Part 28 (1/2)

”Ted! Ted Jordan! You're just in time! I'm hurt and these scoundrels are trying to rob us!”

”Whoop!” yelled Ted. ”If it ain't my old partner, Gabe Harrison! Who's trying to rob you? Those chaps? Go for 'em, boys! Show 'em how the lads from Dizzy Gulch can handle a crowd of gamblers and thieves!”

But Morton and his cronies did not wait for this. Wheeling their horses, they rode back the way they had come, while to hasten their speed the members of Ted Jordan's party fired several shots over the heads of the scoundrels.

”Well! well!” exclaimed Ted, when quietness had been restored. ”How in the world did you get here, Gabe?”

”Prospecting with these two lads,” indicating Jed and Will. ”But what takes you away from Dizzy Gulch?”

”Dizzy Gulch has petered out. It's no good. There was only outcropping gold, and that's all gone. So I made up a party, left the place, and we're prospecting. Have you had any luck?”

”Not much.”

”But we have!” exclaimed Jed, as he pulled some of the nuggets from their hiding place, and showed them to the astonished miners.

”What! Where did you get those?” asked Gabe.

Jed and Will quickly explained, telling where their wonderful find was located. They also gave an account of the pursuit, and how they had, by great luck, managed to get on the trail that led back to camp. Gabe explained what had happened to him, and said that his leg was getting better every hour.

”I'm all right to travel now, if you go slow,” he said.

”Travel? Travel where?” asked Ted Jordan.

”To where the boys made the lucky strike, of course. We'll all go there and stake out claims. If Dizzy Gulch is no good we've found something better.”

They started off, not making especially fast progress on account of Gabe. They calculated to take two days in getting to the place, and they had no fear now that Con Morton's gang would interfere with them.

It was toward the evening of the first day, when as they were looking for a good place to camp, that Gabe Harrison remarked, as he looked up toward the sky:

”I think we're in for a bad storm.”

”What makes you think so?” asked Ted Jordan.

”The way my leg hurts. It always hurts when there's a storm coming.”

”It doesn't look so,” remarked one of the men. ”The sky's as pretty as a picture.”

”You wait,” said old Gabe, slowly shaking his head.

In spite of the fact that no one else took much stock in Gabe's prophecy, it was noticed that the camp was made more snug than usual, and the men looked well to the fastenings of their horses.

After supper, when they were all seated about the campfire, the men smoking and telling stories, to which the two boy gold miners listened eagerly, one of the men remarked:

”I believe it is going to blow up a little rain.”

The evening sky was beginning to be overcast with clouds, and there was a moaning and sighing to the wind, as if it bemoaned the fact that the pleasant scene was so soon to be spoiled by a storm.

”Better look to our tent-ropes, boys,” suggested Gabe, for he and the two lads from the farm bunked together in a small tent that had been brought along. ”I don't want it blown away in the night, and have us all get soaking wet.”

The darkness increased more rapidly, now that the sky was becoming thickly covered with clouds, and the wind grew stronger.