"Drove you out of there?"
"Make yer fortune?" cried his two puzzled listeners.
"Yep; listen," and Jim Hicks told them substantially the story, which we have already perused in his notebook, so providentially delivered into the hands of the prisoners of the old church. The man who willed it to him was a dying recluse he had aided.
"And there the book is, written in with onion juice stuffed in a cranny of the wall for any one's finding and nobody's reading," chuckled the prospector in conclusion. "It was the only thing I could do. You see, I didn't know whether those greasers would catch me or not, so I concluded the best thing to do would be to take no chances, and hide it."
"You think you can find it again?" asked Jack, fascinated by the old prospector's strange story.
"Why, I dunno, son. You see, I was in such a hurry to get away when I heard them fellers coming, that I just stuffed it in a crack in the wall. If they got inquisitive they could easy get it out, but they wouldn't suspect nothing, for the book looked blank."
"But how did you escape without their seeing you?"
"Ah, you've got to trust an old borderer for that," grinned Jim Hicks. "You see, when I got near the church, thinks I to myself, 'now, Jim Hicks, you don't want to burn your bridges behind you' so I just left my pony hidden in a little arroyo about half a mile away. When I heard them coming by the front of the place, I slipped out the other side and into the brush. After a lot of wrigging about through the scrub, I reached my pony, and rode back up here to where I had my outfit cached."