“I’m going to tell the truth,” she said; “they can’t do anything with me, for I’m not mixed up in the thing, except that Ward came to see me, and he and Benson quarreled about it. I’ll tell the whole thing, you murderer; you killed Ward, and I’ll get even with you by blabbing everything!”
She “blabbed.”
According to her statement, Tim Benson had discovered that Buffalo Bill was hot on his trail, and was coming to Blossom Range, where Benson had been doing a lot of hold-up work recently. To throw him off the track, he and Juniper Joe, who was secretly his partner in crime, concocted the dazzling scheme of the “jubilee” wedding, when Juniper Joe pretended to marry Tim Benson, who was posing as Mrs. Rafferty, the widow from the East. No one could deny that the thing had been cleverly carried out; the whole of Blossom Range had been neatly hoodwinked.
It was Juniper Joe’s plan, after that, to have the gold shipments sent out by the way of Eagle Gap, in charge of the prospectors. He and Benson held them up there, killing one and wounding the other. They got safely back to the cabin with the plunder, after bringing the burros near to the town, and then turning them loose in the hills.
Ward had knowledge of all this, and had told the woman about it when he called on her. He had said that he meant to kill Benson; and there could not be any doubt, from evidence gathered later, that in the night, or just before morning, he had gone to the cabin, where he had attacked Juniper Joe and Benson. Probably, as he had left Benson unconscious, he believed he had killed him.
Benson had already been wounded in the head by a bullet from the baron’s revolver. In the fight with Ward, the latter had rapped Benson on the head, opening the unhealed wound made by the baron’s bullet; thus producing a condition which had puzzled Buffalo Bill; who, it will be recalled, had found Juniper Joe and his “wife” in the cabin that morning; Juniper Joe tied and gagged, and his “wife” unconscious on the floor.
Ward had got out with some of the nuggets in buckskin bags, a part of the loot from the burro shipments; and had tried to cache them at the time he was followed and seen by the baron.
Juniper Joe and his “wife” had also followed Ward; and they had killed him. After that, becoming frightened, they had tried to hide the body in a cañon, had thrown away the bags of nuggets, and had shaped their course to get out of the country, sure that at last Buffalo Bill had discovered the truth and was after them hotfooted.
Juniper Joe bitterly denied the statements of Vera Bright, raving thunderously in making his denials; he was a much-abused and injured man, he declared, of good intentions and wholly innocent of wrongdoing.
Some proof against him was found when the mine was again gone over by Buffalo Bill and the local officers, and a thorough search brought out of various hiding places the whole of the gold shipments which the Wells Fargo had tried to send across the hills by the prospectors. This was good evidence that Juniper Joe had been concerned in that hold-up, and that when John Ward attacked the occupants of the cabin he found but a small part of the treasure.