"No, that's so. Let's hide behind this rock and see what they do."
The boys slipped behind a big boulder and a moment later the boat was beached.
"Well, here we are," came in Eph's voice, "and if the stuff is worth all you say it is, we ought to get enough out in a couple of nights to make us rich."
"Gee! I can hardly wait till it's time to start digging," said Sam Higgins. "Here we are, on Tom Tiddler's ground, picking up gold and silver."
"Wait till we get it before you start hollering," said Masterson gruffly.
"What time will we start over?" asked Sam.
"About midnight. It will be plenty of time."
"But how are we going to locate it?" objected Eph.
"We can see where they've been digging, can't we?" said Bill Masterson, "or if they haven't started yet, we can hang around and watch till they do."
The three worthies sat under a rock not far from where the boys were and talked. It appeared that Bill Masterson had read up on mining and claim law and knew that the boys could not order them off the island. They had a right to take all of the mineral-bearing earth that they could.
Suddenly, however, their talk stopped.
"What are you doing, Eph?" demanded Sam indignantly.
"Nothing. What do you mean?" asked Eph in an astonished voice.
"You threw a rock at me."
"I didn't."
"You did. Ouch! There's another."
"One hit me, too," cried Eph, springing up, and at the same moment a yell came from Masterson.
Jack and Tom, as much surprised as the three marauders, heard the rocks pelting around them. Suddenly they looked up. Standing on a high rock above the place where Masterson and his cronies were talking, was a strange-looking figure in tattered clothes outlined in the moonlight.
He was busily hurling rocks down at the intruders. Suddenly a demoniacal laugh split the air and the creature vanished, running swiftly, crouched, with long arms hanging.
"It's the wild man!" gasped Tom, while the three worthies on the beach uttered a startled cry.
"It's ghosts, that's what it is," declared Sam Higgins shuddering.
"Nonsense. It's those kids. That's who it is," said Bill, but his voice was rather shaky.
"I never heard anything human laugh like that," declared Eph. "Ugh! it makes my blood run cold."
"Maybe we'd better go back," said Sam. "If we've got a right here I'd just as soon land in the daylight."
"You're a fine pair of babies," growled Bill. "I'm sorry I brought you along. Ghosts indeed--Wow! what was that?"
Another long ringing peal of laughter sounded through the night. It reverberated against the steep walls of the canyon and was flung mockingly from crag to crag. The boys felt their blood chill as they heard it. There was something diabolical in the merriment of the wild man who, they knew, was making the hideous sounds.
"I'm going back to the other island," declared Sam.
"If you move I'll knock your head off," said Masterson. "It's just a trick of those kids to scare us, that's all it is."
CHAPTER XXXV.
TRIUMPH.
It was midnight. The moon rode high in a cloudless sky, and the camp of the Boy Inventors, to all appearances, was wrapped in slumber. Through the woods came three creeping, cautious figures. Each carried a spade and a sack. They paused by the camp and looked about them.
Then, by the bright moonlight, they saw the bare plateau below. The black barren where the adventurers had been working that afternoon. Masterson was the first to see traces of digging. He seized Eph's arm and pointed.
"That's the place," he said in a hoarse whisper. "See, they've been at work there already."
"Tom Tiddler's ground," whispered Eph.
"I guess we'll get some of it, too," chuckled Sam, who had gotten over his fright in a sudden greed at the thought of riches.
Silently, for they had sacks tied round their feet, the three interlopers crept down the rocky slope toward the black barren. The dark ground, thickly sown with mineral wealth, glittered in the moonlight as if a frost had fallen on it and made it gleam iridescently with millions of sparkling points of light.
As the trio stole down the slope, dark figures from the Boy Inventors' camp followed them. Led by Zeb, they found hiding places and watched operations as Masterson and his cronies began to dig. They wielded their shovels frantically.
"And we can't stop them," groaned Dick.
"Wait a minute," said the professor.
They continued to watch, and before many minutes had passed they saw Sam Higgins lay down his shovel with a grunt.
"Go on and dig," ordered Masterson.
"Yes, hurry up, we haven't got all night," urged Eph.
Sam made a few more feeble movements and then quit.
'"I can't do any more," he said languidly.
"Ouch! my hands are burning," cried Eph suddenly, "and I feel as if all my bones had turned to water. What's the matter with the place?"
After a few minutes more both Eph and Sam gave up, but Masterson stuck doggedly to his task, although his hands were burning terribly, and the radio-active stuff was eating through the sacking on his feet. At last he, too, had to give in. They were too weak to carry the sacks they had partially filled across the island, owing to the effects of the black barren, and staggeringly they hid them to call for them at a later time.
"I thought so," said the professor, as the hidden watchers saw Masterson and the other two wearily clamber up the slope. "They'll have bad sores to-morrow and may be crippled for some time."
"But they'll recover?" said Jack, whose conscience began to smite him.
"Oh, yes, but they will have quite a lesson first," rejoined the professor.
"Let's see what they do next," suggested Jack, and he and Tom carefully made their way to where the trio had left the boat. Masterson ordered Sam to get on board; but just as the timorous youth was about to obey another hideous laugh from near at hand startled him so that he almost jumped out of his skin.
He leaped forward, but in his alarm missed the boat and gave it a shove that sent it into the stream. Sam fell flat on his face, while Masterson, with an exclamation of dismay, leaped for the boat. But the swift current had it in its grasp and bore it rapidly away. Masterson sprang on Sam and began beating him violently as the cause of all the trouble. It was serious enough for them. The loss of the boat had marooned them on the island.
The boat drifted past a rocky point further down the island shore. Had they been there, they would have been able to seize it. They watched it with alarmed eyes as it sailed down the current. All at once a dark figure dashed from the trees and made a spring from a high rock, hoping, seemingly, to land in the boat. Instead, there was the sound of a heavy fall and then a piteous groan.
Whoever it was had jumped for the boat, had missed it and fallen on the rocks. Not caring whether Masterson and his cronies saw them or not, the boys raced along the beach. From the groans of the injured person they knew that he was badly, possibly mortally, hurt.
In a few minutes they reached his side.
"It's the wild man!" cried Jack, as they gazed at a hairy, wild-looking man who lay stretched out, breathing heavily, on the rocks where he had fallen. His only clothing was a pair of tattered canvas trousers and a ragged shirt.
"Poor old Foxy. He's done for at last, is Foxy, for his sins," groaned the man in an insane voice. "He suffered terrible for his crimes, has Foxy, but it's all over now."
"Foxy!" exclaimed Jack. "That's the man that came down the river with Blue Nose Sanchez. The man who stayed in the boat."
"He must have landed here and then gone crazy from privation," said Jack. "I can't find that any bones are broken," he said after a brief examination. "Suppose we carry him back to camp?"
"I wonder where that Masterson outfit has got to?" said Tom, as they picked up the wasted form of Foxy, who was raving and moaning by turns.
"I don't know. They are in a fine predicament now. They've got no food and no boat They're marooned on this island."
"I suppose we'll have to help them out," said Tom.
"I guess so, though they don't deserve it."
"I lost that boat," moaned Foxy. "I could have got away in it. Poor old Foxy. It's tough on Foxy," and he began to weep.
The professor found that the man had not suffered any broken bones but the fall had bruised and sprained him and he was helpless. From scattered bits of his ravings they learned what he had endured on the island and how, when the black sand began to burn him, he had had to give up working on it. Then his boat had drifted away and since then he had lived the life of a wild man, setting snares for rabbits and partridges, and eating them raw, tearing them with his clawlike fingers.
Early the next day the expected happened. Chastened, and with burned and swollen hands and feet, Masterson and his cronies came into the boys' camp at breakfast time. They looked crestfallen and sheepish, but the boys did not want to make them feel any worse than they did, so they spared them questions at first.
But when Masterson begged them to get them out of their predicament and take them back to Yuma, Jack felt that it was time to put them through a cross examination.
"You followed us here to try to cut out some ground from under our feet, Masterson," he said, "and you know you told me in Nestorville you wanted to get even with me."
"Don't rub it in, Chadwick," said the humbled Masterson. "I'll do anything you say if you'll only get us out of this terrible place. I can hardly walk, and my hands feel as if they'd been burned in a fire."
"How did you know our destination?" asked Tom. Masterson made a full confession and at the end begged forgiveness.
"This ought to be a good lesson to you to mind your own affairs," said Jack as he concluded.
"I know a man who made a big fortune just minding his business," said Dick. "For my part," he went on, "I'll forgive you, but I want you to sign a paper promising not to publish anything about this expedition."
"I will--oh, I will," said Masterson. And then he wrote as Dick dictated. The boys witnessed and signed the paper.
"And now you'd better eat breakfast," said Jack.
Three days later, the Wondership made two trips to Yuma. On the first she took the original party with the addition of the insane Foxy, who was placed in an asylum. He never recovered his reason but died in the institution. Also, there was carried a part of the leaden carboys which they had filled.
Masterson and his cronies had been left behind on the island to pack up the camping equipment and thus make themselves useful. Zeb went to the U.S. Assay Office and formally filed their claim to the island and its riches. In the meantime, the professor took charge of Foxy and turned him over to the authorities.
As for the boys, they sailed back to Rattlesnake Island, after sending a telegram to Mr. Chadwick. It was brief.
"We win," was all it said.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE HOMECOMING.
The next day Masterson and his companions, very much subdued, boarded the Wondership as passengers. All of them were still suffering painfully from the effects of the burns, their only reward from their ill-advised raid on the black barren.
"Boys," asked Masterson, "can't you take our camping equipment along? It's a shame to have it rot here."
"All right," said Jack. "I think we may be able to sell it for you. Come on, we'll get to work now!"
"You're not such a bad chap," said Eph when he heard Jack agree to Masterson's suggestion.
"He's the finest chap on earth!" exclaimed Tom.
"That he is," added Dick Donovan.
"He is a model young man," declared Professor Jenks, overhearing Tom's last remark.
Jack flushed with pleasure and embarrassment. It was very gratifying to know that his friends thought highly of him, but at the same time he wished they would not give him that uneasy feeling with their sincere compliments. So he hurried away, asking the others to follow him toward getting together Masterson's outfit.
While the dumpy little geologist went once more to search for strange specimens, the boys readily set to work and in a very short time the camping equipment was placed on board the Wondership.
When the boys arrived at Yuma, Masterson found no difficulty in selling the camping outfit to old man McGee, who decided to make one more try to find the Three Buttes.
"Don't you think you're too old, and that the gold, after all, may not be there?" Tom asked the eccentric miner.
"Nonsense!" exclaimed McGee indignantly. "As I tole you afore, it stands ter reason thar's gold out thar, and 'at it war'ent up to Peg-leg Smith nor'n to Guv'nor Downey, nor'n to McGuire, nor'n to Dr. De Courcy, nor'n to any of 'em to find the Buttes, but as I says afore, I says ag'in--'at ther good Lord never made nuthin' thet wasn't of some use. Very well, then, the desert is good fer nuthin' else but mineral wealth, and Providence made it so plagued hard ter git at so 'at all of us couldn't git rich at once. I've been arter the Buttes all me life, and this wack I'm goin' to land it rich!"
The fanatical old prospector, chuckling gleefully and sucking his pipe, ambled away while Tom looked after him, shaking his head sympathetically.