“I shall be pleased to hear what you have to say.” Wilkins sprang to his feet, he was so excited, and began to walk about the room. “Cody, you’ve always been an honorable man, but you know about these things! I’m a gambler; I seem to be a slave to cards. Barlow is another, but he’s shrewder than I am, and I think he is tricky. We played, and I got in debt to him. I owe him five thousand dollars. I can never pay it, of course, and he knows I can’t; for I haven’t five thousand cents, and he knows that, too. “Well, just because I owed him so much he began to get me to do little favors for him. At first they were all square. Later they have begun to be crooked, and I was too weak to refuse to do them, because of that debt. “The last has to do with you--with you, Buffalo Bill!” “With me?” “Yes. You know that nugget you gave to Colonel Montrose--the nugget with the strange marks on it?” “Ah, yes, I recall that nugget. I gave it to him not long since. And a strange nugget it is. I’ll tell you about it some time.” “Well, that nugget comes into my story--holds first place there. For it was stolen from Colonel Montrose by Lieutenant Barlow, and----” The scout came to his feet. “Be sure you know just what you are talking about!” he warned. “What you charge Barlow with is a crime that will----” “I know it. It will ruin him, and I want it to ruin him. That’s why I’m telling you about it; that it may ruin him. I hope it will tear the stripes from his uniform and send him to jail. And it will!” He walked nervously about the room. “Better sit down and tell me this quietly,” said the scout. “I’d advise you not to shout it out of the windows. And walls have ears, you know.” “It doesn’t matter who hears me now,” said Wilkins excitedly. “I wish these walls had a thousand ears, and a thousand tongues to tell the story!” He strode up and down the room in a very fury of excited anger. “It ruins me, of course, but it will ruin him, and that’s what I want. He is so high now, in the opinion of the colonel, but this will drag him down.” “Quiet yourself and tell me the story,” said Buffalo Bill. “As I said, he stole that nugget from the colonel, and by listening under the colonel’s window he heard its story, and knows that there are many more like it.” “Ah! He knows that?” “And he knows where they are; in the Moonlight Mountains, far to the southwest, on the borders of New Mexico.” “I see that he did hear,” said the scout; “and apparently you heard, also.” “Those gold pieces are the treasure of an old Indian medicine man, and with them he pretends to work his charms; they are sacred to that medicine man, and to all his tribe. That tribe is a branch of the Cheyennes now held on the reservation near here; and if trouble comes these Cheyennes here can be counted on to help those in the mountains.” “Very true,” Buffalo Bill admitted softly. “I’m telling you this,” said Wilkins, “to show you that I know what I am talking about.”