Again Handsome was silent a while, and then he said suddenly:
"Turner, would you like to go to our camp?"
"No; that is, I ain't particular about it. You might think I was trying to spy on ye—or some of the men might, and that would make me mad."
"They won't think anything of the kind if I take you there."
"All right. If you want me to go—I'll go."
"Come along, then. You have got this far, and we've either got to trust you, or kill you. It will depend upon you which that will be."
Keeping in his mind's eye the plans that Turner had made for him, Nick knew perfectly the route over which Handsome led him on the way to the camp, to which he had referred.
It was a picturesque place. Turner had described it in detail to the detective, and had mentioned it as the most likely place for the outlaws to make their headquarters. He had said:
"Ye see, mister, it's a sort of sasser in the mountings. There ain't only one way to git to it from the outside, and that is a purty hard one; so hard that half a dozen men could hold it agin' a thousand; and the other way to git to it is through the caves; and ye've got to know them galleries mighty well in order to find yer way through. I think you'll do it, because you act as if you had been in caves afore."
The place was a "sasser" in the mountains, sure enough. On every side of it there were frowning cliffs, which rose hundreds of feet in the air; and these cliffs were as inaccessible from the outside as they were from the saucer itself. There was only one pathway, and that was through a narrow fissure, barely wide enough for one big man to walk through it.