ano!" He was as eager and excited as a boy. Indeed Bud
and his cousins were not a little excited as they looked at the two
scientists who came out carrying specimens of ore which they had
knocked off the walls of the cave with their peculiar hammers.

"Didn't take you long," commented Bud.

"No, this was an easy problem," answered Professor Dodson. "We don't
even need an assay to determine our findings."

"By golly! What do you know about that?" cried Billee. "About how
many dollars will she run to the ton?" he asked. "I only want to know
_about_," he stipulated. "I won't pin you down by five or ten dollars,
'cause I think that wouldn't be fair. But roughly about how much do
you think our mine will assay to the ton?"

"How much what?" asked Professor Dodson with a peculiar smile. "How
much what to the ton?"

"How much gold, of course!" exclaimed Billee. "What else? Gold's what
we want; ain't it?" and he chuckled as he turned to his friends.

"Sure--gold!" was the murmur.

"Then I'm sorry to have to tell you that there is not one ounce of gold
in any number of tons of ore and rock in that cave!" was the unexpected
and startling answer. "There isn't any gold at all."

"No gold!" cried Bud.

"No gold!" echoed his cousins.

"No--no--gold!" faltered Billee Dobb, his jaw falling. He saw his
self-playing piano fading back into the dim vista of his dreams.

"No gold," repeated Professor Dodson. "What we have here," and he
indicated the ore specimens held by himself and Professor Snath, "is a
selected lot of samples of iron sulphid. It is a yellow ore that looks
very much like gold, but which has none of the properties of real gold.
In fact it is so often mistaken for the valuable metal that it has come
to be called 'Fools' Gold.' I am sorry, but such is the case. I shall
so report to Mr. Merkel, who engaged me to come out here after hearing
his son's account."

"Fools' gold!" murmured Bud. "Well, it fooled us all right."

"Yes, and it fooled those other fellows," said Nort. "The men with the
gas cylinders," he added.

As the two professors looked a little puzzled, Dick explained:

"There were some men hiding in this cave who must have thought, the
same as we did, that it contained gold. They drove out Mr. Tosh, who
used the cavern to brew his medicine. Then they drove us out. They
used tanks of some poison gas, or at least gas that made a man
unconscious. We had to put on gas masks, the