed up at the camp one day, down and out. He had been havin' hard luck too and he was broke, so we took him in with us, for he was a good fellow and he had stood by us when things wasn't goin' well in Nevada."

"Our little mine was all right for a while, but after a time it began to peter out. We had four bags of gold by that time, some of it in big nuggets, but we didn't know whether to cash in and use the money to buy new machinery and sink a deep shaft or not. We were in our camp one night talkin' things over and wonderin' just what to do about it when we heard some one prowlin' around among the rocks.