The lieutenant having left the tent, the captain pulled out a map on sheepskin, and explained in detail where he surmised the treasure of the trappers to be, and where he also hoped to surprise Jim Ridge in his mountain recess. His enthusiastic promises and the effect of the liquors restored the recalcitrant pair to good-humoured allegiance.
In two hours' time, one of the scouts returned, pleading that his snowshoes were unable to help him over a snow coated ciénaga, or bad swampy stretch, where he would have sunk and been smothered. But, in the captain's ear, he whispered a communication which set that worthy to reflection. At the end of it, he directed Lottery Paul to take the rackets and go off investigating in a certain direction, ordered Joe to keep good guard over the camp, and took Dick with him on an exploration of his own.
Installed without any hostile spies at his elbow as provisional commander, Corkey Joe smiled to himself, and muttering: "Nothing could have been better; hang them all three!" he proceeded towards the rocks, where Drudge was standing on guard over a mysterious doorway.
[1] See The Treasure of Pearls in this series.
[CHAPTER XII.]
UNDER THE MASK.
When Corkey Joe had almost come up beside Drudge, the latter exchanged a knowing glance with him, and, drawing a sheet of tarpaulin aside from the doorway in the rocks, glided like a serpent within. As the canvas fell behind him, the bandit captain's representative calmly took the sentinel's place.
Drudge entered a kind of passage between rocks, covered over with tree stuff and mud, with the snow heaped on that again to hermetically roof it in. Thus to a second doorway of a cave, he found a hanging of buffalo robes fastened on a cottonwood rod.