“I reckon ye tally, pard,” said Nomad. “What ye say must er been ther work of er human bein’, like ourselves.”
“Sure,” grinned Wild Bill. “The dagger and the piece of bark prove that; and the words on the bark prove that the same person who fastened it to the door was the one who talked at us from the basement of the Alcazar. Flesh and blood, no doubt of it; and I’ve got a hunch Lawless is back of the whole layout.”
The scout was not of Wild Bill’s opinion regarding the question of Lawless having anything to do with the matter, but recent events were so obscure that the scout did not attempt to deny something which might prove to be true.
As people began to come into the dining-room, the matter was dropped, and the scout and his pards fell to talking on other topics.
Directly after dinner preparations were made for a stay of three days and nights in the Forty Thieves. A lot of canteens were secured, and Spangler’s culinary-department was drawn upon for a supply of rations.
By four o’clock Buffalo Bill, Nomad, Wild Bill, Dell, and Cayuse mounted and rode off down the cañon. Blake, the miner who had been robbed of his dust and almost killed, was still resting his bruised limbs on a cot in the general bunk-room. The scout would have liked to talk further with Blake, but did not esteem the matter of sufficient importance to wake him for the purpose.
The romance of mining is full of Fortune’s strange freaks. How the Forty Thieves had come into the hands of Captain Lawless, Buffalo Bill did not know. Yet, undoubtedly Lawless had prospected the property and had settled it, in his own mind, that it was worthless. Had he not thought it of no value, he would hardly have turned it over to the scout as a gift, even with “a string to it.”
Lawless had fooled himself. The rich vein had been lost—it had not petered out—and, by an accident, Wild Bill had discovered it again.
A small stream ran through the cañon. The stream was little more than a rill, flowing for most of the cañon’s length under the sand and rocks, and appearing on the surface only occasionally, where bed-rock forced the water upward into pools.
At one of these pools, close to the ore-dump of the mine, the scout and his pards halted and dismounted. The canteens were filled, and two riatas were spliced together and dropped into the shaft with one end secured to the platform on the top of the dump.