"It's as odd a story as ever you heard," he said. "Do you want to hear it?"
"By all means."
"Well then, it all happened some years back when I befriended an old fellow in the Greenhorn Mountains in Californy. He was a prospector an' had got himself chawed up by a bar. I came across him on the trail an' took him to my cabin and nursed him as well as I could. But I seen frum the first that the old fellow was too far gone to get over his injuries.
"To begin with, he was too old and feeble anyhow, an' then again that bar had clawed and chawed him till he was a mass of wounds. Well, I neglected my work on the claim I had located there, and spent the best part of my time smoothing out the last hours of that old chap's life. I never knew where he came from or how he came to be a prospector, but before he crossed the Great Divide he gave me the astonisher of my life. By his directions I took a package wrapped in oiled paper from his old ragged coat and laid it on the bed afore him.
"Finally frum some old letters and such truck he produces that there plan I just showed you. He said I'd been so kind to him and cheered his last moments, so that having neither chick nor child he wanted to make me a legacy. He said he'd make me the richest man in the world for what I'd done for him.
"Well, he explained before he passed away what all them marks and lines on the plan meant, and made it all as clear as print. Then he told me the story of Dead Man's Mine.
"About thirty years ago a band of trappers found a rich deposit of gold in these hills. But on their way to civilization with it, they were drowned on the Yukon and only one escaped to tell the tale. He was crazy from his sufferings in gettin' back to civilization, and when he stumbled across a camp of Aleuts they took care of him, having a sort of religious reverence for crazy people. He died among those natives."
"It's a gruesome story," remarked Tom, "but how, then, did the facts become known?"
"Hold on. I'm gettin' to that. Years later an Aleut told the story to a white hunter who had been good to him, and gave him the plan which the crazy man had drawn on a bit of whalebone in lucid intervals. As you may suppose, the white hunter was all worked up over it, as a scratched message on the whalebone said there was more gold left in Dead Man's Mine, that's what the crazy man called it, than had been taken out.