An hour later, the watchers by the hut rubbed their eyes and stared about them. A wild, weird cry rang through the canyon, and in the moonlight Kie Wicks and his bad men saw, far above them on the cliff, the figure of an Indian girl.
"She wasn't walking, she was just floating in the air, it seemed, and as she moved, she moaned and shrieked. It was terrible! There was no doubt about it. It was the ghost," Kie Wicks told his wife when he was safely at home.
"What happened?" Maude urged him to continue the story.
"You should have seen those Indians go! 'The Old Chief's daughter walks! It's the ghost girl!' they cried hoarsely. And that's the last I saw of them."
"And what did you do?" Maude pressed him further.
"I--well, I ran, too. I got out of there in record time, let me tell you. I don't mind shooting it out with a human being, but I don't take no chances with a ghost. I vamoosed."
"He's there yet. One thing certain, I'll never go into that canyon late at night again."
Bet's ruse had worked better than she had hoped. In less than two minutes after she stepped out on the cliff, the place was deserted, the hut left unguarded and Judge Breckenridge and his men rushed in, broke open the door and found the old man asleep on a sack of straw.
The Judge touched him and the professor tried to shake him off.
"What are you going to do with me now?" he asked peevishly, "I want to go to sleep. Can't you let me be?"
"Ssh! Don't talk! We've come to take you home. This is Judge Breckenridge."
The professor recognized his voice and breathed a sigh of relief. He rose unsteadily and did not speak again until they were a long way up the trail.
Then he suddenly got weak and felt as if he were going to faint.
"Don't worry, I get this way sometimes. I have some medicine over at the tent."
As it was only a short distance to the claim, the Judge decided to get him there as quickly as possible.
The professor was like a child in his eagerness to stay at the camp, and finally toward morning the Judge left him there in charge of the boys and Seedy Saunders.
And when Kie Wicks, deciding that he would have a look at the tunnel which he had left in charge of the two ruffians, climbed the trail to the summit the next morning about dawn, the first person he saw was the old professor, smoking his pipe and gazing far off over the hills with a smile of happiness on his face.