He straightened up and winked his eyes at the unexpected sight that met them.
Dorothy stifled a startled exclamation as she recognized him. It was the small, black-eyed man, Gibbons, known to Desert City as George Lightly, who stood blinking at them.
Suddenly he laughed, a short, sharp laugh, and turned back toward the mouth of the cave.
“Come on in, fellows!” he called cautiously. “Just see what I found!”
Joe’s face, through the grime and dirt that covered it, had grown fiery red and he struggled to get free of Dorothy and Tavia.
“Just you let me get my hands on him!” he muttered. “I’ll show him! I’ll——”
“You keep out of this, Joe,” Dorothy whispered fiercely. “Let me do the talking.”
Three other men squeezed through the narrow opening and stood blinking in the semi-darkness of the cave.
One of them Dorothy recognized as Joe’s former captor, a big, burly man with shifty eyes and a loose-lipped mouth, another was Philo Marsh, more smug and self-sufficient than she remembered him, and the third was Cal Stiffbold, her handsome cavalier of the train ride, who had called himself Stanley Blake.
It took the girls, crouched against the wall of the cave, only a moment to see all this, and the men were no slower in reading the meaning of the situation.