Adventure Magazine Cover — page 35: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Silver Zone to investigate the place more thoroughly, and the possibility that the coyote might still be in there decided him. He found a> place where he could scramble down. A giance around showed that the joke was on him. ‘There was a small, barely per- ceptible opening at one end of the pot-hole where brother coyote had | assuredly gone out. : Dal walked slowly toward the place when’ suddenly something rolled under his foot. Looking hastily down he was horrified to see a man’s thigh bone. Lying around promiscuously where they had been dragged by coyotes were the rest of the bones com- posing a man’s skeleton. Dal swiftly located the skull, and it required but a cursory inspection to show. that it had been punc- tured by a rifle bullet. Now thoroughly interested Dal began an inch by inch search of the surrounding ground, Bits of rotten clothing were scat- tered here and there, but none of them yielded anything that might identify the dead man. He began to search the entire pot-hole, and close to the narrow’ entrance used by the coyotes,he was rewarded. There he picked up a buckskin sack, or poke, six inches in length, rotten and moldy but the strong buckskin still holding to- gether. It was badly chewed, mute evi- dence that some coyote hag been worrying it, but the draw-string at the top was still tightly drawn. Dal broke the string and peered inside. ‘There were a few coins, but these he gave scant notice. The thing that . interested him was a moldy, crumpled sheet of paper in the bottom of the poke. Dal drew it out carefully to avoid tearing it, and gently wiped away the mold. After it had dried in the sun a few minutes it was easily read in spite of its age. The date and part of the heading of the letter was gone but the body of it was still intact. Lonesome Jim, Hog-up, Nevada. Dear Sir:—I regret to have to inform you that the samples of _galena ore you sent me to be assayed are practically worthless. Not enough silver to bother with. A full report will follow, but you are wasting your time trying to exploit ore of this character. Re- spectfully yours, Samuel ‘Bently. If Lonesome fim’s ore was worthless, why was Bently so confident that there was a rich silver-mine in the vicinity? Then the truth dawned upon Dal. Bently had deliberately lied to the old prospector to get him to abandon his mine; then he had = E come out to find it, hoping that Lonesome a Jim had left the country in disgust. Bently, then, was the most contemptible kind = of crook. Dal’s eyes wandered to the bleached bones of the old prospector. Could Samuel Bently be worse than a crook—a | killer? had been shot down by some one above the pot-hole, Second thought convinced Dal that it could not have been Bently. only gun the assayer owned was the one with the filed sights given him by ‘Has- brouck, and Bently surely was not a marks- man even if he were a murderer which was a thing Dal found it impossible to believe. — There was not a doubt, however, that circumstantial evidence pointed at Bently. Dal himself had too recently been a victim of that kind of evidence to attach much importance to it, but he was glad that the letter had fallen into his possession instead of anybody else—Hasbrouck, for instance. Had the date of the letter not been obliter- ated’ it might have established Bently’s alibi. Whatever Bently had done he was past injuring any one again, and Dal deter- mined that the old man should never be called on to explain his relations to Lone- some Jim, Yet something held him from aestroying — the letter. Having cleared Bently of the charge of murder to his own satisfaction, he went on trying to acquit the old man of 3 fraud. The evidence seemed indisputable, but it was not in keeping with Bently’s character. Still, men did queer things © where money was concerned. Finally he folded the letter tightly, rolled a cigaret with the last of his tobacco, put the letter _ pe in the sack and returned them both to his pocket. If anything should happen to him no one would think to look through a half- : : empty tobacco sack. SA Later in the evening he found a "small : spring in the head of a box cafion that suited him for camping purposes. The place was heavily wooded, and there was a bit of a meadow with grass enough to last a. horse for 4 month. Altogether it was ideal. There was small chance that he would ever be located there, and three hours hard riding would take him either to, Silver Zone or to Hasbrouck’s ranch. The next day was a lonesome one. He tried hunting coyotes for a while only to Eomicaoo The indications were that the prospector ‘ . - — r ‘ = + . <Si.G ww