“Well,” said Prawle, “I judge if he rounds up Jim Sanders before we do, it’ll be all day with us. Without that option I haven’t got the ghost of a claim on the ground. It’s a thousand pities things have turned out as they have. Who would have suspected we had a listener that night in your pop’s surgery?” looking at Charlie Fox.
“I never heard of such confounded hard luck,” returned Charlie, kicking the wooden front of the hotel spitefully in his silent wrath. “Just when we have sighted a big fortune for the crowd of us—not to speak of a million or two which, by right of discovery, is coming to you, Mr. Prawle—in steps a pair of unmitigated rascals, with every chance of scooping the trick at our expense.”
“By shinger!” chipped in Meyer: “do we stood dot? I feels so mad dot I vould like to do somedings already yet.”
At another time Jack and Charlie would have given the German boy the laugh, but they were not in laughing humor at that moment.
The outlook was altogether too serious.
Next morning the rig which had brought them from Trinity to Rocky Gulch was hitched up, and Gideon Prawle and the three boys started back along the trail.
They had perhaps accomplished half the distance to the river town, when a solitary horseman, astride of a wretched nag, was seen coming toward them in the distance.
“By shinger!” exclaimed Meyer. “Off dot don’d peen a scarecrow I’m a liar!”
“He certainly looks like a hard case,” said Jack, watching the stranger’s approach with not a little curiosity.
When the distance between them had lessened about one half Prawle, who had been examining the newcomer with great attention, suddenly gave a shout that fairly electrified his young companions.