When Dick reached the surface he found Hardy, McKnight, and Peterson standing apart from the crowd, with elate faces, talking earnestly.

‘She’s a rich dyke,’ McKnight was saying, ‘an’ she’ll go plumb down to any depth.  We must get the pegs in at once, an’ apply fer a lease.  She just misses Silver Stream ground, an’ the ole Red Hand is forfeit long ago.  Boys, it’s a fortune fer us.’

‘Remember Phil Doon’s a shareholder, too; his father’s got to be in it,’ said Dick.

‘To be sure, lad, to be sure; all honest an’ fair to the boy pioneers.’

Dick felt little enthusiasm about the Mount of Gold just then, for the loss of the bag of stolen gold troubled him sorely.  He feared that Detective Downy regarded him as a liar and a cheat.

CHAPTER XX.

After coming up Downy examined the opening in the rock critically.

’Do you think a man might have made his way through that hole before you broke the edges down?’ he asked Harry.

‘Well, yes, with some crowding I think he might’ve.’

’Yet the boy said he had to squeeze his way through.  Did you notice if the opening had been enlarged recently?  Were there indications of recent breakages?’

‘Yes, the stone had been broken in places.  I s’posed the boys did that.’

‘Perhaps.  Here, Dick.’

Dick was quite sure neither he nor any of his mates had increased the opening.  They kept it small because it was easier to hide; besides, he said, it was more fun having to squeeze through.

‘Which of your mates took that bag?’ asked Downy sharply.

’None of ’em.’

‘Why are you so positive?’

‘’Cause I know they wouldn’t be game.’

‘Afraid of the darkness or the mine?’

‘No, afraid o’ me.’  Dick squared his shoulders manfully.

‘Get out—­why should they be afraid of you?’

‘Wasn’t I legal an’ minin’ manager an’ chairman o’ the directors?  If one did what I told him not to he’d get the sack an’ a lickin’, too.’

’Oh, he would, eh?  Well, you’d better give me their names anyhow.  And now,’ he continued after jotting down the names of the shareholders of the Mount of Gold, ’show me the track you took when you dragged the hide bag through the quarry.’

Dick went back over his tracks, and Downy followed slowly on hands and knees, rescuing a hair or two from the edges of the rock or from a bramble here and there.

‘Fortunately that bag of yours shed its hair freely, old man,’ he said. ’here’s corroborative evidence anyhow.  The bag went down all right—­now let’s see what proof there is that it came up again.’

He returned to the hole in the rock and commenced another search, with his nose very close to the ground, moving slowly, and peering diligently into every little cranny amongst the stones.  At length, after travelling about ten yards in the direction of the spring in this fashion, be called sharply: