Ronicky Doone's Treasure (1922) by Max Brand Read Free Book Online Page A

were about the richest ever made, according to what Moon told me. The boys dug out the gold like dirt. They got it by the millions. It was all surface stuff, and the claims gave out quick; but while they lasted about two years and a half they were mints. The chief trouble with the mines along the Jervey was that they wasn't any railroad within three hundred miles, and the gold had to be carted out on mules and hosses along the trails across the mountains. Naturally there was a lot of robbing and holdups going on such a pile of it that nobody could say how much gold was lost or how many men murdered in the business. But Jack Moon says that out of about sixty millions taken from the Jervey claims, not more'n twenty millions ever was got across the mountains by them that shipped it out!
    "Forty millions was lost. Think of that! You'd think that losses like that would have brought out the whole United States army to look after things. But the whole army wasn't very big in those days, and it was tolerable busy with the Indians. Besides, when the stories got East, they weren't believed; or if they were believed, nobody cared very much. They were used to hearing all kinds of wild tales about gold coming out of the West, and most generally they figured that the gold diggers were a set of rascals, one about as bad as the other. So nothing was done till the miners done it.
    "They bore up for a long time, until after a while pretty nigh none of the gold ever got across the mountains. Then they stopped digging and got ready to fight, and they were about as good at one thing as the other. They meant trouble, and they meant trouble in heaps. In a couple of weeks something broke. They sent out a fake gold convoy. There wasn't any gold, but there were ten mules and only ten men and behind the ten came close to fifty with rifles. Sure enough, the ten were jumped, there was a big fight, and half a dozen of the robbers were shot down. The miners were so mad that they didn't leave 'em live long. But one gent kept a spark of life, and he lived long enough to tell 'em that the whole system of robbing was run under one head, and that that head was the gent that was sheriff of the district where the mines was! The skunk had worked a double game and won both ways. His name was Hampden.
    "Them fifty men went back to the claims and rounded up Hampden. At first he put up quite a talk; but they faced him with the dying gent, and he weakened. He was smooth as oil, but there was some things that he couldn't answer. When they searched his cabin and found under the flooring some guns that was known to belong to gents that had been murdered on the gold trails, they give that sheriff a short time for living.
    "His nerve held good till they tied the knot around under his ear and got him ready for the swing, and then he buckled. He begged 'em to give him a chance. He swore that he wasn't any more than a tool, and that the gent that had planned all the organized robbery was really to blame, and that if they'd spare his life he'd take them to that gent and they could not only get him that was the root of the whole affair, but they could get the gold that had been stolen a third or half of it, anyway, because that was the share, he said, that the master kept for himself.
    "Of course the vigilantes figured this talk to be just plumb fear. Hampden wanted to live, and so he was lying and putting the blame on somebody that didn't exist. Anyway, they cut him short by kicking the box from under him, and Hampden swung still trying to talk and explain as long as he had a breath in him.
    "Now let's go back to Jack Moon. He heard about this story; and he had an idea that they was something in it. Seems he hunted around for ten years trying to locate who the master mind had been, if there was such a man; and finally he hit on a gent named Boyd Cosslett that lived in a cabin right up on a cliff over the Cunningham River. He was a queer old gent with yards of white beard, and