to discover the secret entrance from the garden, and Starbuck was consequently obliged to attempt it from the hotel—­for which purpose he had introduced himself as a boarder—­by opening the disused well secretly at night.  These facts were obtained from papers found in the otherwise valueless trunks, weighted with stones for ballast, which Starbuck had brought to the hotel to take away his stolen treasure in, but which he was obliged to leave in his hurried flight.  The attempt would have doubtless succeeded but for Polly’s courageous and timely interference!

And now that they had told her all, they only wanted to know what had first excited her suspicions, and driven her to seek the well as the object of Starbuck’s machinations?  They had noticed her manner when she entered the house that night, and Starbuck’s evident annoyance.  Had she taxed him with her suspicions, and so discovered a clue?

It was a terrible temptation to Polly to pose as a more perfect heroine, and one may not blame her if she did not rise entirely superior to it.  Her previous belief, that the head of the accomplice at the opening of the garden was that of a ghost, she now felt was certainly in the way, as was also her conduct to Starbuck, whom she believed to be equally frightened, and whom she never once suspected!  So she said, with a certain lofty simplicity, that there were some things which she really did not care to talk about, and Larry and her father left her that night with the firm conviction that the rascal Starbuck had tried to tempt her to fly with him and his riches, and had been crushingly foiled.  Polly never denied this, and once, in later days, when admiringly taxed with it by Larry, she admitted with dove-like simplicity that she may have been too foolishly polite to her father’s guest for the sake of her father’s hotel.

However, all this was of small account to the thrilling news of a new discovery and working of the “old gold ledge” at Buena Vista!  As the three kept their secret from the world, the discovery was accepted in the neighborhood as the result of careful examination and prospecting on the part of Colonel Swinger and his partner Larry Hawkins.  And when the latter gentleman afterwards boldly proposed to Polly Swinger, she mischievously declared that she accepted him only that the secret might not go “out of the family.”

LIBERTY JONES’S DISCOVERY

It was at best merely a rocky trail winding along a shelf of the eastern slope of the Santa Cruz range, yet the only road between the sea and the inland valley.  The hoof-prints of a whole century of zigzagging mules were impressed on the soil, regularly soaked by winter rains and dried by summer suns during that period; the occasional ruts of heavy, rude, wooden wheels—­long obsolete—­were still preserved and visible.  Weather-worn boulders and ledges, lying in the unclouded glare of an August sky, radiated a quivering heat that was intolerable, even while above them the masts of gigantic pines rocked their tops in the cold southwestern trades from the unseen ocean beyond.  A red, burning dust lay everywhere, as if the heat were slowly and visibly precipitating itself.