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!”