“She isn’t dead,” he told Juniper Joe. The latter got heavily to his feet, and came over, kneeling beside the scout, who was working over the woman. “If you can walk,” said the scout, “you had better hustle out for help and a doctor. How did this happen?” “Bub--Benson!” Juniper Joe stuttered. “He did it?” “Sh--shore thing. How he got into the cabin, I dunno; but the first thing I knowed I heard my wife screech out. It was before light; but I was back in the mine. It brought me running. When I butted through the door thar, not knowin’ what to expect, Benson tripped me, and give me a side-winder behind the ear that done me up fer a while. When I got my thinker to goin’ again, I was hawg-tied like you found me.” “Benson!” “That gold you saw me have--he got it, every bit of it.” “You saw him get it?” “I was comin’ back to myself, and seen him take it; he done it up in a bag that was over thar; then he let himself out by the door, which he locked behind him.” “If I hadn’t been gagged,” he added, “I might have hollered then, when he opened the door; but I reckon even then ’twouldn’t done no good, as nobody lives clost by.” “Better get help for your wife,” Buffalo Bill advised. Juniper Joe seemed either too anxious to leave her, or he did not want to get a doctor; instead of following the scout’s advice, he turned his attention to assisting in restoring her to consciousness. Their combined efforts were soon rewarded. When she came back to consciousness the woman lay on the bed, in the rear room, where the scout had placed her; she looked round wildly. “You are all right, now,” Buffalo Bill told her. “B-b-but Benson!” she cried, as if frightened. “He is not here now.” “He struck me and knocked me down,” she stated. She put out her hands, clinging to Juniper Joe. “Thar--thar!” he said. “That’s all right; he ain’t hyer now.” She stared round. “He cut out,” he said; “but he tuck the nuggets I got out o’ that pocket in the mine yisterday.” “He didn’t shoot you?” Buffalo Bill asked her, as he again looked at the wound and the caked blood round it. “It resembles a pistol wound.” “He hit me with a pistol, I think,” she averred. “I reckon it was the pistol hammer done it.” “Very likely.” As Juniper Joe still showed an unwillingness to get help, Buffalo Bill soon left the cabin, and sent a physician, whose office he passed on his hurried way back to the town. “Of course, the hammer of a pistol could have made that wound,” he thought; “but to me it looked mightily like a bullet wound, made some hours before, though it had bled rather recently.” He could not get away from the thoughts suggested by Jackson Dane’s declaration that Juniper Joe and his wife were the two who had played road agents and corraled the treasure guarded by the baron and the prospectors. CHAPTER VI. THE BARON’S ADVENTURES.