“Well, I saw that some day sooner or later someone was bound to discover it if I worked openly in it, so I started constructing a tunnel. The mouth of it is under that hearthstone, and the other end emerges into the shaft of the lost mine. For many years I have used it, and no one has ever suspected that old Jared Fogg, the hermit who lived in this hut, had thousands of dollars in gold. I am rich—ha—ha—I am rich.”
The old man’s face became convulsed.
“But,” he went on, “now that I am dying—ah, I know death when it is coming on—I have a great wish to right a wrong I did years ago. My name was not always Jared Fogg. It was once Jack Riggs. I was once a bandit and a robber and did many, many wicked things. But one weighs on my conscience more heavily than any of the others. One night we held up the Rio Bravo stage. There was fighting, and I shot the stage driver and his wife, who, when her husband fell from the box, seized the reins and attempted to drive on. With them was their child, a lad of three or four years. That disgusted me with crime. I reformed from that night. I took the lad and raised him till he was six or seven, when he was stolen from me by a wandering circus. I have never seen him since. If I could see him, now that he has grown to man’s estate, and tell him that on my death bed I beg his forgiveness for my wicked deed, I would die happy. All these years I have thought of him. If I only knew where he was now.”
“Would you know him again if you saw him?” Bart Witherbee’s voice shook strangely, and several times during the old man’s recital he had passed his hand across his brow as if striving to recollect something. Now his eye shone with a strange light, and he bent forward eagerly:
“Yes, among a thousand!”
“How?”
“By a peculiar mark on his arm, where he was shot accidentally by one of my gang in the fight following the killing of his father.”
Bart rolled up his sleeve, and the old man gave a terrible cry as his eyes fell on the dark-red scar the boys had often noticed.
“Forgive——,” he cried, stumbling to his feet and stretching out his hands as if to keep from falling.
The next moment he had fallen forward with a crash.