“Well, keep right on looking if you want to!” was the surly answer. “I’ve had enough of climbing to-day. Besides, those people on the old mine dump are watching us. We wouldn’t dare enter the mine if we should find it—not with them looking on!”
“I wish we had our searchlights,” Clay remarked, as soon as the others had disappeared. “We may be in the mine and we may not be! I don’t believe there is any gold or silver here, anyway! If there was gold here, there would be outcroppings in other places close by.”
“That is the way it strikes me,” Don returned. “If there is anything of value in here, I reckon Uncle David put it here. If you knew what a queer old fellow he was, you would think so, too.”
“What would he have to hide here? He secreted the bonds in the old house at Yuma, and it seems to me that if he had possessed other things of great worth he would have put them with the bonds.”
“There is no knowing how much money the old fellow had,” Don continued. “He made a million or more in Chicago real estate, and at the time of his death, I am told, there wasn’t a cent of his money in any of the Chicago banks. He was afraid of banks. I guess that Mr. Frost was the only banker he ever trusted, and he trusted him with his nephews and not with his money! Oh, yes,” the boy went on, with a sigh, “the poor old man sent word to Frost to look after Tom and I! So Frost says. I never knew that Uncle cared enough about us to do even that!”
“What would he naturally leave in a place like this?” asked Clay.
“Bonds or money—money, probably.”
“I’ve got a few matches left,” Clay insisted, “and I’m going to use them to see what sort of a place this is. If there is any money here we ought to be getting it out.”
“Yes; before the natives come back,”
Clay lit a match and looked about. Where he stood there was merely a long passage, high and roomy at the back but narrowing down to the small opening the boys had used in front. There were no openings in the walls, no places where anything might have been stored away.