“Oh, you yourself are likely to see him one of these dark nights, Buck,” laughed Jack Rover, as he winked at the other boys. “A storekeeper that’ll work night and day stacking up money year in and year out is liable to have a call sooner or later from the bandit and his friends.” “Oh, hell!” was the laconic response of Buck Ashley. “Guess I sure can take care of myself.” “But Don Manuel may not be alive,” suggested the young lieutenant. “He’s alive right enough, make no mistake,” said Tom Baker, “although I’ll allow I don’t know a single soul who has actually seen him personally for more’n twenty years. He is a kind o’ shadowy cuss. Everybody knows him by his old-time deeds of high-way robbin’ and all-round murderin’ for golden loot. I heard of a feller last year who claims to have seen the White Wolf when he was makin’ that last big stage delivery over by Tulare Lake. He was masked, and had all the passengers out on the roadside with their hands thrown up over their heads while he was takin’ their valuables away from them.” “It’s a dead cinch,” Buck Ashley observed, “that whenever there was a hold-up or a robbery, or a murder in cold blood for money, why everybody knew that the White Wolf was again in the hills and playin’ his cut-throat game for pelf and plunder, or mebbe just for revenge against the gringos, whom he hated like hell. Sometimes he was not heard of in these parts for two or three years, and then he showed up more blood-thirsty than ever. His hand was agin every man, and it looked like as every man’s hand was agin him.” “I’ve been told,” said Dick Willoughby, “that when the White Wolf was a boy he saved the life of the old highwayman, Joaquin Murietta.” “Yes, them are facts,” replied Tom Baker. “Leastways I’ve heard say so. They claim that he saved Murietta’s life from a posse of deputies one night, and altho’ the White Wolf was only a boy at that time, yet a heap of people think he’s the only livin’ soul who knows the whereabouts and location of the secret cavern where Joaquin Murietta planted his loot, amountin’, they say, to millions of dollars in gold and jewels and valuables of all kinds. The retreat always proved a safe one for the murderin’ gang, and now they’re gone no one even to this day can find the place. It’s somewhere on San Antonio Rancho, but where? The White Wolf kept his secret well.” “If old Pierre Luzon ever gets out of San Quentin,” remarked the storekeeper, “I guess he could tell, but he’s up for life. He was nabbed in that same Tulare Lake affair ‘bout which Tom had been talkin’.” “Yes,” said the sheriff, “two others were shot dead before they got back to the mountains. The White Wolf and Pierre were ridin’ alone when the Frenchie’s horse stumbled. They picked him up insensible, a broken leg and concussion of the brain, and he was the only one of the gang who ever went to jail.”