to Don Gaspar with a certain surprised skepticism.

"But I follow them," said Don Gaspar, "and I offer them to pay; and
after a while two of them come back with me, and we make a litter of
branches with many blanket; and we carry Senor Yank down to the town.
There is a town there now. And by good chance," concluded Don Gaspar
with a little show of quiet racial pride, "we find a California man and
his wife, and they do their bes' for Senor Yank, who is very essick, and
I think he is now dead from the tramp of the horses. And we borrow the
fresh horse and come back."

It was indeed, as I think of it, a wonderful ride in the darkness; but
at the time my mind was full of our poor friend. The others, however,
thought only of the gold.

"We have left," replied Don Gaspar to the rudely expressed shower of
questions, "just the one half. It is well known to all that Senor Yank
carried the most of the gold."

"Yes, and we have Munroe to thank for that," snarled Missouri Jones.

"As far at that is concerned, I was against sending out the gold from
the very start," I retorted. "If you'd listened to me, it would have all
been safe right here."

"If we'd had a decently strong guard, we'd have been all right," growled
McNally.

We all saw the futility of our first instinctive flare of suspicion. It
was obvious that if Don Gaspar and Buck Barry had intended treachery
they would never have returned to us. I think that, curiously enough, we
were unreasonably a little sorry for this. It would have been
satisfactory to have had something definite to antagonize. As it was, we
sat humped around our fire until morning. For a long period we remained
sullenly silent; then we would break into recriminations or into
expressions of bitter or sarcastic dissatisfaction with the way things
had been planned and carried out. Bagsby alone had the sense to turn in.
We chewed the cud of bitter disappointment. Our work had been hard and
continuous; we were, as I have pointed out, just ready for a reaction;
and now this catastrophe arrived in the exact moment to throw us into
the depths of genuine revulsion. We hated each other, and the work, and
the valley of the Porcupine, and gold diggings, and California with a
fine impartiality. The gray morning light found us sitting haggard,
dejected, disgusted, and vindictive around the dying embers of our fire.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE BULLY

With daylight we began to get a grip on ourselves a litt