"But what do you s'pose this all means?" asked Nort again, as he slipped from his saddle, and, by pulling the reins forward, over his pony's head, thus gave that animal the universal sign of the plains that it was not to wander.
"I don't know," Bud was frank to say, as he shook his head. "They sure have been tearing up the ground," he added, as he noticed on the side hill, where there was an outcropping of red sandstone, that many excavations had been made.
"If it isn't gold maybe it's silver," suggested Dick, willing to accept a theory of less valuable metal. "Or diamonds!" and his eyes gleamed as he overmatched his brother's guess.
"Nothing doin!" laughed Bud. "Of course there are silver mines not far from here, down Mexico way, and diamonds have been found in the United States, but not around this locality."
"Well, what's your theory?" asked Nort of the more experienced boy rancher. "Here we've been gassing along, saying what we thought, and we don't know any of the ins and outs of the matter. You're right on the ground, and you've lived here all your life, so you ought to have some idea of what it all means."
"But I don't!" exclaimed Bud. "Wish I did," he added, as he joined his cousins on foot, walking about the debris of the camp, while the ponies sniffed, here and there, sometimes finding a choice morsel which they daintily lipped before eating.
"You'd say they were hunting for something, wouldn't you?" asked Nort.
"What makes you think so?" asked the young rancher quickly.
"Well, there isn't any hole, or any excavation, where they could have taken out a treasure chest, or bags of hidden gold; not to say mined gold," went on Dick. "In all the stories of recovered treasure I ever read, they always left a hole where they took out the stuff. There isn't any hole like that here, though there's enough to show that plenty of digging went on."
"I don't believe they've been after any gold, or anything like that," declared Bud. "That professor man said so, but----"
"But was he telling the truth?" asked Nort. "That's what we got to figure on."
"I s'pose," agreed Bud. "And from what I know of the country and sizing up this outfit, I'd say he was--they aren't after gold."
"What then?" asked Dick. "A man--two men like Professor Blair and Professor Wright don't hire an outfit such as they had, and prospect for nothing!"