Two Boy Gold Miners; Or, Lost in the Mountains Part 28

"Ted! Ted Jordan! You're just in time! I'm hurt and these scoundrels are trying to rob us!"

"Whoop!" yelled Ted. "If it ain't my old partner, Gabe Harrison! Who's trying to rob you? Those chaps? Go for 'em, boys! Show 'em how the lads from Dizzy Gulch can handle a crowd of gamblers and thieves!"

But Morton and his cronies did not wait for this. Wheeling their horses, they rode back the way they had come, while to hasten their speed the members of Ted Jordan's party fired several shots over the heads of the scoundrels.

"Well! well!" exclaimed Ted, when quietness had been restored. "How in the world did you get here, Gabe?"

"Prospecting with these two lads," indicating Jed and Will. "But what takes you away from Dizzy Gulch?"

"Dizzy Gulch has petered out. It's no good. There was only outcropping gold, and that's all gone. So I made up a party, left the place, and we're prospecting. Have you had any luck?"

"Not much."

"But we have!" exclaimed Jed, as he pulled some of the nuggets from their hiding place, and showed them to the astonished miners.

"What! Where did you get those?" asked Gabe.

Jed and Will quickly explained, telling where their wonderful find was located. They also gave an account of the pursuit, and how they had, by great luck, managed to get on the trail that led back to camp. Gabe explained what had happened to him, and said that his leg was getting better every hour.

"I'm all right to travel now, if you go slow," he said.

"Travel? Travel where?" asked Ted Jordan.

"To where the boys made the lucky strike, of course. We'll all go there and stake out claims. If Dizzy Gulch is no good we've found something better."

They started off, not making especially fast progress on account of Gabe. They calculated to take two days in getting to the place, and they had no fear now that Con Morton's gang would interfere with them.

It was toward the evening of the first day, when as they were looking for a good place to camp, that Gabe Harrison remarked, as he looked up toward the sky:

"I think we're in for a bad storm."

"What makes you think so?" asked Ted Jordan.

"The way my leg hurts. It always hurts when there's a storm coming."

"It doesn't look so," remarked one of the men. "The sky's as pretty as a picture."

"You wait," said old Gabe, slowly shaking his head.

In spite of the fact that no one else took much stock in Gabe's prophecy, it was noticed that the camp was made more snug than usual, and the men looked well to the fastenings of their horses.

After supper, when they were all seated about the campfire, the men smoking and telling stories, to which the two boy gold miners listened eagerly, one of the men remarked:

"I believe it is going to blow up a little rain."

The evening sky was beginning to be overcast with clouds, and there was a moaning and sighing to the wind, as if it bemoaned the fact that the pleasant scene was so soon to be spoiled by a storm.

"Better look to our tent-ropes, boys," suggested Gabe, for he and the two lads from the farm bunked together in a small tent that had been brought along. "I don't want it blown away in the night, and have us all get soaking wet."

The darkness increased more rapidly, now that the sky was becoming thickly covered with clouds, and the wind grew stronger.

"Say, do you notice anything queer?" asked Jed of Will, as they stood together on a little jutting point of rock and looked over the valley spread out below them, a valley now shrouded in gloom.

"Something queer? How do you mean?"

"I mean like when your foot goes to sleep, and you try to walk on it."

"As if pins and needles were all over you?" asked Will.

"Yes, that's it."

"I did notice something like that," admitted his brother, "but I didn't think it was anything. It's growing worse, though."

"You're right, it is. Let's ask the men and old Gabe if they feel it.

Why, it's just like an electric battery now."

The boys looked at each other curiously and in some alarm. They were both now conscious of a very peculiar sensation. Their flesh all over was tingling as if tiny needles were being brushed against them.

"Do you notice anything queer, Gabe?" asked Will.

"Queer!" exclaimed the miner. "I should say I did. It feels like ginger ale tastes."

"That's it," remarked one of the men. "I was wondering what was the matter with me."

The miners and the boys were ill at ease. There seemed to be something strange in the air about them--some unseen influence at work. They looked all around. The storm was evidently coming closer. The wind was now blowing quite a gale, and there were occasional mutterings of thunder.

"The horses feel it, too," observed Ted. "I don't like it here. I wish we'd kept on, or else stopped down below."

Hardly had he spoken than there came a vivid flash of lightning, followed an instant later by a startling clap of thunder. But it was not the lightning which caused every one in the camp to jump sharply. Nor was it the thunder.

"Did you feel that?" cried Jed.

"I should say I did," answered Will. "A regular electric shock, that's what it was. Felt as if I had hold of the business-end of a battery."

There came another flash of lightning, a far-off one, for the forked tongues of it shot down behind a distant, towering peak, but the effect on the little party of gold-seekers was even more p.r.o.nounced than before. Gabe fairly leaped into the air, in spite of his injured leg.

"Tarantulas and centipedes!" he cried. "Something's the matter!"

"We're on top of a natural electric battery!" shouted Ted Jordan.

"No, we're not, but it's almost as bad," spoke one of the men. "I know what it is."

"What then?" cried several.

"We're on a part of the mountain that's filled with iron ore. The electricity is attracted to it, and we're getting shocks from it. I was in a place like this once before, out in Australia, and a lot of natives were killed during a storm. The iron ore acts just like a live wire."

"Then we'd better get off," said Will. "I don't want to be electrified any more."

"Move's the word, and we can't be any too quick," spoke Gabe.