Ronicky Doone's Treasure (1922) (11 page)

He reviewed the case, in fact, exactly as Hugh Dawn had prophesied he would. The best conclusion to which he could come was that he had better linger on the outskirts on the march of the outlaws and do them what damage he could until he had reduced their numbers, or until he found an opportunity of making a dash to win the freedom of the girl and her father in case both were alive. What he chiefly worried about was the man, for he knew Westerners and their ways well enough to understand that a girl need have no fear, so long as she was in their midst. The most they would do would be to keep the pair for some time in their company until they had reached a far portion of the mountains, and then they would send her back. But even on the point of their treatment of the girl he could not be sure, for his memory of the pale, handsome face of Jack Moon brought up the most evil forebodings. The man must be capable of any crime.

With these thoughts to disturb him, Ronicky passed a miserable night, and in the first gray of the dawn he made out, from the shack on the hill beside Cunningham Lake, the signs of preparations for breakfast.

His own meal consisted of hard-tack, while Lou grazed in a meadow of rich grass which he had found behind the outskirts of the trees.

The meal on the cliff was followed by saddling and mounting, and now Ronicky strained his eyes from the covert of the trees as he had never strained them before.

He could not distinguish faces. But he made out the form of the girl on her gray horse, placed about halfway down the long procession, and beside her rode another figure on another gray horse. It must be her father.

He waited, however, until the whole cavalcade had moved on. There were now fourteen men besides the girl and her father; evidently the whole Moon band had assembled at the Cosslett cabin during the night. The thirteen were led by one so formidable as lack Moon. It was indeed a Herculean task even to dream of thwarting so many practiced fighters. And yet the eyes of Ronicky Doone gleamed with evil desire, and he caressed the butt of his rifle. Rapid fire might greatly reduce that company, but at the first shot he knew another bullet would be driven into the body of Hugh Dawn.

He dismissed all shadow of doubt as to whether or not Hugh Dawn lived by climbing into the saddle on Lou and riding to the cabin. There he made a careful search for crimson stains, and, finding none, he was certain that there had been no death in Cosslett's shack.

It needed a long detour to the left to come in sight of the riders again. He picked them up in the midst of a difficult trail, almost blind, that ran among the mountains north and west. The direction made the heart of Ronicky leap, for it convinced him that Jack Moon had at length learned the secret of the treasure. The bargain had indeed been made!

After that Ronicky hung less closely on the heels of the riders. It was a needless courting of danger, and if the distance to the burial place were twenty miles, as Dawn had estimated, he need not dog their footsteps every inch of the way.

He contented himself with coming into view only occasionally, weaving from one side of the trail to the other so that, in case he had been seen and a small rear party were detached to take him, he would not be located in the expected place. But always, when he had a chance to count the numbers of the procession, the original fifteen came to view.

It was mid-morning when they debouched out of the upper mountains into a steep-sided hollow. To the southeast a narrow, deep ravine carried out into the distance the waters of a little creek which flashed with arrowy swiftness from among the pines of the northern slope. Wood, water, a shelter from the winds
what more could man wish for in a camping ground? The existence of the trail across the mountains was readily explained by the pitted sides of the hollow. There had been mines here, many a year before, and the trail had been worn by the hundreds of pack mules and horses; rocks had been cleared away here, trees hewn down there.

Ronicky was in time to see the procession turn into a mad rush for the bottom of the hollow as soon as the crest was topped. Helter-skelter down the side they rushed, and in the bottom land below he saw them dancing like mad creatures as they flung themselves from their horses. Only the two figures on the grays retained their saddles. The rest seemed to be intoxicated, and no doubt this was the gold-madness taking hold of them.

After the first frenzy they were seen to be swirling around a central, commanding figure seated on a bay horse of unusual size, and Ronicky did not need a field glass to pick the man out as Jack Moon. For this was the directing mind which presently sent men scrambling here and there. He himself joined the workers, and after a time Ronicky could make out that they were lining up two tall mountains to the north and crossing this line with another drawn through two other peaks in the east.

If he had doubted before, this work convinced him that he was right. Yonder sway-backed mountain to the east
that was unquestionably The Crescent. After a time, on the far side of a little mound in the hollow, three shovels and as many picks began to flash rhythmically and swiftly. The task of digging had commenced.

Most of the party remained here. But Jack Moon, the Dawns, and two more men rode up the course of the creek and disappeared under the pines, obviously in search of a good camping place. Ronicky turned Lou to the left and cut around the hollow to make out what luck they had.

He left Lou a short distance back in the woods, after he had come reasonably close to the course of the brook, and went out cautiously on foot. It was not hard to skulk safely through the forest, since there was a dense growth of virgin wood in many places, and, in others, thickets even more favorable to secret approaches. So he came to an opening in the woods and found there the whole party which had climbed from the hollow. He was quite near
not more than a hundred yards away, perhaps; and he made out the face of Hugh Dawn for the first time, standing beside Jack Moon.

Around them spread five little shanties which in the days of the mines had been put up by the laborers close together for the sake of sharing the advantages of the natural clearing and enjoying one another's company. Time had not completely ruined the little buildings, for they were of logs, rudely squared to be sure, but put together solidly enough to stand another generation, perhaps. The two men of Moon's band who had joined the party of exploration were already busy clearing some fallen logs to the entrance of one of the huts.

This was as much as Ronicky desired to learn. Before late afternoon the hut would be occupied, the horses picketed in the rich surrounding meadow, and the whole band quartered at ease. Ronicky could not but admire such a faultless system as this. The chances were that they would be able to get down to the treasure by the digging of a single day. But if they did not, here he was equipped with a flawless camp. It was a part of good generalship.

With this much ascertained, Ronicky started back to find Lou and locate some close quarters of his own in the near distance.

Chapter
Fourteen. The First Attempt
.

The hole was deepening rapidly. The few hours of work had brought about amazing results, for the ground in this place was a loose mixture of sand and gravel; without using picks to loosen it first, the men simply shoveled as fast as their arms and backs could swing. They had made the first cut amply wide, and now, narrowing the pit at the depth of twelve feet, they left a ledge onto which the diggers cast up the dirt while two men on the shelf tossed it up again in relay to a great heap which was growing on the lip of the cut. They were down sixteen feet, and who could tell when a thrusting shovel might strike the treasure? So they were working like mad, never speaking, never even pausing to wipe the dropping sweat from their faces. Only the occasional grunt of effort rolled up, hollow and dull-sounding, from the deep hole.

"Go up the hill and bring Dawn and his girl," said the chief. "Ought to be getting close to twenty feet now, and I want 'em to see as much as we see."

Accordingly, a messenger hurried up the course of the creek to the hut and returned to Dawn and the girl. In the meantime, the men had been arranged in four shifts by the leader. Three men were always on guard, overlooking the hole and at the cabins. Three more dug in the pit, and six were kept in reserve. Every half hour the shifts changed. The workers from the pit went up to stand their guard. The guard came back to wait for a turn in the pit, and three fresh men jumped down to take the shovels whose handles were kept warm from the friction of labor.

Meanwhile Dawn and Jerry arrived.

A tape was now run down the side of the pit, and a shout of exultation announced that they had cut a full nineteen feet. They gathered in a rush around the edges of the hole, so close, indeed, that the lip of the pit caved under one man and precipitated him, tumbling and yelling, to the bottom. But he came to his feet, snatched the shovel from the hands of a tired worker, and himself assailed the bottom-ground with fury.

The dirt came up in a steady shower now, and there was no sound but the ringing scrape of little stones on the thin metal of the shovel blades as the gravel was flung high. The watchers swayed and stooped in harmony with the workers, as though by joining the rhythm they were joining the labor and helping. Now the tape measured twenty feet at the edges of the hole. In the center it reached to twenty-one.

The laborers paused. Of one accord they raised their gloomy faces to the watchers above. Then, with not a word said by those above or those below, the task began again. Two more feet the hole was sunk. And then, uncalled, the men in the pit clambered to the surface, bringing their tools with them.

Solid silence continued. The digging of the hole had brought the thought of the golden hoard close to every one. For an hour, every time a worker had thrust in his shovel and turned the edge against a solid rock, he had jerked it out expecting to find the tip bright with glittering yellow. At length:

"We must of made wrong measurements," said Moon. "We sure must of got the mountains lined up wrong, boys!"

No one else ventured to answer until Silas Treat spoke.

"Jack," he said, "I looked over those sightings. I got 'em lined up proper. There's The Vixen; there's The Crescent, and the point at the left is the peak of The Crescent. There's Mount Noah, and there's The Ravenhead. Don't I know this country like I was born and raised here? No, sir, we sure got the right peaks lined up, and we sunk the old hole more'n twenty feet. Jack, they simply ain't no treasure here, and old Cosslett, cuss his white-livered hulk, had a laugh at us while he was dying! Wish I had him here now, so I could plug him once more myself."

Afterward, Jerry Dawn wondered why that brutal speech did not shock her. But at the time she was intent on only one interest
gold! She paid no attention to even the surly faces around her. Here was a problem, and the reward for solving it was thousands of pounds of solid gold. She could not doubt that the treasure was buried in this vicinity. The slip of paper and the figures on it had been real; the code could not have lied to her.

"But suppose," she said at length, "that Cosslett didn't know this country as well as you, Mr. Treat. To him it might be impossible to calculate which tip of The Crescent is the highest. It lies there like a new moon, on its back. Suppose he took the other tip as his guide and lined it up with Mount Noah beyond. That would bring the line farther over to our right."

She began walking, climbed a little mound, and stood on the top of it, shading her eyes and peering under the flat of her hand.

"Here's where the line would fall, Mr. Treat. And surely the chance is worth trying. I know we can't fail."

The black look with which Jack Moon had been regarding Hugh Dawn cleared a little.

"Boys," he said, "shall we try it? Not now, because we've done a day's work already, and night's almost here. But tomorrow?"

The expectant face of the girl had produced the inevitable reaction. The gold fever, which had exhausted them with the first great disappointment, returned with new force. There was but one gloomy voice of foreboding.

"Here's the place, right enough," said Silas Treat, following the girl and, like her, squinting to line Mount Noah with the south crest of The Crescent, "but look here. How come old Cosslett was so strong he could bury his gold under rocks like this one?"

He pointed to a great boulder on which he was standing. He leaned and laid hold on a ragged projecting edge. The rock did not move.

"Cosslett wasn't never the man I am," he declared. "If I can't budge this rock, how come it that old Cosslett could ever have put stones like this in the way?"

"He might have had other men working for him," answered Jack Moon. "That ain't hard to explain."

"Hire gents? Gents that would know where the gold was buried as well as he knew? That don't sound like Cosslett! He always played safe!"

"Maybe when the hole was dug he just up and plugged 'em and buried 'em on top of the money," suggested Jack Moon. "That sounds reasonable."

"Maybe it's got a reasonable sound to you," Silas Treat returned gruffly, "but it's got a devilish bad sound to me. Anyway, if you want to dig, I'll bear a hand. Only, how come these big rocks here?"

Jerry Dawn pointed up the nearest side of the hollow.

"See where the trees have been torn away along the hill by a landslide?" she exclaimed. "That same landslide must have rolled these rocks down. It made the mound, too. And well have to dig through the mound and then twenty feet beneath it. But I know that the gold is here! I feel it!"