"What's that?" Cumshaw demanded with a show of interest. "What do you mean?"
"Only this," Bryce said slowly. "There's another crowd on the track, and they've already warned me that they'll make the going heavy. If you've got to be up against them, why not throw in your lot with me? It's fifty-fifty with us; if you stand out on your own, you'll probably lose it all."
"I think you've got me in a cleft stick," Cumshaw said a trifle ruefully. "I can't see that I can refuse. Now how much do you know?"
Said Mr. Bryce untruthfully, "I know everything except where you've hidden the gold."
"And even I couldn't swear to that," Cumshaw said.
"It seems to me," said Bryce dryly, "that the best thing you can do is to tell me the whole story."
He listened eagerly to the tale, occasionally stopping the other to question him on some obscure point, sometimes helping him along with a comment that threw unexpected light in the dark corners of the story.
"It amounts to this," he said when Cumshaw had finished. "Bradby buried the gold in this hidden valley of yours. It's so hidden—the valley, I mean—that you only came on it by accident, and you have no definite idea as to its whereabouts. It's three or four days' journey into the mountains, that's all you can say. There's no way of recognising it from the outside that you know of. Well, I'll tell you this, Mr. Cumshaw. It's my frank opinion that your clever murderous friend had some way of finding it again, or he wouldn't have been in such haste to make away with you. He knew what he was doing, you can depend on it. Now I wonder if he left any clue?"
"I've got a hazy memory that he left directions somewhere and that I had them," Cumshaw said despondently, "but I can't say what happened to them. You must remember that I was wandering about half-delirious for a long while after I got knocked, and it was years before I got really right again. I might have lost any note he made; I might have done anything with it."
"You might have and that's a fact," Mr. Bryce agreed. "Now you say you've hunted for this valley many times during the last ten years or so."