"Now," said the leader, "go over there and set down, away from your guns. Which one of you is Elam Storm?"
"My name is Toby Johnson," replied Elam, speaking before anybody else had a chance to open his mouth. "I don"t deny that I am sent up here to prospect for gold; but I don"t see much chance of finding any."
"And what"s your name?" demanded the leader, turning to me.
It was a little time before I could speak. Elam"s plan for throwing them off the scent was a good one, but it came so sudden that it fairly took my breath away.
"I am Carlos Burton," I replied.
"Burton! I know you," said the man, who hardly knew whether to be delighted or otherwise at the discovery he had made; and then all of a sudden it flashed upon me that here was the man who had stolen my cattle. How I wished I had my rifle in my hands! There would have been one cattle-thief less in the world, I bet you; but, then, what good would it have done? I would have been gone up, too, for the other man still held his c.o.c.ked rifle in his hands.
"Ah, yes! Burton," continued the leader, "Do you remember one of the fellows who took some cattle away from you once?"
"I didn"t see the men, but I have heard what sort of looking fellows they were. I should like to see you under different circ.u.mstances."
"Well, I don"t know but you will, but I doubt it. What sort of appearing fellow is that Elam Storm? Seen him, either of you?"
"I don"t know him," said Elam. "I never heard of him. I am a stranger in these parts."
"Seeing that neither of you is Elam Storm, perhaps you may have something about you that tells you where to go to find his nugget. Stand up and put your hands above your head. You have got a ditty-bag about you?"
"Yes, sir, and there it is," said Elam, rising to his feet and throwing his bag outside his shirt, so that the man could examine it.
Well, there! the turning point had been reached at last, and Elam was the one who helped it along. Tom was utterly confounded, and I was so amazed and provoked that I hid my face from the men by resting my elbows on my knees and looking down at the ground. Of course Elam"s map was found, there was no doubt about that. I saw him have it in his hand not half an hour before, and was positive that he put it in the bag out of sight. With that gone we were as powerless as the two men were. I listened, but could not hear him say anything about the map. He took the bag off Elam"s neck and up-ended it on the ground. There were a pipe, some tobacco, and some matches, and that was all there was in it. He put them all back, after helping himself to a generous chew of the weed, and turned to Tom and myself; but as we didn"t have any bags he let us go.
"You have been duped, fellows," said the leader. "Who sent you here, anyway?"
"Uncle Ezra," said Elam.
"Ah, yes! He"s a great chap for such things. And you"ll meet Elam somewhere up there, and you want to look out that he doesn"t put a bullet into you. He thinks he"s got a dead sure thing on that gold."
"Were you sent out here to hunt for it?" asked Elam, and I held my breath in suspense, waiting for his answer. I wanted to find out who was at the bottom of this matter.
"Well, that"s neither here nor there," said the man. "We"re here, and that"s enough for anybody to know. Here"s Burton, now. I did steal some cattle from him because I was hard up, but I don"t want him to go on and get fooled in this way. And you"ll get fooled as sure as you live. Now, we don"t want anything to eat. We have got everything we want out here in the rocks to last us to the fort; and if you"ll say you won"t shoot at us, we"ll give you your guns."
"I won"t shoot at you," said Elam. "You have given me a point to go on, and I don"t know but I had better turn around and go back. Here"s a tender-foot come out here to see the country----"
"All right. Go on, and let him dig away some of the landslides until he gets sick of them. He won"t get nothing, I bet you. Now, suppose you take your creeters and go on your way. We can have a fair view of you for a quarter of a mile, and that"s all we want."
Elam at once picked up his gun, mounted his horse and rode away, leading one of the mules, leaving Tom and I to follow at our leisure. I noticed that the two men eyed me rather sharply. They didn"t know how I felt at being reduced to poverty, and they were ready to nip in the bud any move that I took to be even with them. I didn"t feel very good over it, you may imagine, and when I got on my horse I couldn"t resist an inclination to say a word to them.
"I hear that two of the men who engaged with you in that cattle-thieving business were hanged for horse-stealing," I said.
"Has that story got around down here?" said one of the men.
"Yes; and I am very sorry that they were dealt with in that way. I wanted to get even with them myself. It seems as though those six thousand dollars didn"t go very far with you."
"Well, go on now, for we don"t want to take this matter into our own hands. We will wait until you get up to the turn in the canyon, and then you had better look out."
I rode on up the gully after Tom and Elam, and when I got up to the turn I looked back. The men were not in sight. Elam rode a little way further and then dismounted, preparatory to going into camp.
"There were two things that happened to-day that I did not think possible," said I, throwing myself out of my saddle in a disgusted humor. "One was that Elam would give up when he saw himself cornered."
"I saw at the start that they did not want to hurt anything," said Elam.
"Suppose we had resisted them; where would we be now?"
"And another thing, I did not think it possible for me to stand near the man who stole my cattle without putting a chunk of lead into him. He didn"t say who he was until after he had charge of my rifle, did he?"
"No, but I tell you you wouldn"t have made anything by trying to shoot him. If we had made the least attempt to c.o.c.k a gun, it would have been good-by. Those fellows were not fools."
"And what made Elam deny his ident.i.ty?" said Tom. "You said you were Toby Johnson."
"And what became of his map?" I chimed in. "I saw him have it a short time before they came up. What did you do with it, Elam?"
"It"s there, close to where I was sitting on the rock. When we think we have given them time to get away, I"ll go back there and get it. I didn"t want them to find it on me."
"And do you say that you took it out of your bag and threw it on the rocks?" said Tom in utter amazement. "I sat close to you all the while, and I never saw you do anything like it."
"No; I took it out of my pocket," said Elam. "The name I gave, Toby Johnson, saved them from handling me mighty rough."
"Well, now I am beaten!" I exclaimed.
"You see, if I had told them what my name was, they would have said at the start that I had some sort of a map with me, and would have hazed till I give it up. But they would never have got it," said Elam quietly, and there was deep determination in his words. "But I know one thing, and that aint two. Those fellows have left their picks and spades up here. They got tired of them and didn"t mean to take them back."
"Who were they, anyway?" asked Tom. "They were not the men who stole the skins."
"Now, wait until I tell you; I don"t know."
"One of them might have been the man who got shot," I suggested.
"There are a good many things connected with this nugget that we will never find out," said Elam. "And that"s one of them. We"ll stay here until we get dinner, and then I will go back after my map. It is all in a lifetime. So long as I get my nugget I don"t care."
"I never heard of men turning out so friendly after doing their best to rob us," said Tom, pulling the saddle off his horse. "And you met them half-way."
"Who? Me? I will always be friendly with a man who never tries to do me dirt," said Elam. "If they had had the nugget you would have seen more."
I was very glad indeed that they did not have the nugget. So long as they let us off without being hurt I was abundantly satisfied; but if they had had gold stowed away in their blankets, we probably should never have seen them. They would have slunk away among the rocks and tried to hide their booty for fear that we should try to take it away from them. Would Elam try to hide his nugget after he got it? Well, he had not got it yet by a long ways. We ate dinner where we were, and Elam shouldered his rifle, lighted his pipe, and started back after his map.
He told us that we had better stay where we were, and this gave me an idea that Elam was afraid he might be shot. He was gone half an hour, and when he came back his face wore his old-time expression again.
"Have you got it?" asked Tom, who always wanted to make sure that he was in the right.
"Course I have," said Elam. "Catch up, and we"ll go on. There is one thing about this map business that I don"t exactly like. You see this nugget is hid in a pocket."
Of course, I was thunderstruck, but then Elam had been all over that country, and of course knew where every pocket went to. He knew which canyons ran back into the mountains and which did not.
"You see this man had a fight before he got the nugget, and he was too badly hurt to get off his course to find a pocket to bury his find,"
Elam hastened to explain. "Now, this canyon that we are in goes back into the mountains I don"t know how far, and it was in this gully that the fight took place; consequently the find is buried right here alongside of this little stream."