"Why, that's the man Jadbury Wilson mentioned!" Frank exclaimed.
"And who, may I ask, is Jadbury Wilson?"
"We'll tell you later, Dad. It may not be the same fellow, but he mentioned a miner named Bart Dawson. Go on with the story, and then we can tell you about Wilson."
"Well, this chap Dawson called me out here on the case and told me that the gold was stolen from them by a gang of outlaws who have been terrorizing this district for years. The outlaws are known as Black Pepper's Gang."
"Black Pepper! And his real name is Jack Pepperill."
"You seem to know as much about these fellows as I do myself," said the detective, in surprise.
"We'll tell you how we happened to hear about him. It's the same man all right. Go ahead."
"Black Pepper's gang stole the gold from these miners. I discovered that before I'd been working on the case two days. We laid a trap for two members of the gang and managed to capture them. Then we threatened them with imprisonment if they didn't tell where the gold had gone to. They declared that one member of the gang had deserted and had taken the gold with him. The gold was in four bags, and although the outlaws gave chase and finally caught this man, the bags had disappeared. Try as they might, they could not get the fellow to admit where he had hidden it. He denied the theft utterly, said he had seen nothing of the gold, and that night he escaped.
"The outlaws were of the opinion that the gold had been hidden somewhere in a deserted mine shaft. That was the story the two rascals told us, and it was while I was checking up on this story that I was attacked by Black Pepper himself. I managed to fight him off and disarmed him, but he got away so I chased him and it was while I was chasing him that I fell off the rock and cracked my ribs."
"And that's how the case stands now?"