"How so?"
"You are so successful in unraveling the mysteries of nature that you surely should be able to discover water even where there isn't any."
"What are you driving at, Mrs. Gray?"
"I have an idea that you solved at least one mystery this morning."
Hi Lang flushed a little under his tan and shook his head.
"There's no use trying to keep anything from you, and there's no reason that I know of, why I should. No one is buried in that place where we found the box. The cross was set up to keep people away so they wouldn't find the box with the gold and the map. It was my idea that we should find it to be so. How did you know?"
"I saw what you had been doing," answered Grace. "What do you think is the most important contents of the box, the gold?"
"No. I reckon the map might be a sight more valuable than the handful of gold if one knew where to find the place that the map pictures. There's a heap of bad actors down this way, Mrs. Gray. They are regular land pirates. We call them desert pirates. They'd murder a man for two bits, and I reckon that maybe they had something to do with that place back there, and that the fellow who owned the map, when he saw the pirates coming, buried it so they shouldn't find it."
"Then this is another mystery for us to solve, Mr. Lang—the mystery of the buried map. I suppose you have discovered that the girls of the Overland Riders are possessed of the usual curiosity of their sex, have you not?"
Hi laughed silently.