"Seems to me that's enough," retorted Mollie. "It's one thing to think a thing yourself and an entirely different thing to find out somebody else thinks it too."
"Don't be an old granddaddy, Allen," Betty said, adding threateningly: "If you don't look out we won't let you have any of that wonderful gold we are going to find—not one little tiny nugget."
"That's gratitude for you," said Allen reproachfully. "Not one little nugget for a fellow who finds her a fortune."
"You haven't found it yet," Amy reminded him.
"No," said Allen suddenly animated, "I haven't found it—not yet—but I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track. Look here," he appealed to them: "It seems reasonable to me to suppose that if Peter Levine and the people above him are so anxious to get the property they know pretty well where they stand. They don't want the ranch simply because they think there is gold on it."
"Then you think——" Betty was beginning breathlessly, when Allen interrupted her with a rush of words.
"Yes, that's just what I think," he said. "I've been pretty well over the whole of this ranch since I came, and I've noticed that this extreme northwest portion of it, the only part where there would be any possibility of finding gold, is pretty well deserted most of the time—absolutely so at night——"
"Then you think," Betty burst forth, "that these people, whoever they are, may have made actual tests? That they are sure there is gold here?"
Allen nodded.
"That is my theory," he said gravely. "But of course the only way to prove the truth of it is to keep my eyes open and catch them, if that is possible, in the act."