"Were they animals?"
"You are right again. Now, hold on till I light my pipe and I'll tell you all about it. Tony, you ought to have gone up there; you would be ten thousand dollars better off than you are this minute."
Tony was a man who was noted far and near for his success in killing the lions which were so abundant in the mountains. He would rather hunt them than dig for gold, because he was almost sure to get the animal he went after. He was filling his pipe when Banta was speaking, but he dropped it and let it lay on the ground where it had fallen.
"It is the truth I am telling you," declared Banta. "If you don't believe it, you can go up there to that haunted mine and find out all about it. The boys killed them with nothing but revolvers."
Banta had his pipe lit by this time, and the miners crowded around him, all eager for his story. Bob and Jake were there, and no one seemed to pay the least attention to them; but they were impatient to learn all the particulars of the case. There was one question they wanted answered immediately, and that was, Did the boys really have a bagful of dust, or was Banta merely joking about that? Fortunately Tony recovered his wits and his pipe at the same time and asked the question for them.
"Did the boys get ten thousand dollars in two weeks?" he asked.
"Well, they brought a bag out for us to examine, and they thought it was nothing but iron pyrites," said Banta; and then he went on smoking his pipe.
"We took one look at the bag," said his partner, "and we took a big load off the boys' minds when we told them it was gold, and nothing else. Yes, sir—they have it fair and square."
"The boys are going ahead as though there had never been any ghosts there," said Banta; and then he went on to tell the miners everything that had happened during their trip to the haunted mine; and when he got started, he followed Julian's narrative, and paid no attention to Jack's. It was certain that the story did not lose anything by passing through his hands.
"Jack pulled off his shirt," said he, in conclusion, "and he has some wounds on his back that will go with him through life."