“Maybe more of his deeds,” Mort said. “You know, the night you was chief of the bandits and I helped, you said we ought to find more deeds for mines because he was representin’ a company——”
“Well, if you hadn’t shot him!—” accused Henry.
“I shot him? You got rats! You done that!”
“Well, look at the papers and let’s go back to toting gold.”
Henry, with the flash bulb now merely a dim, yellowish filament, held a paper close to his eyes.
“What’s this?” he almost forgot his caution.
“Well, what is it?”
“‘I—Henry Morgan—do confess,’” he began, then flung aside the paper and opened the last one feverishly.
Meanwhile Mort strained his eyes at the first, but Henry, snatching the lamp and using it, snarled.
“It’s got all about you being a bandit and shooting the gringoes—“(Americans)—“and lots more, Henry.”
“Well, this confession is about you and how you stole from me and your pals and hid the gold dust and took the little girl.”
“Well—what of it? Who put them there?”
“We did!” snapped a sharp voice.
“And you might as well sign the confessions!” said another.
Whirling, dazzled by two vivid white beams cast on them from large flashlamps protruding through the window, the two, caught red-handed, blinked and stammered in amazement.
“We’re the Mexican police,” declared one of three men who promptly handcuffed the two dazed culprits.
Tom, Nicky, Cliff, Bill, Jack, Mr. Gray, the mine superintendent—and Margery—everybody was trooping into the doorway and the small room.
“We heard every word they said, we crept right under the window,” Nicky said. He turned to Tom, “and I didn’t make a false move, did I?”
“Not a one,” said Tom. “The only false move was the one these men made trying to get the best of three boys, as they thought.”
“And they can sign those confessions and save you a lot of trouble,” said one of the Mexican officials. Mort looked at Henry and his look was returned—there was nothing else to do so the confessions checking and verifying the duplicity of the two—and worse!—were duly signed.
“But what became of the guard I hit?” asked Henry, when he had been told how they were surrounded all the time they talked and worked, and Tom answered: “Oh, Nicky and I were inside here with a hat and wadded sacks around a broomstick, to seem like a man in sombrero and poncho, leaning out of the window. When you ‘socked’ at them we let the hat drop off and put the rest over in the corner—there they are!”
“You certainly outwitted us,” said Mort, grudging admiration, but compelled to admit defeat.
“And now—” it was Jack, the man who had no memory until he left Porto Bello—“Just wait a bit. Mort Beecher—you that was with me so long in Porto Bello, and I never guessed—listen to this! Who crept in my room in a Colorado camp bunk house and stole my deeds, that I was carrying from one ranch to another—and who, by doing that, ruined my reputation, caused me to leave the State, and made the wreck who ended up on the beach at Porto Bello?”
“How should I know?” demanded the handcuffed Mort, but he shivered.
“You should know by this!” snapped Jack. “Oh, I got my memory back at last, and I can remember as well as anything how a piece was torn off the bottom of one deed, the one you tore taking it out of my bunk! It was my own deed, to my own mine, I had just bought, down in Mexico. You thought the corner of the paper was lost. It wasn’t! It was left in my bunk and I had it in my old wallet down in Porto Bello all the time; only, I had been there so long I didn’t recall anything. But I brought away the wallet and here is that piece of paper with my signature on it!”
Eagerly Tom grasped the deed to the Golden Sun, transferred, supposedly, to one Morton Beecher. From Jack’s worn, faded wallet he fitted to its patched corner a bit of paper, yellow and mildewed, but an exact fit!
“So Margery and I will have you for a half-partner instead of that—” Tom made a face toward Mort who was being led, with head bent, toward his imprisonment and trial, with Henry, for their many sins.
“Bill,” cried Jack. “Tell you what I’ll do. You always liked mining and you say you used to prospect in Peru for mines. How about trading my share in this Golden Sun for your ranch in Colorado?”
“It’s a go!” said Bill.
“And our old Bill will be our partner,” chuckled Tom. “I’m glad.”
“And we’ll take Cliff and Nicky into partnership, too, won’t we?” Margery pleaded.
“As to that!” exclaimed Tom, with a grand air, and waving a hand like an orator, while he stuck the other arm into the bosom of his coat, “I believe we shall have to take that up with the board of directors—in the morning.”
“In the morning, my dear!”
“The reason I didn’t want to talk about shares, last night,” Tom told his sister, late the next afternoon, “was because we don’t actually own a dollar’s worth of that mine.”
They were sitting outside the mine shack. Henry and Mort had been lodged in a Mexican prison. They were merely waiting until Mr. Gray would be ready to leave the mines. Bill and Jack had attended to the necessary legal formalities. But Mr. Gray learned that the mine superintendent had discovered a regular hoard of old Aztec relics in the fastness of the hills and Mr. Gray proposed to go with him to inspect them the next day. He might decide to remain the rest of the late summer and collect and arrange the relics.
“Why, don’t she own a dollar of the mine?” Nicky demanded. “She hid the paper. Her father paid for half the mine.”
“But he paid Mort, and Mort can’t return the money, and he had no right to sell the mine. It was really Jack’s——”
“Well,” said Jack, ambling up, “did I hear my name mentioned?”
“You certainly did,” declared Cliff. “Tom says he can’t touch the mine at all because it’s all yours and what his father paid——”
“Please—please!” gasped Mort’s former beach combing partner of Porto Bello. “Don’t make me weep. Don’t make me laugh.”
“Just the same,” said Tom, “it wouldn’t be right.”
“Well,” said Jack, “let’s look at it this way. Your father paid in good earnest.”
Tom nodded, and Margery, beside him, smiled and gave vigorous assent.
“And because Mort was greedy and all, his greed and lust has turned against him and has brought me back to being a man through you folks. But that don’t pay for the mine, of course. And it’s a shame, too.” He looked over toward the mountains. The sun, declining, was taking on the rich, golden hue, and the sky was dyed, above a blood-red line just over the hills, with a vast, swimming, pulsating light, a vivid golden sea of beauty.
“It’s too bad,” Jack added. “Don’t you think so, Bill?” as Bill came up. “What with us finding that the Dead Hope vein has been struck again, and they’ve got their gold dust back and our own mine has a vein of ore as thick as your arm, about two feet under the rock—ain’t it too bad we can’t sell shares to our friends?”
“Sell, yes! But not give!” said Tom.
“Well,” said Jack, “how about making me an offer. If you was to want the half-interest, say, I might consider taking that—let me see—yes! That cigar lighter that saved you in the Chucunaque country. You don’t smoke. It’s no good to you.”
“It’s a keepsake,” Tom said—and then started—“Golly! It isn’t even mine to keep. I took it from Bill.”
“I now and here make you a present of it!” said Bill magnanimously, “and you keep it, too. Jack may own that mine, but he’s traded half to me for my ranch, and he don’t know which half he’s traded, so I guess nobody owns the other half—so, why not claim it from him!”
“Would that be right?” asked Margery, her eyes big and interested.
“Little sister,” said Bill kindly, “for lads like Tom, and Cliff, and Nicky—and a girl like you!—anything a decent fellow can do is—right!”
“Thanks,” said Nicky.
“Same here,” said Cliff.
Margery wasn’t ashamed to hug Bill.
As for Tom, with just a little lump in his throat for the fine chum Bill always was—Tom couldn’t think what to say.
So, as Bill dragged out a cigarette, Tom said nothing.
And lit the cigarette with his life-saving lighter.
THE END
[1]This is not impossible for a clever and adept person who has the strange ability to identify his mind with that of another, to “see his pictures,” as Cliff’s father explained it to Tom later.
[1]This is not impossible for a clever and adept person who has the strange ability to identify his mind with that of another, to “see his pictures,” as Cliff’s father explained it to Tom later.