Did this mean they had divided their treasure here?  It might mean that.  Or it might mean that before they cached it they had opened one sack to see how much it held.  Dingwell clung to the opinion that the latter was the truth, partly because this marched with his hopes and partly because it seemed to him more likely.  There would be a big risk in taking their haul with them farther.  There was none at all in caching it.

It was odd how that little heap of ashes in the center of the camp-fire drew his eye.  Ashes did not arrange themselves that way naturally.  Some one had raked these into a pile.  Why?  And who?

He could not answer those questions offhand.  But he had a large bump of curiosity about some things.  Otherwise he would not have been where he was that afternoon.  With his boot he swept the ashes aside.  The ground beneath them was a little higher than it was in the immediate neighborhood.  Why should the bandits have built their fire on a small hillock when there was level ground adjacent?  There might be a reason underneath that little rise of ground or there might not.  Mr. Dingwell got out his long hunting-knife, fell on his knees, and began to dig at the center of the spot where the campfire had been.

The dirt flew.  With his left hand he scooped it from the hole he was making.  Presently the point of his knife struck metal.  Three minutes later he unearthed a heavy gunnysack.  Inside of it were a lot of smaller sacks bearing the seal of the Western Express Company.  He had found the gold stolen by the Rutherford gang from the Pacific Flyer.

Dave was pleased with himself.  It had been a good day’s work.  He admitted cheerfully that there was not another man in New Mexico who could have pulled off successfully the thing he had just done.  The loot had been well hidden.  It had been a stroke of genius to cache it in the spot where the camp-fire was afterward built.  But he had outguessed Jess Tighe that time.  His luck had sure stood up fine.  The occasion called for a demonstration.

He took off his broad-rimmed gray hat.  “Three rousing cheers, Mr. Dingwell,” he announced ceremoniously.  “Now, all together.”

Rising to his toes, he waved his hat joyously, worked his shoulders like a college cheer leader, and gave a dumb pantomime of yelling.  He had intended to finish off with a short solo dance step, for it is not every day that a man finds twenty thousand dollars in gold bars buried in the sand.

But he changed his mind.  As he let himself slowly down to his heels there was a sardonic grin on his brown face.  In outguessing Tighe he had slipped one little mental cog, after all, and the chances were that he would pay high for his error.  A man had been lying in the mesquite close to the creek watching him all the time.  He knew it because he had caught the flash of light on the rifle barrel that covered him.