"Immediately; from Cripple Creek, and as soon as Barrett had told me your story. We had our reply at once, and I took the first train for Glendale, your old home town. What I have been able to dig up in that little dead-alive burg is a great plenty, Bertrand. Your arrest has turned out to be just about the most unfortunate thing that could possibly have happened for certain persons who were most anxious to bring it to pass--namely, two old rascals who made use of the traveling-man Barton's story and started the pursuit in the right direction." "Call me Weyburn," I broke in. "That is my name--James Bertrand Weyburn--and I'm going to wear it, all of it, from this time on." "I know," laughed the big attorney, drawing up the stool and seating himself beside the cot much as Whitredge had done at an earlier hour of the same day. "They call you 'Bert' and 'Herbert' down yonder in your home village, and they don't seem to know that your middle name is Bertrand." "You say you have been digging: what did you find out?" I questioned eagerly. "Some things that I was looking for and some that I wasn't. I had the advantage of being a total stranger to everybody, and all I had to do was to stroll around and ask questions. Let me ask you one, right now; do you know who the owners of the Lawrenceburg are?" "A New York syndicate, I've always understood." "Not in a thousand years!" retorted the lawyer, laughing again. "It is owned, pretty nearly in fee simple, by two old friends of yours--Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. More than that, it is a reorganized and renamed corporation founded upon a certain gold-brick proposition, called 'The Great Oro Mining and Reduction Company,' promoted and floated down in your section of the State something like five years ago by two men named Hempstead and Lesherton. Does that stir up any old memories for you?" It did, indeed. "The Great Oro" was the mine for the capitalization of which Abel Geddis had used the money belonging to his depositors; the basis of the theft which had cost me three good years of my life. "But I had understood that the 'Oro' was a fake, pure and simple!" I protested. "It was. A claim had been located and a shaft sunk to ninety feet, but there was no mineral. That shaft is the present main shaft of the Lawrenceburg. After Geddis and Withers found they had been 'gold-bricked' they went to Colorado and looked the ground over for themselves. The result of that visit was a determination on their part to send a little good money after the bad, so they put a force in the mine and began to drift from the shaft-bottom, and shortly after that the workings began to pay." "Which direction did that drift take?" I asked.