The officers smiled, but said nothing. They followed their guide, as he scrambled down the bluff, and in a few minutes more they were standing beside the brook.
“There’s Le Capitan,” said George, pointing to a huge rock on the other side of the stream, which rose to the height of two hundred feet without a single break or crevice.
“I recognize the captain from the description I have received of him,” said the sheriff, as he drew a note-book from his pocket, and consulted a diagram that he or somebody else had drawn on one of the pages. “He is in a bad business for he is standing guard over stolen property.”
The officer led the way across the brook, and around the base of the rock, to a thick cluster of bushes, in front of which he stopped long enough to light a dark lantern he had brought with him. Then he dived into the bushes, and when George and the constables followed him they could not find him.
He had disappeared in a small opening in the ground, which seemed to run back under the rock. Presently a bundle of something came sailing out, then another and another, until there was a small cartload of them piled up before the opening.
The constables examined them as fast as they came out, and found that they contained a quantity of ready-made clothing, underwear of all kinds, boxes of cigars, tobacco, jewelry, jack-knives, pistols, cutlery, buffalo robes, blankets, cloaks, and a lot of other articles too numerous to mention.
The constables opened their eyes in surprise when the sheriff came out, and told them that these were not half the goods that had been stolen. The rest had been sold to enable the thieves to raise money enough for their Western trip.
“What were they going to do out West?” asked George.
“What do people of this stamp generally do out there?” asked the constable, in reply. “Benson and Forbes would have died of home-sickness, and Wallace would have been in the hands of a vigilance committee in less than a week. Now let’s go up to headquarters, and see what we shall find there.”
After taking another look at his diagram, the sheriff moved up the ravine, closely examining the base of the bluff as he went, and when he stopped, it was in front of a little pole cabin, which was so effectually concealed by the thick shrubbery and trees that surrounded it that one might have passed within five feet of it without knowing that there was any cabin there. Having opened the door, which was formed of half a dozen saplings that fitted loosely into holes in the ground, the sheriff went in and flashed his lantern around.