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Updated: May 17, 2025
Both had come to Clearwater to repair their broken fortunes from the mine of which they both had knowledge. Whether it was guilty knowledge or not no man could tell. Such directions as Rutheford had given his son had been unavailing because of the snowslide that had changed the contour of the little valley where the mine lay.
Also I will chase down Rutheford, and track him all over the world until I find him, and make him suffer for all he has done!" This was a northern child, and his baby eyes would gleam and his features draw, and then his mother, half-frightened, would try to quiet him in her arms.
It was no other than Rutheford, the man who later, in the cavern darkness, had struck his father down. His deductions followed with deadly and remorseless certainty. He knew now why Harold Lounsbury had come into Clearwater.
His eyes were glittering and terrible to see at the potentialities of that finding. Yet in an instant he knew that death had likely already claimed the elder Rutheford. Otherwise he himself would have come back, long since, to recover the mine. He would be financing the expedition, rather than his brother Kenly.
Rutheford did not return to the mine at all; he was traced clear to the shipping point, three hundred miles below Bradleyburg. And he did not go empty-handed. The pack horses had not carried empty saddlebags. They had been simply laden with gold. And Bronson never returned to his family in Bradleyburg. There was only one possible explanation.
Harold would come back and claim the mine; perhaps he would even erect his own notice before his departure, and the Rutheford family would know the full fruits of their crime of long ago. But it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered now was rest and sleep. Slowly he sank down in the snow.
But the years had come and passed, and Rutheford had not been brought to justice nor the mine found. It was true that in a past summer Bill had traced his father's murderer as far as the shipping point, but there all trace of him was irremediably lost. Bill had made many excursions into the Clearwater in search of the lost mine, all without success.
He understood now Harold's disappointment and emotion when Bill had discovered the mine. Likely his own name was Harold Rutheford, or else Rutheford's true name had been Lounsbury. Bill stood shivering all over with rage and hate. Now he knew the road of vengeance! He had only to trace Harold Lounsbury back to his city there to find his father's murderer.
The gold had represented the season's washings an amount that went into the hundreds of thousands and Rutheford had murdered his benefactor and absconded with the entire amount. No living human being except Rutheford himself knew where the mine lay; there was no way for Bronson's family either to reclaim the body or to continue to work on the mine.
His father had come early to the gold fields of Bradleyburg, and he had been one of few that was accompanied by his wife, a tender creature, scarcely molded for life in the northern gold camps. Then there had been Rutheford, his father's partner, a man whom neither Bill nor his mother liked or trusted, but to whom the elder Bronson gave full trust.
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