“What else can we do?” Mort grunted. “Seems like we can’t work it, seems like!”
“Tell the chief this,” Tom went on. “We do not work evil magic.”
“Listen!” cried Henry, suddenly, with a malicious leer toward Tom. “First you tell the chief that our magic failed because them—them evil ones work against us!”
Margery looked toward Tom. “Tell him,” he agreed.
She did. The chief looked toward Tom and scowled.
“Wait, though,” Tom continued, not at all frightened. “Now tell the chief that these men admit that our magic is stronger than theirs.”
Margery, smiling in spite of the gravity of the occasion, spoke.
The chief nodded, and his next frown was turned toward Henry, who looked a little desperate. Then he said, softly, to Mort. “But them busybody kids can’t do what we can’t. How can they light the lamp?”
Mort nodded and perked up.
“Tell the chief,” Tom added. “Tell him that our magic is good, and it is even stronger than the other. And to prove it we will make their own magic work.”
When Margery had done this the chief looked at the youths with some surprise and a little mystification. His medicine men also nodded and motioned toward the small, compact picture machine.
“Nicky,” said Tom, “unroll that piece of cloth they brought. And you and Cliff go to the side, about ten feet off, and hold it up, as taut as you can!”
While they were doing as he asked, Tom bent down and examined the picture projecting apparatus. It was not yet “threaded up” with film, and he took from the small case one of the three rolls of films, small, tightly rolled, in little tin containers.
Opening a “can” he unrolled a bit of the end, the blank “trailer” that is put between the rollers and toothed gears so that when the machine is started the picture begins properly. “It isn’t marked ‘non-flam’,” he called to Cliff. “It’s just marked with the regular kodak marking in the edge.”
“Then be careful,” Cliff said. “It will blaze up, then. Watch what you do and don’t hold it still while it’s in front of the flame!”
“Maybe you’d better come and work it,” Tom urged.
Margery ran lightly across to take Cliff’s end of the sheet. She and Nicky, tall enough to lift it four or five feet up, held the sheet.
“Now, we put the roll on this spindle,” Cliff said “Then we run the end over this guide roller, down through this ‘gate’ and aperture plate, so it lies flat, then over the lower guide, and fix the end onto the spindle in the ‘take-up’ magazine at the bottom. Now she’s all set.”
He gave the attached handle a small turn and saw that the action was perfect.
“Now for the lamp!” he said. “I hope——”
“She’s O.K.,” said Tom excitedly. “I can smell the gas and the base is tight now.”
“Tell the chief we make the other man’s magic work!” he told Margery.
In her clear, treble tones she informed the company. Outside the men pressed closer in. There was a tense expectancy in the air. All eyes focused on Tom.
“I only hope the gasoline hasn’t evaporated out of this lighter,” he muttered. “It’s a good, tight sort—well, here goes——”
He snapped the wheel. The spark ignited but did not light the wick.
Calmly, although his fingers trembled a little, he closed the small case again and waited until the wick had a chance to be covered for an instant to accumulate some gas. Also he wanted to control his own muscles.
Then again he whisked the small, steel wheel.
There was a spark and the wick sprang into yellow light.
Carefully he lowered the flame, while he opened the thumbscrew on the lantern burner. There came a slight puff of light, like a little explosion, a sizzling flare, and then the flame settled down to an even, vividly brilliant white glare.
Tom snapped shut the burner, shoved the lamp into place in the casing so it was behind the film.
“Crank her, Cliff,” he urged.
And, to the marvelling gasp of the Indians and the little shriek of amazement from Margery, there appeared on the sheet of muslin a square of gleaming white light, covering at once by a moving picture showing a marching army!
The Indians gasped, and several fell down on their faces.
When that reel was over the chief, after a long silence, spoke.
“Oh, dear!” said Margery. “He says the men who have failed are to be sent to their fathers—that means——”
Cowering, shrilly screeching with fear, Henry and Mort tried to dash toward safety. But at a sign from the chief the archers were in the hut, and before the crawling pair of white men appeared the other group, armed with cudgels of knobbed, polished wood.
“Stop!” shouted Tom. “Tell him to stop, Margery!”
Fearlessly he dashed in front of Henry and Mort, and faced the men with the bows. In one hand he held the closed lighter; in the other he unrolled a piece of leader film torn from another roll.
“Margery,” he gasped, “tell that Indian that our magic is good magic and is stronger. But tell him that we want these men spared. Say that if he does not we will use our magic to pour fire on his village and we will burn it to the ground.”
Margery, white-faced under her bronze, and with tight lips, managed to gasp out enough to make the chief listen.
Nevertheless he leaped out of his hammock and strode forward.
Tom put up a hand.
“Watch out!” he shouted.
He dropped the piece of curling film before the chief’s toes and stooping swiftly he ignited the lighter and touched the edge of the film.
As he leaped back, covering his face from the glare, the leader took fire and its celluloid base, almost as combustible as dynamite, shot into a blaze of white fire while a great, pungent puff of smoke flung itself upward and began to belly out in the still air of the hut.
Instantly the chief dropped to the ground like one stunned, and the archers, the councillors, the medicine man and every other Indian seemed to run away and vanish like the disappearance of the film at the end of the magic show.
“Well,” gasped Tom, as Nicky and Cliff dashed to his side, “Margery—come here! I guess we’re safe for awhile.”
And again, as had been hinted when he first saved Henry Morgan’s life, Tom had performed that service for the second time.
CHAPTER XXVI
TWO MEN DISAPPEAR
“These people will be your slaves from now on,” Margery said. “I know them. They ran to hide because they are afraid of you. If you do what I tell you we can get away safely after awhile!”
“All right,” said Tom.
He looked at Mort and Henry, crestfallen and a little surly, standing by the motion picture machine.
“We’re going off by ourselves,” he told them. “I’ve got you out of the trouble you made for yourself, Henry—twice now,” he was not boasting, but stating it as a fact. “I think the least you can do is to be honest with us from here on.”
Henry nodded, curtly, nudged Mort, and without a word of thanks, swung on his heel and slunk out.
“Let’s go to my hut,” Margery suggested. “It’s more comfortable to talk, and I’ve fixed up like a home in it.”
Unaware that the eyes of the man they had saved were still burning hotly with resentment at his own defeat, that he watched because he was still determined to get what he wanted, they walked across the dark square to a small hut where an Indian girl, about a year older than Margery, slept in a hammock. Margery stuck the torch she had brought into a makeshift holder against a supporting pillar of wood, and showed the three chums her makeshift home.
She had preserved some of her American taste of love and comfort, in spite of the hardships. There, with the other girl dismissed firmly, she and Tom took their first brother-and-sisterly embrace and the girl, now very shy, clasped hands with the two who had come with Tom to her rescue.
“Now,” said Tom, “Sis’, are you too tired to tell us some about yourself? It can wait——”
“No,” she said. “I’ll feel better if we know everything all together. I’ve had a dreadful time. But it will soon be over—thanks to you three fine friends. I love you all!”
Then she told them her story. After her parting with Tom, when he was prevented from going with her and his father to Mexico, she and their father had gone to the land of the chili bean and the tamale.
On the way their father had fallen into conversation with a man who was going back to Mexico “to work a mine.” He had tried to sell it but had failed; its samples of ore were not very convincing, although its owner had great faith that he was nearly ready to tap a fine vein of ore. But his health was poor and the Mexican climate, even among the hills, was detrimental to recovery; he wanted to dispose of his holdings.
Their father told her, Margery said, that he was going to look at the mine before they went on to the Dead Hope, and if he liked it he might take an option on it.
He did so, but the man, when he found that Mr. Carrol considered the property good, begged him to buy it outright so he could take the money and go to Nevada to grow better. Mr. Carrol had agreed to take a half-interest and the papers had been drawn up.
They had then gone on to the Dead Hope mine. He had, in Mexico City, left the man who sold him the half-interest in the mine.
With bated breath she disclosed his identity.
“It was Mort Beecher!” she said.
“Great grief!” gasped Nicky. “I’ll—wait till I see him——”
“Sh-h-h!” she warned. “He went off with the money father paid him and I guess he spent it in wild parties. But let me tell you the rest.
“The first night we were at the Good Hope mine house we were waked up by horses galloping, guns firing, men yelling. Father looked out and said it was bandits making an attack.”
“There was gold dust there,” Tom interrupted. She nodded and went on.
“Father got his gun and told me to stay quiet and not to leave the shack. He had to go to help the mine people. The mine was part of the property of the firm he was paid by, you see.”
“And he left you alone?” Nicky was surprised.
“Only while he helped drive off the bandits. He thought they would be frightened away. But——” she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, for there were no handkerchiefs in that primitive place, “Father—didn’t—come—back—ever!”
“No,” said Tom. “I wish we knew who fired the shot that——”
“I guess we never will know,” she said. “But this is what is important now. Father gave me some folded papers out of his pocket and said I must keep them until—he came back. But the fighting got worse and I was frightened. People began falling down in the open place and I was awfully scared.”
“It must have been terrible,” Cliff said, sympathetically.
“I saw a man coming across the open place and it was Mort Beecher, only I didn’t recognize him at first.”
“Yes,” Tom said, “he rescued you, Henry told us.”
“But Henry said you ran out while he held the horse, and Mort saved you,” Cliff said.
“That wasn’t so, at all,” she declared. “I did not run out! I was obeying father. But when I saw that man coming I thought I’d hide the papers, because father had said they were partnership agreements and a deed. So I—put them—under a board—it was loose—right under where the old stove stood.” The youths nodded.
“Then Mort Beecher came in and said he would save me, and he picked me up and carried me out to a mule.”
“I’ve thought, all along, that Mort was the real bandit,” Nicky said. “What you say all checks up. He sold part of the mine and then, when he found out there was gold dust to be taken he wanted to get the agreements back and have the money too!”
“But if he was the real bandit leader, why did he rescue me?”
“Didn’t he ask you about the papers?” Tom questioned.
She nodded.
“But not for a long time. After all the excitement was over. Then I said I didn’t have any papers and he was disappointed.”
“How did he get you away—Henry said he defended the pass while you were taken off, and that it was only ten minutes—but the gold was gone and so were you and Mort.”
“Up the trail we stopped. Mort unloaded the sacks and dropped them over the edge. I thought it must be awfully deep, but when he hit the burros and sent them flying up the trail he got down over the edge of the cliff and told me to jump into his arms.”
“And you did?” gasped Nicky.
“Yes. It was only down about six feet. Then he made me bend low and I saw the edge hung over a sort of shallow place under it. So we hid there while the bandits went past. After a long time he crawled up on the trail and pulled me up, and made me give him a sack of the gold dust first. Then we climbed an awful trail, up the side of the hill, and hid in a cave. After that night he went away and left me; I thought he wouldn’t come back, but he did—with food. Then we went on to where he had a mule—he must have caught it on the pass. We rode for ever so long, and finally we came to where a hut was. Old people lived there. He said we were lost and begged for food and they gave us some. After that we rode on again and he was always afraid the bandits would find us, and our mule got worn out and we had to leave him and walk. Then we got to where some more people lived and he bribed them with some gold dust and they gave him a mule and then we rode from there. Finally we came to a city; he disguised the sack with some old oilskins he found, and I think he sold the gold dust gradually to some banks, for we stayed there—it was a long time, I don’t remember how long.”
“The bandits must have traced him,” Nicky suggested. “For Henry said—no, it was Jack—we found Jack in Porto Bello, but never mind—he said Mort had told him, while they drank—they did that a lot——”
“You’re worse mixed up than a shaker full of soda water!” laughed Tom. “What he’s trying to say is that in tracing you we found a man who told us part of Mort’s story as Mort told it to him. It was that bandits followed Mort and he took you——”
“On a boat, and kept me in the cabin and disguised me and said I was his daughter——”
“And you cried and the stewardess got suspicious—” Cliff added. They were all trying to tell what they knew.
“And we were put ashore on a San Blas Indian island,” she smiled. “Tom, you remember how I loved to doctor my dolls and all? Well, I saw how the Indians lived and when I could make them understand and learned a few words I doctored them as well as I could—and all of a sudden, one night, some Indians from inland came—and they took me away. They thought I was a great spirit or something. But I didn’t have any medicines and I wasn’t very old and so I couldn’t help them.”
“Why didn’t they send you back?” demanded Tom.
“Maybe they were afraid of being caught for what they had done,” Nicky suggested.
“That must be it,” Margery agreed. “They didn’t make me prisoner or anything and they always treat me nice; but they didn’t have any use for me if I couldn’t cure them and so I just stayed and stayed because I didn’t know how to get away.”
“But you’ll get away now!” declared Nicky bravely.
“But what about the deeds and the partnership papers?” demanded Tom. “What did you do with them? They’d be mighty valuable.”
“I hid them the minute father went out,” she said.
“In the mine shack—at the Dead Hope?” Nicky cried.
She nodded.
“Under a board in the floor, under the stove,” she said.
“Golly!” cried Cliff, “that’s why Henry was so anxious to find Mort and to get you and learn about that.”
“That—and the rest of the gold dust,” Tom agreed.
“Well, they owe us their lives now,” Nicky asserted. “We can share some of what’s rightfully ours, and especially the half-interest in the Golden Sun mine.”
But, outside in the dark, there was a pair of ears that heard and a brain that was bound that no one should share except Mort and Henry.
Once before Henry had repaid the saving of his life by treachery.
He was planning to do so again.
“Well,” said Tom, “we’d better let Margery get some sleep. When the Indians come around in the morning we can plan to leave as soon as possible.” That was agreed to.
They were awakened soon after dawn by a tumult and excitement in the square. Margery met them, her hair blowing in the morning breeze.
“The two white men have gone!” she cried. “They left during the night!”
“Well, I guess they have gotten enough of this place,” Tom conceded.
“But the men are getting ready to pursue them—and—”
“Don’t let them!” Tom cried. “We saved them last night. Tell the chief it is Big Boy Tom’s will that they be allowed to go.”
Margery sped away on her light feet.
“That returns good for evil,” Tom said to Cliff and Nicky. “They only want to escape. They don’t know what we know!”
But—they did!
CHAPTER XXVII
AGAINST ODDS
Out from the mainland came a canoe. In it were two white people. They paddled stolidly and steadily, although several other canoes were close behind them, and at their sides, their occupants screaming and demanding in their high, shrill women’s voice, the return of the commandeered canoe.
Bill, Andy, Jack, Mr. Gray and Bob, on the cruiser, at anchor not far from a dingy, white sloop, watched curiously, and a little anxiously. Who were the men? They were men, not boys! But they were too far away to be recognized, if they were known, even with glasses trained on them. All that was to be seen was the anger of the canoeists around them and the lifting of an oar, with which they drove back too venturesome canoes.
The cruiser’s party, having made every effort to locate the missing Tom, Cliff and Nicky, even at risk of getting lost in the jungles themselves, had finally been forced to give up the search. They were lying at anchor, simply waiting, hoping against hope that something would give them a clue to the youths.
Mort Beecher and Henry Morgan, in their commandeered—to use a polite word—canoe, gave the cruiser plenty of seaway, and passed her well on the far side. However, Bill, using the glasses, recognized Henry and set up a shout. It was decided to row over to the sloop, on which they were seen to embark; at once Bob got the boat up and he, Andy and Bill tumbled in; but before they were half-way over the lagoon to the outer water which had depth for the deep-keeled sloop, she had hoisted sail and was bearing away.
“That’s funny,” Bill commented, when, giving up, they returned to the Porto Bello. “They didn’t come near us, and how they did hurry that boat away from here.”
“They could not have seen or heard of our boys,” Mr. Gray said. “They would, in decency, have stopped to tell us, no matter how great their haste.”
“They were in a big hurry,” Bill reflected. “I wonder why! They had no one with them. Could they have found Tom’s sister? In that case they would have brought her out.”
“They got into this Chucunaque country and came out safe again,” suggested Andy. “Might the lads have got there too?”
They could come to no conclusion, and while they all agreed that there was something decidedly strange about the haste with which Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher sailed North, and their avoidance of the very men who had helped Henry, they dared not go in pursuit to compel the elusive Henry to reveal his ’Cause why!
Nearly a week later, after being treated with dignity accorded to people of real prestige, Tom Nicky, Cliff and Margery were permitted, well-escorted, to leave the Chucunaque’s village for the coast.
Probably the chief’s experience with the motion picture film helped to establish them as true wonder-workers. The chief had seen Tom’s startling demonstration of fire, when he used the strip of celluloid “leader” torn off the end of a film. He therefore feared Tom until one of his medicine men, a little jealous of the white lad’s superior prestige, whispered that there was no great trick or secret, that he, too, could produce the smoke and flame with a piece of the picture-ribbon.
Nicky, Tom, Cliff and Margery, walking from but to hut, visiting the hammock-bound sick people, who believed that if Tom touched them it. would help to heal them, saw the portable picture projector apparatus, abandoned by Henry, being examined by the chief. He gingerly touched it, but his medicine man, with a contemptuous grunt, drew a length of the coiling film out of the lower magazine and ripped off a short bit. This he handed to the chief with some directions. The chief, hesitating, walked gingerly to the fire over which the community cook-pot hung, and stood irresolute.
“Look, Tom,” Nicky whispered. “He’s trying to nerve himself to make your magic. If he does, we are beaten.”
“Don’t worry!” Cliff retorted. “I examined the film, this morning. I wondered why the film was so combustible when it was to be used on a ship and with an open light. I saw the reason. The ‘leader part’ isn’t supposed to be ‘threaded-up’ in the beam of heat from the light; it is to go down to the lower magazine and so it can be of ordinary celluloid base film. But the real picture is on what is called ‘non-flam’ which is a celluloid base especially treated and with chemical constituents that make it smoulder when it gets hot, but it won’t burst into flame or explode. The chief has a bit of the picture itself, so Tom’s laurels are safe.”
It proved that he was right, for when the film was cast into the fire it only curled up and smouldered into ash, whereas Tom, to “make good” his own standing, at Cliff’s behest secretly secured a bit of “leader” from a second roll of the film and then “put on a show” for the chief which impressed the monarch so much that he ordered his bowmen at once—and the jungle resounded to the crashing escape of a medicine man who had advised jealously but not too wisely.
In time the sick had been touched and Margery’s request that she be allowed to go with the chums was granted; she promised to send back, by the guards, all the medicines on the cruiser, and when, after the days in the jungle trails the quartet reached the head of a small stream, and thence were hurried to the coast in canoes, they set foot again on the smooth white deck, she kept her word. All the medicine was sent, with careful instructions for its use according to the diseases prevalent in the country; other gifts were heaped upon the messengers and they left with the first smiles that any white man had seen on their stolid faces for many years. In return they loaded Margery and the chums with their cloth into which was woven many designs which later proved to be a key to many links of the modern Indians with ancient civilization.
Margery was greeted with much delight by Bill and Jack. Both of them were old enough, as was Mr. Gray, to realize that what worried Tom, her childishness, her habits of the girl of eleven in a body of a miss of sixteen, would soon be outgrown in new surroundings.
There was great excitement and a regular banquet to celebrate the return, and over plates of tinned meats and broiled yams, turtle and freshly caught fish, the youths related their experiences to an eager audience; but they hardly finished when Bill slapped his knee, almost upsetting all their crockery as he shouted:
“So you let Henry Morgan and Beecher go? And you thought they’d quit? Where were you lads when you and Margery talked over her story?”
“In her hut!” cried Tom, starting as he recalled a former time when Toosa had declined certain facts and an eavesdropper had overheard.
“You don’t mean?—” began Nicky. “Why—let me get hold of that—”
“That would explain why they avoided us and why the sloop sailed North in such a hurry,” Jack declared. He was much more of a self-respecting man than he had been even when the youths saw him last. He had control of himself, and took pride in his appearance.
“Andy—Bob—” called Bill, “get up the anchors and make everything shipshape. We’ve got enough provisions for a run back to Mexico?”
“I guess so,” responded Andy, fussing over his spark plugs.
“We’ll make it do.”
“Yes,” agreed Tom. “If what Margery said was overheard and our enemies have a start of us, we’ll have to try hard to catch them before they get to Mexico—”
“Anyway, before they get under those floor boards!” Nicky added.
“Make her hum, Andy,” Cliff said, taking up his duties as oiler and engineer’s assistant.
And so again, Northbound, the Porto Bello nosed into the Caribbean!
CHAPTER XXVIII
GOLDEN BAIT
During the long race back to Mexico the cruiser’s party never caught up with the lost time. Henry and Mort were always ahead; at Colon a tramp steamer had them aboard; at Vera Cruz they debarked; at Mexico City they were still ahead.
So it was that when the party reached the Dead Hope mine they were quite prepared for what they found.
Henry Morgan and Mort Beecher had come there four days before; yes, the superintendent explained, they represented that they had bought a mine location adjoining the Dead Hope. Yes, they asked to let them sleep in the old shack at the edge of his Dead Hope property until they could level off a place on the shaggy hillside for their own mine shaft and shack. No, he told them, he did not know whether they had done any exploring in the old shack.
On a warm afternoon Tom, Nicky, Cliff, Bill and Margery stood in the old, rickety shack, its corrugated metal sides almost ready to drop apart.
“You can see for yourself,” said the superintendent. “It looks as if they’ve done some explorin’, at that.” He had been told a good many facts concerning the adventures the chums had been through, the cause for their trip, and some deductions concerning the solution of the mystery of the missing gold dust which Bill, Jack and the chums had figured out.
“They certainly have been hunting for those papers Margery hid,” Tom said. “I guess we are beaten. If they find the papers they will destroy the partnership agreement father got, and change the deeds in some way, and then, of course, neither Margery nor I can do anything.”
“Well, they’ve torn up the old floor boards under the stove,” said Cliff, and Nicky echoed his statement. Jack, who came in, stared out of the dusty, grimy window, with its bit of rag stuffed into a broken pane, and did not seem to care much what was going on. He appeared to be trying to get his newly awakened memory to reveal some further pictures of his past.
“Let’s see if there was anything under the floor—or a place for it,” Bill suggested, but Margery touched his arm.
“I’ve been trying to remember something,” she said, “and I have. Tom, Nicky, Cliff—Bill—” she beckoned them close and whispered. They stared at her.
“The stove isn’t where it was when I hid the—papers!”
“No!” gasped Tom. “Then—where was it before?”
She pointed to another corner.
“The paper may still be under there, then. They haven’t torn up those boards.” Tom started across the floor. He stopped. Nicky was scratching his left ear. At the same instant Margery touched Bill’s arm and they all became very quiet, except Margery who, in a whisper, gasped into Tom’s ear: “Now do just as Bill said to do if Mort or Henry appeared.”
Tom nodded. In the dimly lit room, bare except for a bed and a stove and a chair with one leg gone, he and Cliff and Nicky and his sister, with Bill and Jack, were as silent as statues. So that Henry Morgan strolling with his mind far away, got half-way through the door before he discovered them.
“What—say!—er—” he gasped. “Why——”
“Hello!” said Tom. “How’s Mort? And how are you?”
“Um—er—oh! Fine. Fine! ’Cause why? ’Cause we see you got this little lady safe away from the Indians. We knew you would. I said to Mort, ‘We’ve told the Indians to take good care of them till they want to leave and then take them safe to the shore.’ He said ‘Seems like deserting them, seems like,’ but we had to hurry, because—because——”
For once his ’Cause why was forgotten in his effort to hide his surprise. “——We had to keep an appointment with the captain of a sloop——”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Tom, playing a part which Bill, Jack and the chums, and even Mr. Gray, had decided was the surest way to lull suspicion of what they really meant to accomplish.
“I knew you’d see it. ’Cause why? ’Cause you’re a fine feller. Tom, we fixed it all up with the Indians about letting Miss Margery go and then we come on back here. ’Cause why? Mort had remembered about his Golden Sun. It was a mine and he was anxious we should be partners.”
Tom felt that Henry had mixed himself up in enough half-falsehoods.
“Yes?” he said, with his eyelids lifted and brows arched, playing his part in laying a trap. “So that’s why, in the old days, Mort didn’t tell you where the gold dust went——”
Henry darted closer and eagerly demanded:
“Do you know? Do you know anything? I didn’t learn nothing ’cause Mort got chased by the bandits and hid and then went to Central America.”
“I don’t think you ought to count too much on him for a partner,” Tom added to his story as Bill had arranged that he should, if circumstances allowed him to do so. “Henry—what would you say if I showed you how the gold dust disappeared—and where?”
“Oh! I’d—I’d be grateful. Of course, it won’t do any good now, but it would be nice to know.”
“Come on, then,” Tom urged, and the whole party, with Bill nudging Nicky to prevent the youth from doubling up with glee, went up the old trail to a spot well remembered as the point where the youths first met Henry Morgan—the man who then boasted that he could “smell money.”
“You said, when we first saw you, that you could smell money,” said Tom. Henry nodded. “Your nose must have been out of joint,” he said. “Look here.” He approached the ledge, and pointed overside. Henry, cautiously, drew close and looked; then he gasped.
“Why!—it’s only down about six feet.”
“Yes, there’s a narrow ledge about six feet down—of course the chasm is below, but you could get down to the narrow ledge—and, here’s a little secret—the ledge goes back in under the overhang of rock—if you get on your stomach and look over, you’ll see!”
“I do,” said Henry, after he had looked. “It’s like a narrow cave under this overhang I’m lying on.” He stared back again. “What’s that, like something black, down on the ledge?”
“Oh, that!” said Tom, pretending to be uninterested. “That is the last sack of the gold dust. Here’s where the mules were stopped and where Mort dropped the sacks of dust and then, later, he and Margery were down there, hiding, when the—bandits!—rode past.”
“Well, I’ll be swiggle-swiggered!” gasped Henry. “What’s going to be done with that sack of dust? And where’s the rest?”
“Oh, a man from the Dead Hope is coming back for it—he just took another one out. This is the last. We’re going to lock it up with the rest of the mine’s nuggets and dust, in that old shack, tonight. In the morning we’ll all escort it to the city. We can’t do anything more here.”
“What did you come here for?”
“Oh, just to look up some papers Margery says father gave her and she hid in the old shack.”
They all saw the cunning light in Henry’s eyes. “But you ain’t found no papers!”
Tom laughed. “No,” he said. “The stove has been moved since Margery hid our papers under the boards beneath it—she thinks it used to be in the far corner—by the window. We haven’t looked there, though. I don’t think she remembers after all these years.”
Henry made an excuse and hurried away. Tom looked at his sister and his chums and then, of a sudden, they all smiled.
“Well,” said Tom, “I’ve baited a trap—hope we get two rats!”
CHAPTER XXIX
THE RATS COME
Tom took a firm grip of Cliff, on one side, and of Nick, on the other; to the latter he whispered: “Here they come! If you make a false move I’ll make mince-meat of you!”
“I won’t,” agreed Nicky.
Black night had descended over the Dead Hope mine and its new neighbor, the Golden Sun. The two new partners of that latest venture had hastily taken their few belongings from the Dead Hope shack when Henry learned from Tom that it would be needed for gold-dust storage that night.
To all appearances the shack, standing dark and still, and the hillside behind it, were wrapped in slumber.
Two dull figures, as quiet as ghosts, slipped along in the gloomiest parts of the shadow, close to brush, hugging the cliff, or slinking under the shack windows.
“Seems like nobody’s around, seems like,” Mort whispered. “Ain’t that sort of funny?”
“There was a guard,” Henry said in his hoarse, but subdued rumble. “He ain’t around—’Cause why? ’Cause Henry attends to everything. He was leaning out the window when I sneaked around the side of the shack first time, spying. Well—there’s his hat.” He kicked the sombrero lying on the ground under the window.
“Blackjack, heh?”
“Naw. Cudgel!”
“Oh.”
“Now the main thing is not to wake up the camp,” Henry said. “Last time we played bandits we come with guns and a gang at our backs. But this time it’s different. ’Cause we are workin’ alone and I mean to see that you don’t get the best of me this time.”
“Seems like you never will get over that idear, seems like,” Mort grunted. “I tell you and tell you—I had the little gal to watch out for and I tried to find you but the others was too close behind me——”
“Well, it’s all come back to us, anyhow, except what you wasted in Colon—one sack was all you took, wasn’t it?”
“Only one, Hen. Yes, it’s come back. Now we’d better get it and get the papers out from where the stove used to be——”
“And we was pulling up boards in the wrong place. That’s kids for you—she remembers where she hid stuff and her brother tells us as nice as pie and never plans to bother to look. Thinks his sister has forgot—like that silly old codger, Jack, we saw down to Porto Bello!”
“Yep! Well, Hen, let’s get in through the window—or will you let me hand you the sacks and you take ’em to where we got the burros tied?”
“We’ll work right together,” Henry declared. “Here, you get in there and I’ll be right behind you. Watch. Go easy. Don’t come down hard onto the guard—I hit him and he dropped inward—don’t step on ’im if you can help it!”
“I won’t—but they ain’t any guard here.”
“Maybe he crawled off from under the window. Get in—let me get there after you. Hurry, you slow poke.”
Mort hastened all his fat bulk would permit. Then Henry got in.
“That’s strange,” he said. “I was sure the guard fell in the room when I poked the cudgel down onto his fat head! But, he must of come to life and crawled off. Don’t hear nothing so he hasn’t sounded any alarm!”
“Got the flashlight? Turn it this way.”
Henry unslung a small pocket lamp and switched on its beam. Throwing it over the room he gave an exclamation of delight.
“There’s them sacks o’ dust—and some of nuggets, by the feel.”
They lost no time in dragging some of the buckskin pouches from the top of the pile and dropping them out of the window so they could get to the bulkier flour sacks and gunny sacks beneath them. When they had lifted until they were tired, they decided to transfer what they had dropped under the window to the backs of the mules.
“But wait!” admonished Mort. “Seems like we better get at the papers, seems like. Then, if we’re chased, we know we haven’t left that partnership agreement and deed for the kids to find.”
“Wise idea,” agreed Henry. “Take this flash, and put it so’s it can’t be noticed outside. Then I’ll pry up the boards—let’s see—a girl of nine or ten or so would never have tools—and she was excited when you come in, wasn’t she, Mort?”
“Seems like she was, way I remember.”
“Now, the stove was about here—yep, here’s the spots where the heat warped the wooden floor. Now—Mort, where was the little gal standing that night when you come in?”
“Well as I recall—I come in the door, and she was—just about like you are now.”
“Well, that settles it. She had just straightened up, I bet. ’Cause why? Look at that board along the wall. Loose, I’ll bet. See! A kid could get her fingers almost under the edge—enough to lift it—and sure enough! Here they are!”
He wrenched savagely at the long, narrow board, and lifted it enough to get his arm through and fish out some mouldy looking paper.
“Take care,” warned Mort. “It’s nearly falling to bits.”
“Only the outer wrappers,” Henry whispered, holding the papers close to the electric beam, already growing dim. “See—the inside papers are all right.”
“Well, hurry up and make sure what they are. We want the deed and we might as well take the others and tear ’em up where the pieces won’t get us in trouble. Hurry, though. The battery is going down on that flashlamp.”
“It’s the deed all right,” Mort took one paper and unfolded it partly. “I recall how this corner was tore off where it was signed, and I made a patch onto it—only with my name instead of—that other ’un.”
“And here is the partnership paper. I won’t tear it up yet—but what are these other things?”