“It’s a wonder you didn’t send your half-breeds out after the boys, too,” Ned said. “You might have lugged them away easily enough, I presume.”
“Now, see here,” Toombs went on, “I don’t want any trouble with your friends or with you. I’ll make you a fair business proposition. Tell me the plans of this tricky corporation lawyer you are serving; tell me where to find the papers you came here in trace of, and I’ll give you half a million dollars. Now,” the fat man went on, “perhaps you will understand why I did not molest any of your chums and why no harm came to any of you when my men were at your camp at midnight.”
“And if I refuse to accept this monstrous bribe?” Ned asked.
“Then no one will ever know that the offer was made or refused,” declared Toombs with an evil gleam in his eyes.
CHAPTER VII
THE FRANCISCAN MISSION
“Now, I wonder,” Jimmie mused as he was forced along by the two half-breeds, “whether I won’t get a chance before long to show these ginks how fast I can run. I sure could do something of a stunt on my feet if I had an opportunity right now.”
During one of the brief breathing spells, when the half-breeds paused for an instant on a level ledge of rock, the boy turned to the east and faced the pines in the vicinity of which he had been captured. In the distance he could see the granite finger sticking up like a mile-post in the green of the trees.
“Judging from the course we have taken, and the distance we have traveled,” the boy mused, “we ought to be somewhere in the vicinity of the parallelogram I saw in the snow. Only,” he added ruefully, “it’s quite a climb up to that point yet.”
He was thinking of the story Gilroy had told of the ruined mission; of the walls in ruins, and the subterranean rooms and passages farther back in the heart of the hill.
“It would just be my luck,” he mused grimly, “to discover that ruined mission, and lead the way into the basement of that old peak. If I get a chance to break away from these half-breeds, I’ll make a run in that direction anyway.”