nd ten thousand acres of long-horns. You better
forget that corner. Some night you'll get stewed and spill the beans."

"Who, me?" Slevin laughed in disdain. "Fat chance!" There was a long
silence during which the only sound was the bubbling of a pipe. "I
s'pose I'll have to stick, if you say so," Denny agreed finally, "but
I'm fed up. I'm getting jumpy. I got a hunch the cache ain't safe; I
feel like something was goin' to happen."

Mr. Slevin's premonition, under the circumstances, was almost uncanny;
it gave startling proof of his susceptibility to outside influences.

"You _are_ rickety," Black Jack told him. "Why, there ain't any
danger; nobody goes up there." Laughing Bill held his breath, missing
not a word. "If they did we'd pick 'em up with the glasses. It's open
country, and we'd get 'em before they got down."

"I s'pose so. But the nights are getting dark."

"Nobody's out at night, either, you boob. I ain't losing any slumber
over that. And I ain't going to lose any about your quitting ahead of
me. That don't trouble me none." Berg yawned and changed the subject.
Half an hour later he rose, languidly undressed and rolled into his
bed. Slevin followed suit shortly after, and the rapidity with which
both men fell asleep spoke volumes for the elasticity of the human
conscience.

Now, Laughing Bill had come prepared to spend the night, but his
throat tickled and he had a distressing habit of snoring, therefore he
deemed it the part of caution to depart before he dropped off into the
land of dreams. He effected the manoeuver noiselessly.

Bill lingered at the spring hole on the following morning, and lost
himself in an attentive study of the surrounding scenery. It was
fairly impressive scenery, and he had a keen appreciation of nature's
beauty, but Black Jack's words continued to puzzle him. "Nobody goes
up there." Up where? The Aurora lay in a valley, therefore most of the
country round about was "up"--it was open, too. The ridges were bold
and barren, garbed only with shreds and patches of short grass and
reindeer moss. "We'd pick 'em up with the glasses--we'd get 'em before
they got down." Manifestly the cache was in plain sight, if one only
knew where to look for it, but Mr. Hyde's sharp eyes took in ten
thousand likely hiding-places, and he reasoned that it would be worse
than folly to go exploring blindly without more definite data than he
possessed.

It was clever of the pair to hide the swag wher