There was the deep trench that Parson Stanard had dug; there was the spade he had dug it with, the tracks of the others who had gathered anxiously about to watch him. There was even one of the bright glittering gold pieces half hidden in the dirt, a horrible mockery, as it appeared to them; for the big wooden chest that had been full to the brim with gold pieces, was gone, and the money with it. And all the hopes of the Banded Seven were gone, too.
At first they stood and stared, gasping; and then they gazed about the place in horror, thinking that surely they they must find the chest lying somewhere else. But it was not there. They dashed around the room, hunting in every corner of the place, even in the locked cell, where the ghastly skeletons lay grinning at them as if in delight. But there was not a sign of the chest, nor of any one who could have taken it.
And then suddenly Mark noticed a footprint in the soft earth just underneath the entrance that told him the story.
“They’ve taken it out!” he cried.
Feverish with disappointment and impatience, the Seven scrambled out again through the hole. There on the ground was the same footprint, larger than any of theirs. It did not take half an eye to see that. There, too, was a great three-cornered dent in the ground, showing where the chest had been dropped. And there were finger marks of the hand that had scooped up the fallen coins to put them back into the chest.
Texas, plainsman and cowboy, had often told stories of how he had followed a half-washed out trail for miles across an otherwise trackless prairie. He was on his knees now studying every mark and sign, his eyes fairly starting from his head with excitement. And suddenly he sprang to his feet as he noticed a trail a short way off, a deep, smooth rut worn in the earth.
“A wheelbarrow!” roared he.
A wheelbarrow it was, for a fact. And the track of it lay through the woods to the river. Texas had started on a run, without saying another word, and the rest were at his heels.
The men who had taken that heavy chest down that steep forest slope to the river must have had hard work. Any one could see that as he looked at the mark of the wheel. It would run down a slippery rock and plunge deep into the soft earth at the bottom. It would run into a fallen log, or plunge through a heavy thicket. And once, plain as day was written a story of how the chest had fallen off and the heap of scattered coins all been gathered up again.
These things the plebes barely noticed in their haste. They ran almost all the way. It was perhaps two hundred yards to the river, and there was a steep, shelving bank, at the bottom of which was a little pebbly beach. Down the bank the wheelbarrow had evidently been run, half falling, upsetting the box once more, and necessitating the same labor of gathering up the coins. One of them had been left in the sand.