is Bumpus Hawtree; this other is Bob
White; while the one who gave you that challenge is Davy Jones. He'll
shake hands with you by offering one of his feet, because he's
standing on his head about as much as the other way."

And Aleck went around, shaking hands heartily. Plainly they could see
that he was more than delighted to meet with such a hearty reception;
and just when it seemed as though he needed friends the worst kind.

So the newcomers were quickly waited on, and found that a bountiful
supply of supper had indeed been prepared against their coming, and by
boys who knew what a mountain appetite meant, too.

By degrees those who had been left in camp were told just how the
rescue had been effected; and then Aleck started in to tell something
about his experiences.

"I live with my mother and sisters in a town called Logan, down in the
northern part of Utah. My father died several years ago, when I was a
little shaver. He had just come back home, and told us he had struck
it rich, and we would never want again, when he was taken down with a
fever; and after being sick a week, he died. The last thing he did in
his delirium was to press a little pocket looking glass, with a
cracked front, into my hands, and close my fingers on it, like he
wanted me to keep it. And we thought it was just imagination that made
him do it, and that perhaps he believed he was giving me all the money
he saw in his wild dreams.

"Well, as the years went along, I used often to look at that little
mirror, just a couple of inches across, and think of my father. We
never could find anything among his traps to tell us where the mine he
had discovered was located. More'n a few times this here Colonel
Kracker would visit us, and tell my mother what a big thing it would
be, if only she could find some little chart or rude map among my
father's things, to be sort of a clew to the lost mine; but though she
searched, and I looked again and again, we just couldn't.

"And one day, would you believe it, somebody broke into our cottage
while we were all out, and stole everything belonging to my father,
from his six shooter and gun, to the old tattered knapsack that he
used to carry, when he was prospecting for pockets of rich ore, or pay
dirt anywhere along the creeks."

"The old snake!" muttered Step Hen; for of course every one of them
guessed who must have been responsible for this robbery of the widow's
home.

Aleck went on.

"And one d