"A New York syndicate, I've always understood."

"Not in a thousand years!" retorted the lawyer, laughing again. "It is
owned, pretty nearly in fee simple, by two old friends of yours--Abel
Geddis and Abner Withers. More than that, it is a reorganized and
renamed corporation founded upon a certain gold-brick proposition, called
'The Great Oro Mining and Reduction Company,' promoted and floated down
in your section of the State something like five years ago by two men
named Hempstead and Lesherton. Does that stir up any old memories for
you?"

It did, indeed. "The Great Oro" was the mine for the capitalization of
which Abel Geddis had used the money belonging to his depositors; the
basis of the theft which had cost me three good years of my life.

"But I had understood that the 'Oro' was a fake, pure and simple!" I
protested.

"It was. A claim had been located and a shaft sunk to ninety feet, but
there was no mineral. That shaft is the present main shaft of the
Lawrenceburg. After Geddis and Withers found they had been
'gold-bricked' they went to Colorado and looked the ground over for
themselves. The result of that visit was a determination on their part
to send a little good money after the bad, so they put a force in the
mine and began to drift from the shaft-bottom, and shortly after that the
workings began to pay."

"Which direction did that drift take?" I asked.

Benedict did not answer the question directly. "Things began to fit
themselves together pretty rapidly after I got the facts in the history
of 'The Great Oro'," he went on. "By that time the news of your arrest
and return to the penitentiary had reached Glendale and the gossip bees
were buzzing. Whitredge was rattling around like a pea in a dried
bladder, holding midnight conferences in the bank with the two hoary old
villains who had sworn your liberty away, starting a petition for your
pardon, and I don't know what all. I didn't pay much attention to him
because I was at that time more deeply interested in a number of other
things."

"Go on," I begged breathlessly.

"First, I investigated carefully the records of your trial and it didn't
take very long to discover that Whitredge had doubled-crossed you. He
bribed the two deputies sent to transfer you from the police station in
Glendale to the county seat. They were to bully and browbeat you into
making an attempt to escape--thus affording proof presumptive of your
guilt--and th