"That is just what it was. Now come with me and I will show you the skins. We have something to prove it."
The miners followed after the boys, when, as they were about to pass their pit, Julian said he wanted to see them about something that had been worrying them a good deal ever since they first discovered it.
"What do you call that?" he asked, gathering up a pinch of the sediment that still remained in the cradle.
"Good gracious! Do you gather much of this stuff?" exclaimed Mr. Banta, who was all excitement now.
"It is not iron pyrites, is it?"
"Iron your grandmother!" retorted Mr. Banta. "It is gold, and a bag full of that stuff will be worth about ten thousand dollars to you!"
"We have a bagful of it hidden away," asserted Julian; while Jack was so overcome with something, he didn't know what, that he sat right down on the ground. "Jack thought we had best hide it, but I will get it and show it to you."
"Well, well! this beats anything in the world that I ever heard of! Don't it you, Pete?" asked Mr. Banta, dismounting from his horse. "Here's you two, come out here as tenderfeet from St. Louis, who never saw or heard of a gold-mine before, and you come up to this pit, which has all manner of ghosts and other things wandering about it at will,—so much so that they scared away two of the best men we had on Dutch Flat,—and then you get the upper hand of the spirits and make ten thousand dollars out of the mine in two weeks! I tell you that bangs me; don't it you, Pete?"
Jack came up to take the horses and hitch them to swinging limbs, and Mr. Banta turned to Julian and told him he was anxious to see that bag with the ten thousand dollars in gold in it; whereupon Julian caught up a spade and hurried out, and Jack, who had returned to the lean-to, was told to sit down and tell them the story about the haunted gold-mine.
"There isn't much to tell," said Jack, who, like all modest fellows, disliked to talk about himself. "I went down to see what the inside of the mine looked like, and one of the lions pitched onto me and I shot him."