“I’m thinking they’ve got off with that much right this very night. It is just a great big organised, dirty steal,––that’s all. Little wonder some folks get rich quick in this Valley, without any apparent outward reason for their luck either in themselves or in what they seem to be engaged in.”
“How did you find all this out?” inquired Phil, his face white with excitement.
“Oh,––easy enough in a way! I was in Brenchfield’s warehouse, hiding. I told you I had the key to it. By good or bad luck––I don’t know which––I was hiding on top of the darned trap door without being aware of it. I heard a noise, and thought it was in the warehouse where I was. Suddenly the flour sacks on every side of me began to slide. I had just to slide with them; there was nothing else for it; and before I could wink I was down here and in among the gang,––Rob Roy McGregor, Summers, Skookum, and half a dozen others; the whole of that Redmans gang; half-breeds and dirty whites.
“I shot a hole in one of them, then my gun got struck out of my hand. I knocked down two with my fists and made a dash for it. I got to the ladder at the old barn there and ran up, but I forgot about a man who happened to be at the top. He dropped the trap-door crash on my head, and that’s the last I can mind.”
“Good Lord!” cried Phil.
“And the murdering hounds, not content with that, trussed you up and left you here like a rat in a sewer.”
“Ay!––to come back later, maybe, when they had more time, finish me off and bury me in the bowels o’ the earth.”
Jim pulled himself together.
“Phil,” he cried, “come on! We’re wasting time here. I’m going to get that bunch before I sleep.”