Page:Dave Porter in the Gold Fields.djvu/14

2 Roger?" asked a third youth of the group seated on the lawn of Senator Morr's country estate. "Did it just happen?"

"No, Phil, this happened last fall, about nine months ago. The reason I didn't mention it to you and Dave was because my folks wanted it kept quiet. From what my uncle said in his will, the mine must be very valuable, and my folks didn't want any outsiders to re-discover the mine and set up a claim to it. So they started a search on the quiet—hiring some old miners and prospectors they could trust. But the search has been in vain."

"Couldn't they discover the mine at all?" queried Dave Porter.

"No, the landslide was too heavy and too far-reaching. The old miners told my father it was the biggest landslide known in Montana. One prospector said he thought the mine must now be a hundred feet or more underground."

"Had your uncle worked it at all?" questioned Phil Lawrence.

"Not much, but enough to learn that it was a valuable claim. It was in a district that had been visited by landslides before, and so he called it the Landslide Mine."

"Well, your uncle could be thankful for one thing—that he wasn't in the mine when that big slide took place. But you said he died anyway."