Mr. Banta did not say anything in reply. He and his partner rode slowly toward them, looking all around, as if they expected to discover something.
"Is it the ghosts you are looking for?" asked Jack. "Come along, and we will show them to you."
"Boys," stammered Mr. Banta, as if there was something about the matter that looked strange enough to him, "you are still on top of the ground. Put it there."
The boys readily complied, and they thought, by the squeeze the miner gave their hands, that he was very much surprised to see them alive and well, and working their mine as if such things as ghosts had never been heard of.
"Did you see them?" he continued.
"You are right, we did," answered Julian. "Jack, pull off your shirt.
He has some marks that he will carry to his grave."
Jack did not much like the idea of disrobing in the presence of company, but he divested himself of his shirt and turned his back to the miners. On his shoulder were four big welts, which promised to stay there as long as he lived.
"It was a lion!" exclaimed Mr. Banta.
"That is just what it was. Now come with me and I will show you the skins. We have something to prove it."
The miners followed after the boys, when, as they were about to pa.s.s their pit, Julian said he wanted to see them about something that had been worrying them a good deal ever since they first discovered it.
"What do you call that?" he asked, gathering up a pinch of the sediment that still remained in the cradle.
"Good gracious! Do you gather much of this stuff?" exclaimed Mr.
Banta, who was all excitement now.
"It is not iron pyrites, is it?"
"Iron your grandmother!" retorted Mr. Banta. "It is gold, and a bag full of that stuff will be worth about ten thousand dollars to you!"
"We have a bagful of it hidden away," a.s.serted Julian; while Jack was so overcome with something, he didn"t know what, that he sat right down on the ground. "Jack thought we had best hide it, but I will get it and show it to you."
"Well, well! this beats anything in the world that I ever heard of!
Don"t it you, Pete?" asked Mr. Banta, dismounting from his horse.
"Here"s you two, come out here as tenderfeet from St. Louis, who never saw or heard of a gold-mine before, and you come up to this pit, which has all manner of ghosts and other things wandering about it at will,--so much so that they scared away two of the best men we had on Dutch Flat,--and then you get the upper hand of the spirits and make ten thousand dollars out of the mine in two weeks! I tell you that bangs me; don"t it you, Pete?"
Jack came up to take the horses and hitch them to swinging limbs, and Mr. Banta turned to Julian and told him he was anxious to see that bag with the ten thousand dollars in gold in it; whereupon Julian caught up a spade and hurried out, and Jack, who had returned to the lean-to, was told to sit down and tell them the story about the haunted gold-mine.
"There isn"t much to tell," said Jack, who, like all modest fellows, disliked to talk about himself. "I went down to see what the inside of the mine looked like, and one of the lions pitched onto me and I shot him."
"There"s more in the story than that comes to," declared Mr. Banta.
"Let us go out and look at the skins; we will hear the straight of the matter when Julian comes in."
The skins were rolled up,--they had been stretched on the ground until the sun dried them,--but Jack quickly unrolled them, and the miners looked on as if greatly surprised. They could not understand how one ball, fired in the dark, had finished the lion so speedily.
"It is a wonder she did not tear you all to pieces," said Pete. "You must have made a dead-centre shot."
The other skin was unrolled, too, and by the time the miners had examined it to their satisfaction Julian came up with the bag. Mr.
Banta untied it, and one look was enough.
"That is gold," said he; "there is no iron pyrites about that. Now, Jack, you go on and get dinner for us, and we will listen while Julian tell us about those ghosts."
"I told you I did not believe in such things," remarked Julian. "And the whole thing has come out just as I said it would."
"What have you in this pack?" asked Jack. "It looks like provisions."
"That is just what it is. We thought you must be nearly out by this time, and so we brought some along. Let the mule go home, if she wants to; she misses that old bell-mare."
The story which Jack did not tell lost nothing in going through Julian"s hands. He described things as nearly as he could see them before Jack"s light went out, and told of the lucky shot and the savage shrieks that came up to him through the pit.
"Those shrieks were what got next to me," declared Julian, with a shudder. "I can"t get them out of my mind yet. I thought that the ghost had Jack, sure."
"Well, go on," said Mr. Banta, when Julian paused. "There were two lions there--how did you get the other one?"
When Julian told how Jack had taken charge of the matter, and had gone ahead in order to hunt up the other ghost, Mr. Banta acted as though he could scarcely believe it; while Pete thrust his spurred heels out before him and broke out into a volley of such quaint oaths that Julian threw back his head and laughed loudly.
"If you had not done anything else since you have been up here but go to hunt up that lion with revolvers, I should know you were tenderfeet pure and simple," declared Mr. Banta. "Why, boys, that was the most dangerous thing you ever did!"
"Well, we did not know what else to do," explained Julian, modestly.
"Jack said the lion would not let us work the mine if he could help it, and so we had to go and find him."
"I know some miners down at Dutch Flat who would think twice before going for that lion with their Winchesters," declared Pete, "and you had nothing but little popguns!"
"They did the work, anyhow," a.s.serted Julian.
"Well, boys, you have been very lucky," said Mr. Banta. "Take your bag of dust and hide it where n.o.body will ever think of looking for it.
And remember--if any person comes here and asks you for money, you are to give him what is in the other bag, and keep still about this full one."
Julian"s eyes began to open wide as this hint was thrown out. He looked at Jack, who was by this time engaged in dishing up the dinner; but the latter only shook his head at him, as if to say, "Didn"t I say we had better hide that gold while we had the opportunity?"
"Who do you think is going to rob us?" asked Julian, as soon as he could speak.
"I am sure I don"t know; but we have some men down at the Flat who would not be any too good to come up here and see how you are getting along. Of course this thing will get all over the Flat in less than five minutes after we get there. We must tell just how we found you; for, if we try to keep it secret, the miners will suspect something and come up here in a body. But if they do that, then you will be safer than if you were alone."
"We don"t want any truck with such people," declared Jack. "If we shoot as well as we did at the lion that wore that big skin, you will hear something drop. Now sit up and eat some dinner."
"Jack, I believe you have the most pluck," said Pete.
"He has it all," replied Julian. "He don"t say much, but he keeps up a dreadful lot of thinking."
Dinner over, the miners lit their pipes, and then Mr. Banta said they wanted to go down into the mine to see how it looked.
"It is my opinion that you won"t get much more gold out of here," said he, as he stepped into the bucket. "You are gradually working your way toward the ravine, and when you break through the wall, you will find no color there."
"I don"t care," replied Julian. "If it will hold out until we get another bag filled, that will be all we want. We can say, when we get back to Denver, that we have been in the mines."
"And had some adventures there, too," remarked Mr. Banta. "Lower away."
Julian and Pete followed Mr. Banta down to the bottom of the mine, and Jack stayed up above to manage the bucket. They were gone a long time, for Julian was obliged to tell his story over again; and, when they were pulled up, Mr. Banta repeated what he had said before he was let down, namely, that the boys had about reached the end of their vein.