"Ask me something hard," said Elam. "The man may have told him that he had it and refused to give it up; or he may have gone into partnership, just the same as Tom has gone into partnership with me. That is something I don't know anything about, but I just know there is something hidden there, and I'll dig the whole place over but I shall find it. If three months' supply of grub won't do me, I'll come back and get another. You will stake me, of course?"
"Sure. I'll stake you if it takes the last thing I've got. But I'll tell you one thing, Elam, and that aint two, that you won't make anything by it. You had better stay at home and go to herding cattle."
Just as long as they talked the hard-headed old frontiersman always came to this advice, and Elam always dismissed it with a laugh. Finally he said, with more seriousness than I had ever seen him assume before:
"I will tell you what I'll do, Uncle Ezra: I will follow this thing up, and if nothing comes of it, I will take your advice. But I will go to Texas. I can't stay around where that nugget is without making an effort to find it. If you had had it dinged at you for years, you would feel the same way."
And I could swear that that was the truth, for Uncle Ezra had often said to me that if he had had the nugget preached at him from the time he was old enough to remember anything, he would have been as hot after it as Elam was. Nothing would have turned him away from it. Uncle Ezra knew that Elam was in earnest when he said this, and reached over and shook hands with him; and after that the subject was dropped. In the meantime Ben and Tom were getting acquainted, and especially was Ben deeply interested whenever the other spoke of the Red Ghost. Tom had seen it, had a fair shot at it, and could not imagine what had taken it off in such a hurry, if it had been a flesh-eating animal; but it was not, and so it uttered a scream and went into the bushes. It must have been a camel, because that was the only thing that Tom knew of that had a hump on its back.
"But camels don't run wild in this country," said Ben.
"Now, wait till I tell you," put in Uncle Ezra, who had got through talking with Elam. "A good many years ago the government brought over some camels thinking that they could make them useful in carrying supplies across the desert; but, somehow or other, it turned out a failure, and, seeing that they couldn't sell them, they turned them loose to shift for themselves. And that's the way they come to be wild here."
"Well, that bangs me!" exclaimed Ben, who was profoundly astonished. "But supposing they did turn them out to become wild, they wouldn't pitch into horses, would they?"
"I don't know anything about that," returned Uncle Ezra. "I do know that there is a camel around here, that he is red in color, that he has frightened the lives out of half a dozen people, and that he has been shot at numberless times. He does pitch into every horse and mule that he gets a chance at, and I don't know what makes him."
"Well, I never heard of a camel doing that before," said Ben, settling back on his blanket. "If you get another show at it, Tom, make a sure shot, so that you can tell us what it is."