nobody had been hurt. Untie him, and he would go back at once with the dust.
We were more convinced than ever that there had been murder, and one of the party volunteered to ride over to the main camp, some mile and a half distant, and find out what had occurred, while the other three kept guard over Pike. He started off and was gone about two hours. Just after daybreak he returned with a crowd of companions, all deeply excited. They had gone to the Jew's store, found it closed but not locked up, and on entering with lights, had beheld a spectacle frightful beyond the power of words to describe. The store was kept by a Jew of some fifty-five or sixty years of age, and his son, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, both of whom usually slept in the place. The old man lay on the floor of the main store-room, horribly chopped and mutilated with a hatchet, his skull fractured, jaw broken, one ear chopped off, and a great number of cuts on his head, face and breast, but still breathing. The floor was covered with blood, like that of a slaughter-house, and the marks of a desperate struggle for life were everywhere visible. In the back room they found the boy literally hacked to pieces and cold in death. The drawers had been forced open and rifled, and a trunk, kept under the counter and used for storing gold dust, coin and valuables, for want of a safe, stood smashed open and empty on the floor near the body of the old man, who had evidently fallen in attempting to defend it from the robbers, who had entered by the front window and rear door simultaneously. The news spread like
