"Guess you're about the only feller that knows where it is?" enquired Buck, cautiously.
Luzon looked at his questioner and spoke just one word: "Guadalupe."
"Does Gaudalupe know?" exclaimed Jack Rover. "I thought her long suit was the riffle where she gets her placer gold."
"Guadalupe," answered Pierre, speaking slowly, "she know ze cave, but she not know where ze treasure is buried. Ze cave her home. She live zere. Lots and lots of times she come out, and nobody ever track her when she go back. Ze outlaws they sharp-shoot from places in ze hills nobody could see. But I show you," he continued, nodding his head at Jack Rover, "I, Pierre, show you where zat riffle is. I know both where Guadalupe wash out placer gold and ze secret chamber in ze big cave where Joaquin Murietta bury him money and where ze White Wolf, Don Manuel--peace to his soul!"--Pierre Luzon crossed himself--"hide sacks and sacks of ze yellow gold. Oh, yes!"
This long speech had exhausted the old man. He dropped his head wearily.
"What you need now is a good long sleep," exclaimed Tom Baker. "Another jolt of bourbon Pierre, and then you get in between the blankets, old fellow."
"I've got your bed all ready in the next room," observed Buck.
"I guess I go to bed zen," assented Luzon.
He gulped down with relish a nightcap of the old whisky. Then Buck and Tom helped him from his chair.
"It is good to be here," murmured the Frenchman. "I grow strong again among ze mountains. I never go back--never go back to San Quentin, that one horrid prison."
"We'll nurse you like a baby," said Buck assuringly, as he led the feeble old man into the adjoining room.
|ON the very night of Pierre Luzon's return, Ben Thurston was in close colloquy with his attorney, summoned specially from New York. It was not only the murder of his son that had brought about this consultation. The owner of San Antonio Rancho, while filled with fury against Dick Willoughby, was also gravely perturbed over other things. Immediately after dinner the two men shut themselves up in Thurston's office.
Thurston opened the safe and produced a little bundle of neatly-folded, legal-looking documents.
"These are the option papers," he said gruffly, as he tossed them across the table to the lawyer. "Look them over, Mr. Hawkins."