VIII
A lone horseman appeared upon the horizon, and looked down over the rolling shoulder of the hills at the shiftless little huddle of one-story frame buildings known to the railroad maps as Silver Tip.
It was not much of a name, and it was not much of a town, but to the man on the sky-line Silver Tip seemed an enchanted oasis and the home of all delights. The lone horseman was hungry and very, very tired. In addition to these discomforts, every muscle in his body ached in revolt at the saddle, and he had not slept well for five nights. He rode slowly, and wasted some very brilliant profanity upon a totally unappreciative packhorse, which ambled behind, groaning under the handiwork of an amateur packer.
Silver Tip had seen the rider before, and had been very much interested in him. He had outfitted there some two weeks before, announcing that he was about to take a trip into the hills in search of geological specimens for an Eastern university. His name he said, was Hardy—Peter B. Hardy, of Springfield, Massachusetts.
He was returning with the specimens, as the packhorse bore unwilling witness; for, in order that Silver Tip might not gossip too much, Mr. Peter B. Hardy brought a sufficient quantity of miscellaneous rocky fragments to allay suspicion. These would be left where Silver Tip might see and marvel at the foolishness of scientific men. One of the canvas bags, however—a stout brown affair which locked like a mail-bag—would not be placed upon exhibition.
The trip had been a hard one, but the task itself had been almost absurdly easy. The discovery of the Bad Jake cache, to a man who knew where to look, had been as simple a matter as matching a blue ribbon in a New York department-store. Gilmore followed instructions, found his landmarks, and rode straight to the entrance of the rocky gorge which Buckshot John had described. The convict had mapped out a route covering every foot of the way from Silver Tip to the Cedars country. Two hours after the doctor dismounted at the foot of the gorge, he was back in the saddle once more, and his horse's nose was pointed toward home.
The return journey was the hardest part of the expedition. The traveler did not dare to sleep soundly by the wayside, and he fled out of the hills with his hand on the butt of his pistol, like a man pursued by enemies. It was not that his conscience troubled him. Far from that; but he was aware that he was now well worth killing, and the thought brought no comfort with it. He drew his first long breath when he looked down on Silver Tip and the line of the railroad.
Thus far he had made only a casual inspection of the treasure. Most of the currency was still in the heavy express packages, and Gilmore had not broken the seals. It was enough to slash the wrappings and thumb the crisp, bluish-green edges of the bank-notes. The amounts contained in the packages were written on the outer wrappings, and by a swift estimate he reckoned the currency at rather more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all in bills of large denominations.
The diamonds proved equally diverting. These he had found tied up in a dirty red bandanna handkerchief, a flashing handful of fiery drops which blazed in the sunlight. Bad Jake had evidently been a good judge of stones, for he had managed to make a very creditable collection—seventy-eight of them in all. The doctor counted them into the buckskin bag which he carried about his neck.
Five days of nervous haste, five nights of real fear, during which time the Great Gilmore came to know that a lively imagination could be a curse to its owner, and then—Silver Tip in the distance, and safety at last. There would be no passenger-train until the morning, but the traveler remembered, with gratitude too deep for words, that there was at least one good bed in the Occidental Hotel—and money would buy it. The thought of that bed had been much with him in the last ninety-six hours.
The Great Gilmore had no elaborate plans for the future. First of all he wanted sleep and rest from his twanging nerves, and after that, Denver, a hot bath, clean linen, and leisure to plan another artistic but necessarily disappointing interview with a foolish old man at Sand Creek.
And then? Well, the plan-makers were in the brown sack!