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Once, however, the temptation was very powerful, and that was on our return from Axelholm. As I rode along in Cousin Thure's easy landau, it seemed to me that it must be very agreeable to travel through life so comfortably and pleasantly. But at that time I was very unhappy in myself; life had lost its best worth for me; my faith in all that I loved most was poisoned!
Mother is about the best nurse in all California," and Thure gripped one of the hard toil-worn hands and smiled encouragingly. "No." As the man spoke his eyes never once left Thure's face. "No, I am dying. I know. I was once a surgeon, an army surgeon." For a moment his eyes darkened, as if with bitter recollections. "But, what matters the past now? Let it bury its dead," and he smiled grimly.
"I reckon you are not the only tired boy in this camp to-night," and Bud spread out his blanket on the ground by the side of Thure's and stretched himself out on it. "Every bone and muscle in my body has been just a-teasing me for the last two hours to let up and give them a rest. Well, we got here anyhow; and I guess we can now make Sacramento City all right to-morrow night.
"You see you start from Hangtown and go in a northeasterly direction to Humbug Canyon and Three Tree Mountain and Goose Neck Lake and the Devil's Slide to Lot's Canyon; and then up Lot's Canyon until you come to Crooked Arm Gulch, and then up Crooked Arm Gulch until you come to the Golden Elbow; and the cave, you see, is right in the point of the elbow," and Thure's finger rested excitedly on the black spot on the map marked "cave."
But that is sure no fancy," and his eyes glared at the stone, which Thure still held. "And I was sound asleep right on the other side of that log at that very moment!" and Thure's weather-bronzed face whitened a little. "No more logs for bedfellows for me!" "Yes, and he must have been lying right on the other side of that log, when I bent over you to see if you were all right," added Bud.
True the skin map and the gold nugget, still in the miner's buckskin bag, hung, safely hidden, under the armpit of Thure's left shoulder; but the old miner himself had found the Cave of Gold, and, if he had found it, why might not some other man find it?
"Captain Sutter is not here," answered the alcalde, "as anyone in the city might have told you; and it is impossible to send to Hangtown after your fathers." "But, are we to be proven guilty on the evidence of those two men alone, whom I am almost certain committed the crime themselves?" and Thure's face flushed indignantly. "Is not our word, at least, as good as theirs?"
Thure's face was flushed and his eyes were sparkling with excitement. "Now, for the hidden entrance to Crooked Arm Gulch!" and his eyes turned eagerly to the walls of the canyon. The wall of the canyon near the tree, so far as their eyes could judge, was a solid mass of cracked and seamed rocks, that sprang from the bottom of the canyon almost straight upward for five hundred or more feet.
"We only did what you or any other man would have done under the same circumstances Great Moses, just look at that water!" and Thure's eyes turned to the flood that was now foaming and boiling a few feet beneath them.
The button, if it came from my clothes, and I confess that it looks as if it did, must have been got by that man in some other way," and Thure's eyes flashed wrathfully in the direction of Quinley, who grinned and touched his neck suggestively.
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