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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75002 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+ _THE DICK AND LARRY SERIES_
+ _BY FRANCIS LYNDE_
+
+ THE DONOVAN CHANCE
+ DICK AND LARRY, FRESHMEN
+ THE GOLDEN SPIDER
+
+ _CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
+
+
+
+
+ THE GOLDEN SPIDER
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: While they looked, one paused, appeared to dance for an
+instant, and then disappeared.]
+
+
+
+
+ _THE DICK AND LARRY SERIES_
+
+
+ THE
+ GOLDEN SPIDER
+
+ BY
+ FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+ 1923
+
+
+
+
+ Copyright, 1923, by
+ CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+
+
+ Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+ Published September, 1923
+
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+ TO MY GOOD FRIEND AND MINERALOGICAL
+ MENTOR, CLARENCE M. CLARK, WITHOUT
+ WHOSE KINDLY HELP, AND THE FREE USE
+ OF HIS LIBRARY, SPECIMEN CABINETS AND
+ LABORATORY, THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN
+ SPIDER MIGHT NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN,
+ THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER PAGE
+ I IN LOST CANYON 1
+ II THE FROZEN TRAIL 17
+ III IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT 35
+ IV DADDY LONGBEARD 52
+ V FOOTLOOSE AND FREE 71
+ VI SHORT RATIONS 87
+ VII TOMATOES AND PEACHES 104
+ VIII THE ICE CAVERN 122
+ IX THE SPIDER’S WEB 137
+ X NOTICE TO QUIT 156
+ XI FINDERS KEEPERS 173
+ XII NO SURRENDER! 192
+
+
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+ While they looked, one paused, appeared to dance for an
+ instant, and then disappeared _Frontispiece_
+
+ FACING PAGE
+
+ “Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some
+ kind?” 66
+
+ “I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know
+ that they are barking up the wrong tree” 116
+
+ Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by
+ tumbling backward upon his follower 200
+
+
+
+
+ THE GOLDEN SPIDER
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER I
+
+ IN LOST CANYON
+
+
+There wasn’t much suggestion of a canyon, lost or found, in the
+handsomely furnished office in the Brewster National Bank building
+where three young fellows in flannel shirts, belted corduroys and
+hob-nailed lace boots were waiting for the owner of the office to make
+his appearance.
+
+Of the three, only the middle-sized one, a good-looking chap whose
+rough outing clothes fitted him as if they were tailor-made,
+was showing signs of impatience. The biggest of the three, a
+square-shouldered young athlete with good gray eyes set wide apart,
+and a shock of dark-red, curly hair, was standing at a window which
+commanded a magnificent view of the high, forested mountain range
+lifting the skyline to the westward, while the other member of the
+trio, an undersized fellow with a thin, eager face and pale blue eyes,
+was examining the mineral specimens in a corner cabinet.
+
+“Gee! I wish Uncle Billy would come!” said the impatient one, jumping
+up to make a restless circuit of the room. “We don’t want to miss that
+train.”
+
+The big fellow turned from his window. “You’re sure he got in last
+night?” he said.
+
+“Oh, yes; they came in on the Flyer. Aunt Stella called mother over the
+’phone after the train got in――just to let us know. But I wish he’d
+come. We don’t want to lose another single day of this bully weather.”
+
+Dick Maxwell’s impatience was not altogether unreasonable. Ten days
+earlier Mr. William Starbuck――the “Uncle Billy” in question――had made
+a short stop in the Middle-Western college town where Dick and his two
+companions were just winding up their Freshman year, and had asked Dick
+how he was meaning to spend the long vacation. One thing had brought on
+another, and the upshot of the talk was an offer on the part of “Uncle
+Billy” to send Dick, and any two of his college-mates he might pick
+out, on a summer prospecting trip in the Hophra Mountains, the object
+in view being the possible discovery, not especially of silver or gold,
+but more particularly of new sources of supply of the rare metals,
+tungsten, vanadium, molybdenum, and the like, used in the arts and
+manufactures.
+
+Dick hadn’t wasted a moment in choosing the first of his companions
+for the summer outing. Larry Donovan――the big fellow at the office
+window――son of a crippled locomotive engineer on the home railroad, had
+been his chum from their grade-school days in Brewster, and the two
+had spent the preceding summer together as “cubs” on the engineering
+staff of the railroad of which Dick’s father was the general manager,
+so Larry was promptly elected as Number Two in the prospecting trip.
+For the third member they had both picked upon Charles Purdick――Larry’s
+roommate in college――for several reasons: for one thing, “Little Purdy”
+was a pretty good plain cook; and for another, he needed the wages that
+Mr. William Starbuck was going to pay each member of the prospecting
+party irrespective of the success of the trip in the discovery of any
+new mineral deposits.
+
+But there was a third reason for Purdick’s invitation which was still
+stronger. “Purdy,” who, until he became the beneficiary of a certain
+mysterious scholarship in Old Sheddon, had been working his way through
+college, was the orphan son of a steel worker, and had grown up in a
+mill town, under-fed, neglected, kicked about and overworked. He had
+never been West; had never known what it was to have a real vacation in
+the open; and both Dick and Larry had decided at once that he was to be
+Number Three, even if they should have to knock him down and handcuff
+him to bring him along. But Purdy hadn’t needed any handcuffing.
+
+Larry laughed good-naturedly at Dick’s miserly remark about the wasting
+of the “bully weather.”
+
+“Don’t you worry about the weather, old scout,” he said. “We’ll take
+that as it comes, and you know well enough that we’re likely to have a
+lot more good weather than bad, in the summer months.”
+
+“Oh, I guess yes,” was Dick’s rejoinder. “I’m just sweating to be off
+to the tall hills, that’s all.” Then to Purdick, who was busily writing
+in his notebook at the mineral cabinet: “What are you finding over
+there, Purdy?”
+
+Purdick’s answer was forestalled by the entrance of Dick’s uncle by
+marriage, a bronzed, upstanding man who looked as if he might be a
+retired cattle king, and who really had been a range-rider in his
+younger days.
+
+“Well, well! Here you are!” he said, shaking hands with the three.
+“Ready to go out and hit the high spots, are you? All right; sit down
+and we’ll round up the preliminaries――what few there are. Got your
+dunnage kits made up?”
+
+Dick answered for the three.
+
+“The packs are down at the station. Dad told us what we’d need――and
+what we wouldn’t need. I guess he hasn’t let us make any tenderfoot
+mistakes about loading up with a lot of the luxuries.”
+
+“That’s good. Now for my part of it. I’ve wired ahead to Nophi, and
+Mr. Broadwick, the smelter superintendent, is the man you want to see.
+He’ll have a couple of burros for you, with your camping outfit and
+grub packed and ready on the arrival of your train. All you’ll have to
+do when you get there will be to hike out; take your foot in your hand
+and go.”
+
+“Right!” said Dick, bubbling over with excitement. And then: “In your
+letter from New York you said something about maps, Uncle Billy. Have
+you got them here?”
+
+The “grub-staking” uncle got up and took an envelope of folded maps
+from a pigeonhole in the office safe.
+
+“Here you are――sections of the Geodetic Survey covering most of the
+territory where you are going. From Nophi you head up Lost Canyon to
+Mule-Ear Pass. After you cross the first range, the country is all
+yours. When, or if, you find any mineral, stake your claims and jot the
+locations down on the map. Are you carrying a copy of Dana’s ‘System’?”
+
+“Got it in the dunnage,” Dick answered; “it, and a blowpipe field-test
+outfit. We’ve all been boning the ‘Dana’ for a week, and Mr. Ransom,
+out at the ‘Little Alice,’ has been showing us how to make tests.”
+
+“Good. The ‘Dana’ will help you in making the simple tests that can
+be made in the field, and, of course, when you find anything that
+looks right promising, you’ll bring samples of it back with you for a
+laboratory assay. That’s about all, I think. If you have a chance to
+send us word during the summer, do it; but if not, don’t worry, and we
+won’t. I’m betting confidently that you are all able to take care of
+yourselves, and of one another. How about arms?”
+
+Again it was Dick Maxwell who answered.
+
+“Dad has made each of us a present of a light Winchester. They’re down
+at the station with the packs.”
+
+“You probably won’t need the artillery. It’s the closed season for
+game, but it won’t hurt to have the guns along. If you get tired of
+carrying them, you can put them in the jack packs.”
+
+Dick was nervously looking at his watch. It still wanted a full
+half-hour of train time, but we all know how that is when we are about
+to start out upon a wonderful voyage of discovery.
+
+“Well, Uncle Billy,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to be moving along.”
+So the handshaking was repeated, and they were heading for the door,
+when the grub-staking uncle called them back.
+
+“This is rather a humdrum job you’ve undertaken for the summer――looking
+for the industrial metals,” he said, with a twinkle in the shrewd gray
+eyes. “I’ve a mind to throw in a bit of romance, just for good measure.
+How would you like to keep an eye out for a lost gold mine――a real
+bonanza?”
+
+“A lost gold mine?” Dick queried eagerly. “Who lost it?”
+
+The ex-cowboy uncle was smiling quizzically. “It is a pretty long
+story, and if you’ve got to hurry to your train――――” he began; but Dick
+cut in quickly.
+
+“Tell us about it, Uncle Billy. We’ll catch the train all right.”
+
+“Think you can take time to listen? I’ll make it short. Three years
+ago, James Brock, an old prospector whom I knew well, was found at the
+mouth of Lost Canyon, dying of hunger and exposure. I had him brought
+down to Brewster and taken to the hospital. He lived only a few days,
+but during that time he told me his story. He said he had discovered
+a fabulously rich gold lode in the Little Hophras, and, staying to
+work it, the winter had caught him. He had been snow-bound for weeks
+with little or nothing to eat, but had finally made his way out over
+Mule-Ear Pass, half starved and with his feet and hands frozen.”
+
+“Poor old duffer!” said Dick sympathetically. “But go on, Uncle Billy.
+What became of the mine?”
+
+“Nobody knows. Brock had no maps, and he couldn’t describe the locality
+well enough to enable any one to find it. I don’t know how plentiful
+the ore is, but it is wonderfully rich, as you can see for yourselves,”
+and from a drawer in his desk he took a small piece of disintegrated
+quartz, shot through and held together by a wire-like mass of the
+precious metal.
+
+As one person, the three boys crowded around the desk to examine the
+beautiful specimen, and none of them heard the office door open or
+knew that there was an intruder present until Mr. Starbuck suddenly
+covered the bit of quartz with his hand and said: “Well, my man――what
+can I do for you?”
+
+As one person again, they all three wheeled and saw the man who had
+come in so quietly that none of them had heard him. Tramp or beggar, or
+whatever he was, he seemed to be an object of pity, dirty, unshaven,
+and a cripple, walking with a crutch and with one leg drawn up in a
+curiously twisted deformity. And he had a face――as Dick afterward
+phrased it――that would scare the rats out of a corn bin.
+
+“I’m lookin’ f’r Mister Bradley, th’ employmint man,” was the way the
+intruder accounted for himself.
+
+Mr. Starbuck shook his head. “Mr. Bradley’s office is on the floor
+below,” he replied; and at that, the man hobbled out, leaving the door
+open when he passed into the corridor.
+
+Dick Maxwell was again consulting his watch. “We have a few minutes
+more, Uncle Billy,” he said hurriedly. “Is that all you can tell us
+about the lost mine?”
+
+“Not quite all. James Brock told me how he came to discover the vein.
+He had camped one evening at the foot of a small cliff with a crevice
+in it. The cliff faced the east, and in the morning he saw that the
+crevice was curtained with a great wheel of a spider-web, and in the
+center of the web was an immense spider with a body that looked, with
+the sun shining on it, as if it were made out of pure gold. Brock took
+it as an omen. He dug in the crevice and found his mine, which he
+called ‘The Golden Spider.’ So there is your bit of romance. Find the
+Golden Spider and maybe you will all come back rich.”
+
+“But if we should find it, it wouldn’t be ours,” put in little Purdick,
+speaking for the first time.
+
+“I’ll make my right and title over to the three of you,” said the
+grub-staking uncle, with the quizzical smile again wrinkling at the
+corners of his eyes. “When old Jimmie Brock found he wasn’t going to
+live, he made me this little pencil sketch of the place”――taking a
+folded paper from the drawer which had held the specimen――“and told me
+to go and take his bonanza for my own――made me his heir, in fact.”
+
+“And you never found it?” Dick asked.
+
+The quizzical smile turned itself into a quiet laugh.
+
+“No. I spent a good month of the following summer looking for it;
+and after the story got out, others looked for it, too. It has never
+been found, and probably never will be unless some prospector just
+happens to stumble upon it accidentally. One mountain is very much like
+another in the Little Hophras, and Brock couldn’t name his mountain,
+or describe it so that it could be recognized. You may take his sketch
+map along with you if you like, though it won’t help you any more than
+it did me. If I were going to try again, I shouldn’t bother about maps
+or mountains; I should look for a crack in a cliff, and a golden-bodied
+spider hanging in its web. Now you see what an excellent chance you
+have of finding the lost bonanza! But I mustn’t keep you any longer
+listening to these old fairy tales. Good-by, and good luck to you.
+Don’t forget to send word back any time you happen to meet anybody
+coming out of the hills.”
+
+Since the time was now really growing pretty short, the three did not
+stand upon the order of their going. As they ran through the corridor
+toward the elevators, they saw the crippled man hobbling along in the
+same direction, and making as good speed with the long crutch-stride
+and hop as they did in a dog-trot. That being the case, the cripple
+caught the same descending elevator that they did; but on the sidewalk
+they lost him quickly; were a bit astonished to see him climb nimbly
+into a waiting taxi and get himself whirled away down the avenue.
+
+“Huh!” said Dick, as they hurried along toward the railroad station.
+“‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ That fellow looks like
+a beggar, but he rides in a taxi, just the same. I wonder where he is
+going in such a tearing hurry?”
+
+There was obviously no answer to this, and the incident was presently
+forgotten in their arrival at the station. The westbound train was
+in, and both the Maxwell and Donovan families were on hand to see the
+prospectors off for the summer. Little Purdick, having nobody to see
+him off, got the packs and rifles and put them aboard, and when he had
+finished this job the leave-takings were over and the train was pulling
+out.
+
+“‘Good-by, everybody; good-by, everything!’” Dick sang, hanging out
+of the last-left-open vestibule; and when he went in to join his two
+companions he was brimming over with enthusiasm.
+
+“Hey, you old stick-in-the-muds!” he cried. “She’s begun at last――the
+good old summer out-of-doors! We’re due in Nophi at one o’clock, and
+to-night we’ll be sleeping out under the stars! Wouldn’t that jar you,
+Purdy――you old factory-town rat!”
+
+But little Purdick did not answer, because, just at that moment,
+he had caught sight of a roughly dressed man with a crutch settling
+himself in a seat at the far end of the day-coach in which they were
+riding, and the singular prevalence of cripples in this part of the Far
+West struck him as being so odd that he scarcely heard what Dick was
+saying.
+
+The two-hour train rush down the Timanyoni, through Little Butte, and
+up a wide mountain valley to the little smelter town of Nophi, nestling
+fairly under the shadow of the Greater Hophras, was a journey made
+without incident――unless dinner in the dining-car, their last civilized
+meal, as Dick named it, could be called an incident. When the boys left
+the train they found that a telegram from Brewster had outrun them, and
+Uncle Billy’s smelter-superintendent friend was at the platform to meet
+them; also, that the two burros, already packed with the provisions,
+tools and camping outfit, were waiting under a near-by ore shed.
+
+As they were preparing to start, Mr. Broadwick gave them a hint or two.
+
+“The snow is just breaking up on the main range, and you’ll find the
+trail for two or three miles each side of Mule-Ear Pass pretty hard to
+negotiate with the jacks unless you can catch it while it is frozen,”
+he told them. “Late as it is in the season, it freezes every night on
+the range, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll push as far up toward
+the pass as you can this afternoon, camp early, and turn out in the
+morning early enough to cross the range before the sun gets a melting
+chance at it. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to have a lot of
+trouble with the burros. They’re pretty sure-footed little beasts, but
+they will slip off a thawing trail once in a while.”
+
+Larry was the only one who was thoughtful enough to ask if anybody had
+been over the trail since the thawing began.
+
+“Yes,” said the smelter superintendent, “two men went over yesterday
+with supplies for the Little Eagle mine in Dog Gulch. They were
+experienced packers, and they told us they had to wait for the freeze
+before they could make it, coming out.”
+
+They promised to do as the superintendent advised, and five minutes
+later, under a sun that seemed hot enough to make all thoughts of frost
+and snow troubles a sheer absurdity, they were trailing out the single
+street of the small smelter settlement and heading for the Lost Canyon
+portal.
+
+Just as they were leaving the last shacks of the town behind, Purdick,
+to whom all this wild western stuff was as strange as a glimpse into
+an entirely different world, happened to look back down the street.
+What he saw meant nothing to him at first: there were a few stragglers
+in the street, workmen returning to the smelter after the noon hour,
+some children playing in the dust, and the usual number of stray dogs
+foraging for something eatable in the empty tin cans littering the
+roadway.
+
+But in front of a tar-papered building labeled “Hotel Nophi” three
+horses were hitched, and as Purdick looked back, three men came out
+of the hotel to unhitch and mount them. That, in itself, was nothing
+remarkable, of course, and Purdick wouldn’t have given it a second
+thought if he hadn’t happened to see, or think he saw, one of the three
+stick something that looked like a crutch under his saddle leather
+before he climbed to the back of his riding animal.
+
+“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he exclaimed, wholly to himself. But when
+Dick said: “What for?” Purdick’s reply was perfectly non-committal.
+“Nothing,” he returned, with a laugh. “I guess the altitude’s getting
+on my eye nerves and making me see double――or triple.”
+
+As he spoke, the street, which had now dwindled to a rocky bridle path,
+turned sharply to the left and entered the narrow mouth of the canyon;
+whereupon the brawling stream thundering through the gorge swallowed
+up all other sounds, even as the cliff-like walls shut out all sights
+save that of the sky overhead. Nevertheless, as the patient little pack
+animals plodded steadily on, their tinkling hoofbeats hardly audible
+above the noise made by the stream, Purdick fancied he could hear
+heavier hoofbeats clinking upon the stones far to the rear.
+
+That first afternoon’s hike up a canyon trail, which at times scarcely
+afforded footing for the plodding little beasts under the pack-saddles,
+came as near to “getting” Purdick as anything he had ever experienced.
+Having never had time――or the spare energy――to do any athletic work in
+college, the toiling tramp, with a blanket roll and a gun to carry,
+made him realize, as he never had before, the handicap of untrained
+muscles and sinews, and as he dragged along at the tail of the little
+procession he was chopping out a vow to make the summer outing a
+turning point for a fellow named Charles Purdick in one respect at
+least: if hard work and grit would do it, the end of the summer should
+find him better fitted for man-sized, outdoor work or he’d know the
+reason why.
+
+Notwithstanding this fine resolution, he heaved a mighty sincere sigh
+of relief when the five-hour trudge up the canyon came to an end in one
+of the park-like widenings of the gorge which had been recurring with
+increasing frequency during the past hour or so, and Dick called to
+Larry: “Well, old sock; how about it? Isn’t this far enough up so that
+we can hit the pass in the frosty dawn?”
+
+Larry, who had been leading the foremost burro, stopped and gave the
+landscape the once over.
+
+“Couldn’t be much better,” he decided. “Plenty of wood, good water, and
+fir boughs for the shake-downs. Alabama!”
+
+“Huh?” said Dick. “What’s Alabama got to do with it?”
+
+Larry gave a wide-mouthed grin.
+
+“Dig up your U. S. History, sonny. ‘Alabama’ means ‘Here we rest.’ All
+hands on deck to make camp.”
+
+They went at it like old-timers――or at least two of them did. Though
+they hadn’t had much to do with the actual camp-making in their
+railroad construction experience of the summer before, Larry and
+Dick had learned pretty well how to make themselves at home in the
+wilderness. While the setting sun――long since gone behind the towering
+western ranges――was still filling the upper air with a flood of golden
+radiance, they unpacked the jacks and picketed them to graze on the
+lush grass of the little park, built the camp-fire, and chopped enough
+of the fragrant fir tips for the beds.
+
+It was after the fire had burned down to a bed of coals that little
+Purdick began to shine. Out of the hard experience of his strugglesome
+boyhood he had brought a pretty good knowledge of plain cooking, and
+in a little time he dished up a supper that made his two camp-mates
+pound him on his tired back and bombard him with all sorts of jollying
+praise.
+
+“We sure got a gilt-edged prize when we picked you off the limb,
+Purdy,” said Dick warmly. “Whatever else you can’t do, you sure can
+cook. I see where you’re elected for the whole summer――unless you get
+your back up and go on strike and make us two poison ourselves with our
+own skillet messes. Pretty tired after the hike?”
+
+“A little,” Purdick admitted.
+
+“All right; after we get over the Pass, we won’t push it so hard. What
+say, Larry?”
+
+“There won’t be any need of pushing it,” was Larry’s rejoinder, mumbled
+through a mouthful of Purdick’s delicious, skillet-baked corn bread.
+“We’re not out to see how many miles we can do in a day.”
+
+With supper eaten and the tin dishes washed in the crystal-clear
+stream, and with the last tints of the sun glow gone and the stars
+coming out in a black bowl of the heavens that seemed almost near
+enough to reach up and touch, the three rolled themselves in their
+blankets with their feet to the fire, Dick mumbling something about a
+day well spent earning a night’s repose, and falling asleep almost as
+soon as he had stretched himself out.
+
+But little Purdick did not find it quite so simple. For one thing, he
+was too tired to go to sleep at once, and for another the unfamiliar
+surroundings, the black shadows of the trees, the hollow drumming of
+the little river among the boulders in its bed, the high-mountain
+silence which was otherwise unbroken, the stately procession of the
+stars in a sky that was like an arch of black velvet――all these things
+conspired to make him wakeful, and after a time he got up, dug out the
+mineralogy book from Larry’s pack, stirred the fire to make it give
+light enough to read by, and was presently deep in the mysteries of
+sylvanite and sphalerite and chalcopyrite, B.B. tests, acid reactions,
+and the like.
+
+In a little time he began to realize that even a June night at altitude
+eight or nine thousand feet can be pretty chilly, so he wrapped himself
+in his blankets and put his back against a tree. In the new position
+the firelight wasn’t very good for the reading purpose, and before long
+he found his eyes growing heavy and finally the “Dana” slipped from his
+grasp and he was asleep.
+
+This was the last he knew until he awoke with a start some time
+farther along in the night; came broad awake with a conviction that
+a noise, other than that of the brawling stream, had broken into the
+high-mountain silence. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked
+around. The fire had died down to a pile of white-ashed embers, but the
+starlight, as strong in the clear atmosphere of the heights as modified
+moonlight, enabled him to see the dim outlines of his surroundings.
+
+While he looked and listened, the noise which had aroused him came
+again; a measured tapping alternating with the crunch of slow
+footfalls. Straining his eyes, he soon made out a shadowy figure
+dodging along from tree to tree and working its way cautiously toward
+the dying camp-fire.
+
+Purdick’s first impulse was to call Dick and Larry; his next was to
+half close his eyes and pretend to be still asleep. Nearer and nearer
+came the tap and shuffle, until at last he was able to get a fair sight
+of the midnight intruder. It was a man with a crutch, and the watcher
+under the big fir-tree didn’t have to look twice to decide that his
+errand wasn’t neighborly. For now the man was down on hands and knees
+and was crawling up as noiselessly as a snake.
+
+Thinking it over afterward, Purdick could never tell why he didn’t
+immediately raise an alarm. A yell would have awakened his sleeping
+camp-mates, and would probably have sent the intruder flying. But
+instead of flinging off his blanket and shouting to Larry and Dick,
+little Purdick merely tried to give a better imitation of a sleeping
+sentinel and let the crippled man come on.
+
+What happened after that was wholly unexplainable to the watcher
+under the fir-tree. Creeping silently into the diminished circle of
+firelight, the cripple possessed himself first of Larry’s pack and
+then of Dick’s, going through them rapidly but painstakingly, as if
+in search of something. Next, Purdick saw his own pack going through
+the same process. Like a suddenly illuminating flash of lightning, the
+explanation blazed into Purdick’s brain. The cripple was the man who
+had come into Mr. Starbuck’s office just as they were about to leave.
+He had overheard the talk of the Golden Spider, the lost gold mine, and
+he was searching for old Jimmie Brock’s map!
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER II
+
+ THE FROZEN TRAIL
+
+
+When Purdick realized that the rummaging cripple was not only a camp
+thief, but most probably a desperado of sorts, he saw where he had made
+a capital mistake in not arousing his two companions while it could
+have been done with safety. It was too late now. The man was within
+arm’s reach of the two sleeping figures, and he was armed; at least, he
+was using a vicious-looking hunting-knife to cut the pack lashings.
+
+Purdick held his breath. The little pencil sketch made by the old
+prospector had been put into the envelope containing the Survey maps;
+and the envelope, as Purdick knew, had been placed between the leaves
+of the mineralogy book for safe-keeping and carriage. The book was
+lying beside him, just where it had slipped out of his hands when he
+had fallen asleep. Would the thief see the book and look in it?
+
+It seemed useless to hope that he wouldn’t. With the curious perversity
+with which inanimate things appear to be endowed at times, the camp-fire
+blazed up and a resiny twig made a candle of itself, illuminating the
+camp area like a small searchlight. Purdick made sure that the crippled
+scoundrel couldn’t miss seeing the book lying in plain sight; the book
+and the end of the map-holding envelope sticking out of it; and again he
+held his breath.
+
+That, in itself, was unnerving enough, but the sight he got of the
+cripple’s face was even more so. He hadn’t noticed the man’s face
+particularly when the cripple had hobbled into and out of Mr. Starbuck’s
+office in Brewster, but now he saw that it was a perfect mask of sly and
+ferocious villainy, and he had a swift and terrifying conviction that
+the thief would use his knife murderously if any of his victims showed
+signs of awakening.
+
+With that conviction half paralyzing him, Purdick’s heart fairly
+stopped beating when he saw Dick Maxwell stretch his arms over his
+head and yawn as if he were about to wake up. Instantly the man quit
+rummaging and caught up his knife. Little Purdick had never felt so
+helpless in all his life. In propping himself against the tree he had
+wrapped his blankets around him so tightly that he couldn’t get out
+of them without a struggle. None the less, he was drawing his feet up
+to be ready for the struggle when Dick rolled over on his side, gave
+a snort, and was apparently fast asleep again. The peril was over,
+for the moment, at least, and Purdick’s stopped heart began to thump
+furiously, hammering so hard that he wondered why the thief didn’t hear
+it and spring at him.
+
+In the reaction which was bound to follow a shock like that, Purdick
+closed his eyes, and tried vainly for a few moments to fight down
+the sickening dizziness that was threatening to blot him out. When
+he looked again, the man had seemingly given up the search for the
+map. Cautiously, with his knife between his teeth, and one arm thrust
+through his crutch to drag it along, he was gathering up the three
+rifles and making off with them.
+
+Once more little Purdick fought down a frantic impulse to yell out
+to the two sleepers. Without the guns they would be helpless. But he
+knew that the cripple wasn’t alone in the canyon; that somewhere, and
+probably near at hand, were the two men who had ridden out of Nophi
+with him. It was only the thought that the other two might be near
+enough to hear his yell and open fire on the camp that enabled Purdick
+to keep still at this crisis. But he had to bite his tongue to do it.
+
+While the crippled marauder was crawling away, dragging the three guns
+and his crutch, and making hard work of it, Purdick’s resolve was
+swiftly taken. Noiselessly he disentangled himself from the impeding
+blankets, never losing sight for an instant of the crawling figure
+working its way toward the lower narrowing of the park-like opening.
+Never had the little fellow so bitterly resented the fate that had
+made him undersized and, in a certain sense, a physical weakling. With
+Larry’s strength, or even Dick’s, he could have landed upon the back of
+the creeping thief and made him drop the rifles.
+
+He had just about made up his mind to try it, anyhow, when a diversion
+came. Seen dimly by the flickering light of the blazing twig, the
+cripple was stopping beside a great boulder which had some time
+fallen from the cliffs on the opposite side of the little river and
+rolled across to the intervale level. Little Purdick prayed for a
+better light, and got it――just for an illuminating instant; just long
+enough to let him see that the man was poking the three guns under an
+overhanging lip of the great rock to hide them.
+
+This was better; much better; and as the departing thief lifted himself
+upon his one serviceable foot and his crutch to continue on his way
+down the canyon, Purdick darted quickly into the shadow of the firs
+and prepared to follow.
+
+The pursuit did not take him very far. Less than a quarter of a mile
+below the camp site there was another opening in the canyon, with a
+little side gulch leading off to the left. In the mouth of this gulch
+Purdick saw the glow of a camp-fire, and he could dimly make out the
+figures of two men sitting beside it. While he looked, the cripple
+hobbled down the trail ahead of him and joined the two at the fire.
+Here, so Purdick determined, was his chance to find out what the
+desperadoes purposed doing, so he called up all the Indian-stalking
+stories he had ever read and crept down upon the camp in the gulch.
+
+Luckily, he didn’t have to be Indian-silent in making his approach.
+Woodcraft was only a dictionary word to him, as yet, and twigs would
+snap and stones roll under his feet, in spite of all he could do. But
+the brawling stream, along the edge of which he was making his way,
+swallowed up all the clumsy noises, and in a few minutes he had climbed
+to a little thicket of low-growing fir saplings on the gulch side, from
+the shelter of which he could both see and hear, and could look down at
+a sharp angle into the very heart of the small camp-fire and upon the
+men surrounding it.
+
+As he came within listening range, the crippled spy was just finishing
+his report.
+
+“No, I didn’t find th’ map; I just took a chance at that,” he was
+saying. “One o’ them’s likely got it in his pocket. What I wanted was
+the guns, an’ I got ’em. Not that a bunch o’ boys like them would put
+up a fight; but without th’ artillery, they can’t, d’ye see?”
+
+“Why didn’t yuh bring the guns in with yuh?” growled the bigger of the
+two who hadn’t left the camp-fire.
+
+“Too much trouble. I hid ’em where they’ll never find ’em.”
+
+“Well,” said the big man, “do we go on up and scare the kids out of a
+year’s growth? Are you sure they’ve got the map? It was talked around
+in Nophi that they was goin’ out hunting f’r tungsten, an’ the like o’
+that.”
+
+“Didn’t I see it with my own eyes?” snapped the cripple. “An’ didn’t
+I hear Starbuck tellin’ ’em all about th’ Golden Spider? ’Tis a sure
+thing, I tell you! This tungsten business is all a frame-up. Starbuck’s
+got a safe pointer on that gold mine, and he’s sendin’ the boys because
+he figures that nobody’d think a bunch o’ college boys’d be out for
+anything but a good time in th’ big hills.”
+
+“Well,” said the smaller of the two fire-keepers, “this is your show,
+Twisty. What do you say?”
+
+“There’s only one thing to say. If we could get over Mule-Ear with th’
+bronc’s, I’d say, let ’em go on ahead an’ find th’ mine f’r us. But th’
+horses can’t make the trail, an’ it thawin’ an’ freezin’ every day,
+though the jacks can. We’ll wait f’r an hour ’r so, till the trail’s
+froze good an’ hard, then we’ll go up an’ get th’ map an’ the jacks and
+their outfit and grub-stake an’ go on.”
+
+“Leavin’ the kids behind, yuh mean?” said the big man.
+
+“Surest thing you know!” barked the cripple. “They’ll find their way
+back to Nophi, an’ that’ll be the end of it.”
+
+“But if we leave the horses, that’ll give us away,” objected the third
+robber.
+
+“I fixed that before we left Nophi,” said the man with a crutch.
+“Barkey Davis’ll be on his way up the canyon at daybreak, and if he
+finds the bronc’s left behind, he’ll take ’em back. If he don’t find
+’em, he’ll know we’ve gone on. ’Tis all fixed.”
+
+But the third man was still unsatisfied. “We’re too near the town,”
+he said. “I know Billy Starbuck, and so do you. Th’ boys’ll get back
+to Nophi in a day, and that’ll mean a sheriff’s posse, with Starbuck
+headin’ it. It’s too risky.”
+
+“Risky nothing!” was the snapping retort. “’Tis you with a yellow
+streak in you, Tom Dowling! How’s thim b’ys goin’ to know who holds ’em
+up in the dark? An’ with th’ snow thawin’ every day on the range, who’s
+goin’ to trail us over Mule-Ear?” And the cripple spat in the fire to
+emphasize his disgust.
+
+Little Purdick had heard enough, and more than enough. In an hour, more
+or less, their camp would be raided, everything they had would be taken
+away from them, and they would be set afoot in the wilderness to make
+their way back to civilization as best they might. Stealthily he began
+to back out of his hiding place under the low-growing saplings. Flight,
+a swift race back to Dick and Larry with the tremendous news, was the
+next number on the programme.
+
+Before he could give himself the first backing shove, Purdick found
+that he was shaking with nervousness, and he had to wait for a minute
+or two until he could get the trembling fit under control. The little
+pause came near proving hideously disastrous. In moving back he had
+disturbed a round stone the size of a man’s head, and before he could
+grab at it, it had gotten away and was rolling down the declivity. When
+it started, Purdick thought it was all over with him; the stone was
+headed straight for the fire in the gulch. But in its second turn-over
+it struck one of the small trees, was turned aside and went plunging
+down the other declivity into the stream at the right.
+
+Purdick flattened himself to the earth until he had a feeling that he
+was no thicker than a sheet of paper, and he hardly dared to breathe.
+Two of the three men at the fire――the two with sound legs――sprang up
+at the noise of the plunge, but the cripple sat still and laughed
+raucously.
+
+“Youse fellies ain’t got the nerve of a couple o’ jack-rabbits!” he
+sneered. “Did yuh think th’ little sleepin’ b’ys was comin’ down here
+to scrag us? ’Twas only a rock rollin’ round in the creek.”
+
+Purdick had his shaking fit well in hand by this time, and once more he
+started to back away, testing every rock as he retreated to the stream
+level to make sure that it was fastened down before he put his weight
+upon it. Once on the trail, and around the first crook in the canyon,
+he began to run at top speed――and kept that up for just about twenty
+yards――which was all the distance it took to make him understand that
+when a fellow has lived all his life at an altitude of a few hundred
+feet above sea-level, he can’t run to do any good in the tall hills; at
+least, not until his lungs have grown big enough to take in more of the
+rarefied air at a gulp.
+
+So it was a pretty badly winded scout who presently staggered into the
+upper camp opening and flung himself upon his two soundly sleeping
+comrades. Of the two, Larry came broad awake at the first alarm, but
+Dick had to be shaken vigorously before he could be made to sit up and
+listen to the story that Purdick was gasping out.
+
+“Well, I’ll be dinged!――you good old sleuth!” was Dick’s praiseful
+comment, after Purdick had made them understand what had been happening
+while they slept. “Played ’possum and didn’t let him know you were
+awake? But why didn’t you yell out for us?”
+
+“I meant to, at first, of course,” said Purdick. “But I waited too
+long. When he got up right here between you two with that butcher
+knife, I was afraid to. What are we going to do? They said they’d wait
+an hour or so, but they’re liable to change their minds and rush us any
+minute.”
+
+Larry Donovan was the one who knew what was to be done, and he was
+already doing part of it. Quickly throwing a handful of twigs upon
+the fire to make a better light, he began to roll his blankets and to
+gather up the scattered contents of his pack.
+
+“Get busy, fellows,” he said quietly. “If you’ve got it straight,
+Purdy, we may have all the time we need to get out of here――or we may
+not have.”
+
+“Gee!” gasped Dick, falling upon his own preparations with a rush; “you
+mean that we’ve got to tackle the Mule-Ear trail in the dark?”
+
+“It’s that, or a stand-up fight with these plug-uglies,” Larry returned
+coolly. “Knowing what we do, I suppose we’d be justified in ambushing
+the gang as they come up the canyon, but I’m sure none of us want to
+start this summer job of ours by shooting down a bunch of mine-robbers,
+much as they deserve it. The other thing to do is to light out before
+they get to us. And we don’t have to do it in the dark either; see
+there?” and he pointed to a thin crescent of a moon in its last quarter
+which was just beginning to show itself above the high eastern
+mountain. Then to Purdick, “Purdy, you go and corral those guns, while
+I make up your pack.”
+
+Going over it afterward, all three of the boys thought they were well
+within the truth in claiming that no camp was ever broken with less
+loss of time, even by trained burro-freighters, than theirs was that
+night. In a very few minutes the jack-loads were made up and cinched
+on the pack saddles, each man’s shoulder-pack was slung, and they were
+ready for the trail.
+
+Larry, dropping into place as leader in the flight, gave his final
+directions after Dick had brought a hatful of water from the stream
+with which to extinguish the camp-fire.
+
+“I was studying the Survey map as we came up on the train, and if I’ve
+got the right idea of where we are now, we have a pretty long, hard
+pull ahead of us to reach the top of the pass. We must make the best
+time we can while the going is good, because we can’t rush much after
+we hit the old snow. We’ll let old Fishbait”――they had already named
+the two burros――“show us the way. He can find the trail better than we
+can. All set? Here we go, then.”
+
+Happily, the up-canyon trail was easy at the start. Beyond the little
+park in which their camp had been pitched there were a few narrow
+places where the footing at the stream side was somewhat hazardous,
+with only the thin moonlight to show them where it was; but very
+shortly the gorge widened out into a valley with precipitous, wooded
+mountain slopes on either side. Here the trail was broad enough to
+enable them to break the Indian-file order of march; and Dick and Larry
+made Purdick repeat his overhearings at the camp of the desperadoes.
+
+“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted; “let’s see if I’m getting it
+straight. Were they meaning to leave the horses behind when they came
+up to raid us?”
+
+“That’s the way I understood it,” said Purdick.
+
+“Then when they do come up and find us gone, they’ll have to go back
+after the horses before they can follow us.”
+
+“Which is lucky for us,” Larry put in. “As long as the trail stays as
+good as it is right along here, they can cover three miles to our one.
+How far did you say it was from our camp back to theirs, Purdy?”
+
+“I’m no good at guessing distances in a crooked canyon in the dark,”
+Purdick admitted. “But it can’t be over a short quarter of a mile.”
+
+“Not much comfort in that,” Larry grumbled. “Did you see the horses?”
+
+“No; but I couldn’t see much of anything. Their fire was built in a
+little side gulch and it didn’t shine out into the main canyon, and the
+moon wasn’t up, then.”
+
+“Our best hope is that they’re not hurrying about putting the raiding
+job over,” was Dick’s contribution to the discussion. “If they’ll only
+give us time to reach the bad going――――”
+
+The interruption was the distant crack of a rifle, a single shot that
+repeated itself in a series of battledore and shuttlecock echoes from
+the mountain sides on either hand.
+
+“What does that mean?” Dick demanded.
+
+“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Larry. “But if you ask me, I’ll
+say it’s a signal. Just for a try at it, suppose two of them have come
+up to put the raiding job over. They’ve found the birds flown, and now
+they’re telling the third man to come on with the horses. Am I right?”
+
+“I believe you are as right as rain,” Dick agreed quickly. “In which
+case?――――”
+
+“In which case, it’s us for the speedway!” Larry exclaimed, and
+forthwith he urged the little pack animals into their nearest approach
+to a trot.
+
+“If we can’t beat that bunch to the bad going, it’s up to us to make a
+fight or get ready to tramp back to Nophi with our tongues hanging out.
+Get along, Fishbait! If you only had sense enough to know what’s behind
+you, you’d make tracks a lot faster than you’re making them now!”
+
+That was the beginning of a blind race which was made all the more
+difficult by the fact that the fugitives never knew a minute ahead what
+they were coming to next. If they had been familiar with the trail it
+would have been different. But they had to trust wholly to the instinct
+of the leading burro, and at times, when the little beast and its pack
+mate went plunging through dense thickets of the young trees, they were
+reasonably sure they were off the track.
+
+Also, in a very short while the pace began to tell, particularly upon
+little Purdick. By the time they reached muddy going, the high, upper
+valley where patches of the old snow were showing dimly among the tree
+trunks, with leaky rivulets trickling down from them to make a spongy
+swamp of the footway, Purdick was gasping for breath and lagging behind
+the procession, in spite of all his efforts to keep up.
+
+“Getting next to you, old scout?” said Larry, leaving Dick to urge the
+pack beasts on while he dropped back to relieve Purdick of the weight
+of his gun. “This is a pretty hard row of stumps to put you into――the
+first crack out of the box, this way.”
+
+“I’m――I’m all right,” the small one stammered gamely. “If I――if I could
+only――could only get my second wind――――”
+
+“That’s it,” said Larry encouragingly. “It’ll come, after a bit. But if
+it’s too hard for you, we’ll let up a few notches. Dick and I are more
+or less used to these altitudes, and――――”
+
+“L-l-let up, nothing!” stuttered the game laggard. “Wh-when I can’t
+hold up my end you can ch-chuck me into the creek and leave me behind!”
+
+It was the trail itself that presently cut the speed down to something
+less breathless. Within the next five hundred yards the spongy swamp
+underfoot had become snowy slush, and with another hundred feet or
+so of elevation the slush began to crunch encouragingly under their
+feet to tell them that they were at least reaching the zone of nightly
+frosts.
+
+Here, too, the forests were receding on the approach to timber
+line, with steep, snow-covered slopes to take their place, and in
+consequence, the light was immeasurably better; so good, indeed,
+that they could now see the trail quite plainly, part of the time
+as a deeply trodden path between snowbanks, and in other places a
+hard-frozen ridge from which the snow, thawing in the June sun, had
+sunk away.
+
+It was remarkable how the sure-footed little pack animals were able to
+climb steadily, rarely slipping on the icy track, and plodding along at
+a walk so fast that it pushed the three boys to keep up with them on
+the slippery ascent. It was Dick, who had made one winter trip into
+the mountains a couple of years earlier, who cautioned his companions
+about the danger of slipping from the trail.
+
+“Look out in these ridgy places,” he warned. “If you slip aside, you’re
+a goner; just as likely as not you’ll drop into a drift twenty feet
+deep. I did that little thing once, and――――”
+
+Before he could tie anything to the “and,” there was a shout from the
+rear, and the place in the trail which had lately been occupied by
+little Purdick was vacant.
+
+“Hold up, Larry!――Purdy’s taken a dive!” Dick yelled, and the
+procession was halted. On the lower side of the trail, at the spot
+where Purdick had been last seen, there was a round hole in the snow
+crust. It was neither as deep as a well nor as wide as a church door,
+but, like Mercutio’s wound, it served. Down in the bottom of it a
+disturbance, much like that in the pit of an ant-lion when that active
+little bug is burrowing with its prey, was going on to an accompaniment
+of smothered cries.
+
+“Don’t fight yourself to death!” Dick called out. “We’ll get you
+in a minute.” Then to Larry: “Grab me by the feet――I’m going after
+him”――which he did, head foremost, to be dragged back a moment later,
+bringing the buried one with him.
+
+“B-r-r-r!” shivered little Purdick, beating the snow out of his
+clothes; “if anybody had ever told me that I was scheduled to take a
+snow bath in June――whoosh! it’s all down inside of me!”
+
+“It’ll melt in a little while,” said Dick consolingly. “I’ve been
+there, too, and I know how it feels. But we’d better be humping
+ourselves. If I’m not mightily mistaken I can hear those horses coming
+up the canyon trail right now! Listen!”
+
+They did listen, and there was no reason to doubt Dick’s acuteness of
+hearing. Far back along the way they had come they could hear the clink
+of horseshoes upon stone; and the horses were evidently being pushed to
+their best up-hill speed.
+
+“It’s still up to us,” said Larry. “If we can turn that high gulch
+shoulder up ahead before they get out of the timber.... I don’t know
+whether they’d go so far as to try to murder us, but as long as we’re
+out on the bare snow slope we make a pretty plain target, in this
+moonlight.”
+
+That meant more haste, combined with a good bit of uncertainty as
+to the result. The trail had now become a winding zigzag up the
+snow-covered slope, and until it turned to head into one of the higher
+gulches, any object upon it as big as three marching figures and two
+loaded pack animals would stick out like a sore thumb against the white
+background from any lower point of view at the edge of timber line. So
+the question of escape hung once more upon the matter of speed. If they
+could disappear in the gulch before the pursuers reached the foot of
+the snow slope, the worst would be over.
+
+They made it, finally, though by the narrowest possible margin. Just
+after they had urged the blown burros around the projecting rocky
+shoulder which hid them, the three panting climbers turned to look
+back. Down at the edge of the timber, fully five hundred feet below,
+they saw three mounted men push out upon the lower reaches of the
+trail. Larry shifted his rifle from his shoulder to the crook of his
+arm.
+
+“They’re going to try it, anyway,” he said slowly. “If their horses are
+sharp-shod, they may be able to make it. I don’t know but what it’s
+going to come to a fight, after all.”
+
+Contrary to everything Larry had ever known of him, Dick Maxwell was
+the one who counseled patience and a renewed effort to escape.
+
+“I’d hate to see it come to gun-play,” he said. “It would be a pretty
+savage way to start our summer. Let’s not fight until we have to,
+anyway, Larry.”
+
+But Larry Donovan was made of somewhat grimmer stuff.
+
+“Goodness knows, I don’t want to kill anybody,” he protested. “But
+there’s this much about it, and I’m saying it to both of you. These
+wolves mean business. They think they’re on the sure trail of a gold
+mine, and we know what we may expect if they overtake us. If they can
+make the trail on horseback, as they are trying to, right now, it is
+only a question of a little time until they’ll chase us into a corner.”
+
+“Well?” queried Dick. “What have you got up your sleeve?”
+
+“This. As long as we’re climbing the hill, we’ve got the advantage.
+We’ll make the pass if we can, and take cover, if we can find any. I
+don’t want to kill a man, any more than you do, but if they are still
+trying to get at us, we’ll have to take a crack at the horses, in sheer
+self-defense.”
+
+That was the way it was left when they resumed their march along the
+frozen trail whose windings presently led them so far around the
+mountain that they lost sight of the snow slope over which they had
+climbed to reach the high gulch. Before they had headed the gulch
+to come out upon the bare, wind-stripped slope over which the trail
+doubled back toward the pass, the crescent moon which had thus far
+lighted them upon their way began to pale in the first flush of the
+coming dawn. Just ahead they could see the comparatively shallow
+depression in the mountain range which marked their goal, and in a few
+minutes more the toiling ascent was accomplished and they stood on the
+bald summit of the pass.
+
+It was this last ascent that gave them the elevated view-point from
+which they could trace the backward windings of the trail almost all
+the way down to the place where it emerged from the timber. In the
+increasing dawn light they could make out, far below them, the three
+horsemen like black insects crawling along on the snow sheet. While
+they looked, one of the insects paused, appeared to dance for an
+instant, and then disappeared, and they knew that one of the horses had
+slipped from the icy trail to plunge aside into a snowdrift.
+
+“That ought to settle them,” said little Purdick, making a pair of
+shades out of his curved hands to shut out the snow glare, as he
+watched the struggle going on below. “They’ve still got the worst of it
+ahead of them, if they only knew it.”
+
+For a few minutes the three watchers stood motionless, looking on at
+the efforts of the two men who remained on the trail to get their
+submerged comrade out of the drift. When the thing was finally
+accomplished it was at the cost of the loss of a horse. Quite plainly
+they saw the freed and plunging animal break its way out of the drift
+and paw its way up to the surface of hard-frozen crust, only to lose
+its footing and go whirling and sliding down the steep, mile-long
+toboggan slide of the slope below, growing smaller and smaller until at
+last it disappeared entirely.
+
+Dick Maxwell took off his hat and waved it as the three men on the
+trail, leading the two remaining horses, turned and began to creep back
+down the path of hazard which had proved so nearly fatal to at least
+one of them.
+
+“Good-by, you hold-ups!” he shouted, as if he could make himself heard
+over the half-mile or more of intervening height and distance. “Sorry
+you’ve lost your nerve, but we’re mighty glad to see the last of you,
+just the same. Good-by!”
+
+“Don’t you be too sure about having seen the last of them,” Larry put
+in soberly. “If they really believe we can show them the way to the
+Golden Spider, and so give them a chance to ‘jump’ it, they’ll not give
+up so easily. You must remember that the summer is still young.”
+
+“Summer?” said Dick, with a shiver; “it seems as if it might be
+Christmas up here with all this snow.” Then to Purdick, who was untying
+the cooking utensils hanging from Fishbait’s pack saddle: “What’s on
+your mind, Purdy?”
+
+“Coffee,” said Purdick. “I feel as if I’d been up all night. Which pack
+was the solidified alcohol put in?”
+
+Nobody remembered, so there had to be a search made in both jack packs,
+since there was no fuel of any sort on the high, wind-swept barren
+of the pass. The emergency cartridges were found, after a time, and
+Purdick rigged the tripod of the alcohol stove and put a cookerful
+of clean snow on to melt. That done, he began rummaging in the packs
+again, methodically at first, but a little later with feverish haste.
+
+“Tell us what you’re looking for and maybe we can help you find it,”
+said Larry, coming back from a short excursion to the western side of
+the pass where he had been giving the downward trail the once over.
+
+“The book,” Purdick answered gaspingly; “the ‘Dana’ with the maps in
+it! Which one of you put it away?”
+
+“I haven’t seen it since we left Nophi,” was Larry’s rejoinder; and
+Dick also pleaded an _alibi_.
+
+Purdick sank back on his heels and his face was white.
+
+“Didn’t――didn’t either one of you pick it up last night at the canyon
+camp and put it in one of the packs?” he demanded.
+
+“Pick it up? From where?” Dick asked.
+
+“Off the ground. I sat up, reading in it, after you fellows had turned
+in, and when I dropped asleep it fell out of my hands. It was lying
+there beside me while that cripple was going through the packs, and
+I was scared stiff for fear he’d see it and see the map envelope
+sticking out of it. After that, I never thought of it once until this
+minute. It’s gone, and it’s all my fault! I told you two you were
+loading yourselves up with a hoodoo in bringing me along, and this
+proves it. We can’t make a single test without the ‘Dana,’ or locate
+anything without the Government maps. Worse than all, those hold-ups
+will probably find the book on their way back through the canyon, and
+that’ll end it!”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER III
+
+ IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT
+
+
+Consternation was about the only word that fitted when Purdick had told
+the tale of the lost book. What he had said was perfectly true. Though
+they were all three taking engineering courses in college, no one of
+them knew enough about mineralogy as a science to do any practical
+prospecting for metals without a text-book. Besides, there were the
+Government maps; lacking them, they could never locate a claim, so as
+to be able to tell where it was situated, even if they should be lucky
+enough to find one.
+
+At the moment, none of them thought much of the loss of James Brock’s
+little sketch map of the Golden Spider. Uncle Billy Starbuck’s evident
+conviction that the lost mine would never be found unless it was by
+pure accident had its effect; and, anyway, the real business of the
+summer was to be a search for the baser, though not less valuable,
+metals. And unless they could determine the presence of these――as they
+couldn’t hope to without the help of the “Dana,” there was no use in
+going on.
+
+“Well,” said Dick, drawing a long breath, “that fixes us, good and
+plenty. I guess it’s us for a hike back to Nophi, and a wait until we
+can wire for another copy of the book and another set of the Survey
+maps.”
+
+Larry shook his head.
+
+“It’s likely to be a good, long wait. That copy of the ‘Dana’ was the
+only one to be found in Brewster――so the man that sold it to me said;
+and the maps will probably have to come from Washington.”
+
+It was here that little Purdick had his say.
+
+“This crazy break is on me and nobody else,” he cut in. “I had no
+business to forget the book when we were packing up last night. If you
+fellows will wait here for me, I’ll go back after it.”
+
+“A lot of good that would do!” said Dick. “Those three hold-ups will be
+on the trail ahead of you, and you can bet they won’t miss finding the
+book in daylight, if they did overlook it last night.”
+
+“I know,” Purdick went on, “but it’s up to me to try it, just the same.
+I deserve all that’s coming to me.”
+
+At this, both of the others protested vigorously. There was little
+chance that the returning desperadoes wouldn’t find the book as they
+passed the camp site; and Larry and Dick both urged, with a good deal
+of truth, that Purdick was too “soft” to tackle the job; unfit, and too
+unused to roughing it in the open. Purdick let them go on until they
+had talked themselves out, but he wouldn’t give up.
+
+“What you say is so true that it hurts,” he came back. “All the same,
+I’m going. I made the break, and it’s my job to patch it up, if I can.
+All I want to know is whether you’ll wait for me here, or at the foot
+of the pass on the other side.”
+
+Dick and Larry exchanged glances. One of Purdick’s outstanding
+qualities――the one by which he was best known in Old Sheddon――was a
+certain patient, gamey obstinacy that never knew when it was beaten.
+They knew that if he had made up his mind to do penance for his
+neglect by going back, he’d go, no matter what they might say.
+
+Larry took the bull, or rather the dilemma, by the horns.
+
+“It isn’t all on you, Purdy. I sent you down to the big rock last night
+to get the guns, and told you I’d make up your pack. So we can split
+the blame.” Then to Dick: “Think you could navigate these mules of ours
+down the western trail alone?”
+
+“Sure I can,” Dick asserted.
+
+“All right,” Larry went on; “I’ve got a scheme. As I told you, I soaked
+up good and plenty on those Survey maps yesterday, and I believe I can
+find a shorter way back to the canyon than the one the regular trail
+takes around that long loop at the head of the valley. Hustle us a
+quick bite of breakfast, Purdy, and I’ll go along with you. There’s
+just about one chance in a hundred that we may be able to beat those
+hold-ups to it.”
+
+Purdick demurred a little to this, still insisting that the fault was
+his and that he ought to pay the penalty alone. But he did not let
+his objections delay things. The water was boiling, and with the pot
+of coffee made, a few slices of bacon fried over the alcohol blaze,
+and a box of biscuits opened, they bolted a hasty breakfast. With the
+draining of the coffee pot the plan of action was outlined.
+
+Since there was no feed for the burros on the barren pass, Larry’s
+suggestion that Dick go on down the western slope with the pack animals
+had to be accepted, so it was arranged that he was to push on, stopping
+to wait for Larry and Purdick to catch up when he should reach the
+first good grazing ground for the jacks.
+
+“We ought to be able to overtake you by to-night, or early to-morrow
+morning, at the latest,” Larry said, “but if we don’t show up as soon
+as you think we ought to, don’t worry. We’ll do the best we can, and
+we’re going to travel mighty light.” And to prove it he discarded
+shoulder pack, rifle and ammunition, taking only a small camp axe for
+equipment, while Purdick took provisions enough for two meals in a
+light haversack, and nothing else.
+
+“There’s only one thing the matter with this lay-out of ours,” Dick
+said, as his companions were preparing to leave him. “Suppose you don’t
+find the book where Purdy dropped it――what then?”
+
+That was a sort of an _impasse_ to give them pause, as the old writers
+used to say. If they shouldn’t find the book, they would be worse
+off than ever. But Larry Donovan was of the breed of those who cross
+bridges when they come to them――and not before.
+
+“We’ve got to take a chance on that;” he said quickly. “You can’t keep
+the jacks here all day with nothing to eat; they’ve got to either go
+on or go back. We’ll be with you again by to-morrow morning, book or
+no book. And then, if we haven’t got what we went after, we can decide
+what is best to do. Come on, Purdy. We’re losing precious time.”
+
+The start was made without more ado, but instead of taking the trail
+over which they had reached the pass, Larry led the way around the
+sloping shoulder of the northern peak, kicking himself footholds in the
+frozen snow crust, and thereby taking long chances, as he well knew,
+of breaking through into some bottomless drift.
+
+“Step light and walk in my tracks, and for Pat’s sake don’t slip!”
+he called back to Purdick; but the caution was hardly needed.
+Purdick still had a vivid mental picture of the freed horse of the
+hold-ups whirling and slipping and shooting down to oblivion over the
+skating-rink surface of the snow slope, and he was all claws to clutch
+and hang as he followed Larry around the steepest part of the shoulder.
+
+Past the steep shoulder they came out upon what the Alpine climbers
+called an _arrêté_; a ridge sloping gently down and roughly paralleling
+the main range on their left and Lost Canyon on the right and far
+below. This ridge was what Larry had been aiming for. Its rocky crest
+had been blown clear of the winter snows; it was taking them in the
+right direction; there was good footing; and the descent was rapid
+enough to let them take a dog-trot without cutting their wind too
+severely.
+
+“Don’t let me wear you out,” Larry cautioned; “but here’s where we’ve
+got to make time, if we’re going to beat those plug-uglies back to our
+camp site in the canyon. Are you good for the dog-trot?”
+
+“Plenty good, so long as it’s down-hill,” panted the runner-up. “But
+I don’t see where we’re making anything. We can never get down to the
+canyon off of this thing.”
+
+“Wait,” Larry flung back, “and I’ll show you.”
+
+From the top of the high ridge they could get occasional glimpses of
+the trail winding down the deep valley to the canyon head, and one
+of these glimpses gave them a sight of the baffled hold-ups making
+their way slowly along the slippery path, two riding and one walking;
+mere black dots they were, visible only because the dazzling white
+surroundings made them so.
+
+“We’re breaking even with ’em!” said Larry, lengthening the stride of
+the dog-trot by imperceptible degrees. “They’ve got a good mile of the
+snow trail to crawl over yet, and then another mile of the slush and
+mud. I believe we’re going to make it, after all.”
+
+“Yes; but we’re a mile above the canyon, and this ridge will never take
+us down to it!” Purdick gasped out.
+
+“Wait, and you’ll see,” was all Larry would say; but as he ran he was
+studying the lay of the land harder than he had ever boned Math. in the
+college year which had just ended. Far down the ridge little patches of
+dark green showed where a straggling vanguard of the firs had pushed
+its way a full half-mile above the normal timber, and it was toward the
+scattering and stunted trees that he was directing their flight.
+
+“If you can manage to hold out until we get to those trees,” he called
+back to the lagging runner-up. “Think you can do it?”
+
+Little Purdick didn’t stop to think; he was putting the whole battery
+of mind and will upon the business of keeping his legs waggling. Long
+before the tree patches were reached, those legs had become base
+deserters from the animal kingdom and had gone over bodily to the
+vegetable. Pumping for breath like a spent miler on a cinder path,
+Purdick could fancy that his legs were mere blocks of wood hung in
+some mysterious manner to his body by hinges that were sadly in need
+of oiling. But, just the same, they continued to waggle. That was the
+main thing.
+
+None the less, when the race for Larry’s goal was won, Purdick was
+done, finished, _écrasé_, as our French friends would put it. Dropping
+down upon the snow crust, he could do nothing but gasp and groan, not
+so much from sheer exhaustion as in bitterness of heart because he had
+such scanty reserves of strength and endurance.
+
+“That’s right; take it easy,” said Larry, whipping the short-handled
+axe from his belt. “This next shift is a one-man job.” And as he spoke
+he attacked first one and then another of the stunted trees with
+the axe and hacked them down in a few handy blows. “There are the
+toboggans,” he jerked out; “now for the brakes,” and in a few minutes
+more he had two smaller trees down and trimmed to bare sticks with
+stubby branches left at the butts and the stubs sharpened to points.
+
+Purdick sat up, rubbing the calves of his legs.
+
+“Great Peter!” he exclaimed; “do you mean that we’re going to slide
+down on those trees?”
+
+Larry chuckled.
+
+“You’re one fine little guesser, Purdy; I’ll say that much for you.
+I’ll bet you haven’t had a sled ride since you were a little kid, but
+you’re going to have one now――the kind that you’ll talk about after you
+get old and toothless and take your youngest grandchild on your knee to
+tell it what a daring little old rooster you used to be in your younger
+days.”
+
+“But, for mercy’s sake, Larry!――it’s a mile down to that timber, and it
+looks like ten! When we hit those big trees――――”
+
+“I know; you’ll say there won’t be anything left of us. But we’ll
+have to risk something if we want to beat those fellows on the trail.
+It’s our only chance. And I’m betting largely upon these brake sticks.
+You take the stick under your arm, so, and lean back hard on it if you
+find yourself going too fast. The sun’s getting a little work in on the
+crust now, and I’m hoping that these stubby branches will cut in deep
+enough to do the braking act.”
+
+“I’m still game,” said Purdick, getting up like an old, old man and
+helping Larry to swing the cut-down trees into position with the butts
+pointing down the steep slope. And then, as one who knows he has to be
+slain and wishes to have it over with: “Let me go first, and you can
+come along afterwards and gather up the remains.”
+
+“Nothing like it,” said Larry firmly. “I’ve done this thing before, and
+you haven’t. You watch me go, and then do exactly as I do.” And with
+that, he straddled his tree, took the steering stick under his arm and
+shoved off.
+
+Little Purdick had held his breath so many times during the past
+twenty-four hours that he did it now quite automatically. To his
+town-bred notion, Larry was simply committing suicide, or so it seemed
+as the big bunch of evergreen, with Larry riding it, hurled itself down
+the first steep declivity, utterly out of control――it appeared; and
+it was not until the tree and its rider were a mere flying dot in the
+lower distance that Purdick could summon the nerve to mount his own
+vehicle and push it off.
+
+Of what happened to him in the next sixty seconds or so he never had
+a very clear picture. There was no working up to speed; no interval
+in which to grow up to the crowding sensations of the thing. With a
+slithering hiss the makeshift sled was off, and at the first downward
+dash the brake stick caught in the crust, ripped a furrow apparently a
+mile long, and was then torn out of his grasp. With nothing to lean on,
+Purdick whirled over on his face and took a death grip on the branches
+of the tree, burying his arms to the shoulders in the foliage. In the
+one brief glimpse he had of the backward rushing steep he saw great
+slabs of the snow crust, torn up by the hooking brake stick, following
+him down in a cataracting procession; the next thing he knew there was
+a crash as if a blast had gone off under him, and Larry was stooping
+over him, laughing and trying to break that grim death-hold of the
+clamping arms.
+
+“Let go, you old cockleburr!” he chuckled. “You can’t take that tree
+with you where we’re going. Don’t you know that?”
+
+Purdick sat up and made a valiant effort to get once more in touch with
+things ordinary and commonplace.
+
+“S-say, Larry,” he whispered, “what was it that blew up and stopped me?”
+
+Larry was laughing again.
+
+“I guess you were the only thing that blew up. But it was that big pine
+you’re looking at that stopped you. You hit it as square as if you were
+steering for it. Shake you up much?”
+
+“No; I guess I’m all here yet,” said Purdick, rolling off his tree
+sled. “But believe me, Larry, that was some ride!”
+
+“Fifty-eight seconds; I timed you by my wrist watch. Did it seem as
+long as that――or longer?”
+
+Purdick shook his head. “You can’t prove anything by me. After I lost
+my stick I just shut my eyes and came. Whereabouts are we?”
+
+“Not more than a couple of miles from our camp site and a few hundred
+feet above the trail――if I’ve kept my reckoning. But let’s be on our
+way. We are ahead of those rustlers now, and we want to keep ahead. If
+we move right along, we may not have to do any more sprinting.”
+
+“Here’s hoping,” said little Purdick, stifling a groan as he began once
+more to swing the vegetable-kingdom legs. “That run on top of the ridge
+just about put me to sleep from the waist down.”
+
+“You’ll harden up, after we’ve been out a few days,” Larry predicted;
+and then he set a course diagonally through the forest. In a very
+short time they came to the thawing zone, first slushy snow and then
+mud, and springy morass, bad going that slowed them down in spite of
+all the care they could take in picking their way. But this, too, was
+left behind in the course of time, and at last they found themselves
+skirting the canyon on a high bench-like plateau thickly carpeted with
+the fir needles and densely shaded by the primeval trees.
+
+Here, where their hurrying footsteps made no sound, they could hear
+the riffle and splash of the stream in the gorge below, and it was
+Purdick’s quick ear that presently detected other noises――namely, the
+well-remembered clink of horseshoes upon stone.
+
+“Glory!” he exclaimed, closing up swiftly upon his file leader,
+“they’re coming! We lost so much time back there in the mud that
+they’ve overtaken us!”
+
+“How about those legs of yours?” said Larry over his shoulder.
+
+“They’ll run――they’ve _got_ to run!” gasped Purdick. “Pitch out, and
+I’ll try to keep you in sight.”
+
+Luckily, this last race was a short one. A scant quarter of a mile
+farther on they came to the park-like opening where their camp had been
+pitched, and in another minute they were sliding down to the little
+flat where they had built their fire and spread the beds of fir tips.
+
+The lost book was there, lying on the ground at the roots of the big
+tree, just where it had fallen from Purdick’s hands. If the night
+raiders had had a light of any sort, they could hardly have helped
+seeing it. But they had probably meant to make their attack a surprise,
+for which the moon was then giving sufficient light, and, finding the
+fire out and the camp deserted, had doubtless begun the pursuit at once.
+
+Larry, being about two jumps ahead of Purdick, snatched up the book,
+and whirling quickly with arms outspread, swept his slighter companion
+back into the shelter of the wood.
+
+“They’re coming――they’re right here!” he hissed; and they had barely
+time to fling themselves down under a low-growing tree when the three
+men appeared on the trail leading from the upper canyon and halted in
+the little intervale.
+
+From where they lay under the drooping branches of the friendly little
+tree the two boys could see their late pursuers quite plainly. The
+cripple was riding one of the horses, with his crutch thrust under the
+saddle leather. The one the cripple had called “Dowling” was riding the
+other horse, and the third, the biggest of the three, was afoot.
+
+At the halt the cripple barked a command at the one who was walking.
+
+“Take a look at their camp and see if they’ve left anything worth
+swipin’, Bart,” he said; and the big man lounged up to the wood
+edge, kicked at the remains of the fire, turned the beds over with an
+investigative foot, and even went so far as to stoop and look around
+under the low-spreading branches of the nearer trees. As he did this,
+it was only Larry’s quick wit that saved them from certain discovery.
+With a swift premonition of what the man was going to do, he reached
+up and pulled one of the low-hanging branches of the little tree down
+so that its foliage screened them perfectly. But for that, the peering
+robber must have seen them.
+
+“Nothin’ doin’,” said the man gruffly as he straightened up; and a few
+seconds later the two riders and their foot follower had gone on to
+disappear around a jutting cliff in the canyon.
+
+“Gee, Larry, but that was a close one!” sighed little Purdick, after
+the clinking hoofbeats had died away into silence. Then: “I guess I’ll
+have to have something done to my old heart. It makes altogether too
+much noise when there’s anything due to happen. Why, if that big thief
+had been listening half as sharply as he was looking, he could have
+heard it as plain as a trap-drum! What do we do next?”
+
+Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was still only the middle of the
+forenoon.
+
+“I was just thinking,” he said. “We’ll have to go back to the pass by
+the trail, and the middle of the day is going to be the worst time to
+hit the snow. The wet pack will be as slippery as grease, and we’ll be
+pretty sure to get snow-blind with the noon glare. Suppose we go back
+in the woods a piece and bed down and catch up on a little of the sleep
+that we lost last night. How does that strike you?”
+
+“It strikes me right where I live,” said Purdick, yawning in the mere
+anticipation of a rest halt. “I suppose there is no danger of those
+rascals coming back?”
+
+“Not the least in the world. What they’ll do if they really mean
+business――as I’m much afraid they do――will be to go down to Nophi and
+outfit the same as we have for a trip over the range. It’s perfectly
+plain that they believe they have a sure pointer on the whereabouts
+of the Golden Spider through us, and, as I told Dick, I don’t believe
+we’ve seen the last of them. But that’s a future. Let’s hunt us a hole
+and turn in.”
+
+The hole-hunting was a short process. A few hundred yards above their
+former camping place they found a little dell under the trees where
+the fallen needles of many seasons lay a foot deep. There is no better
+wilderness bed when the fir needles are dry, and within a very few
+minutes after they had stretched out on the fragrant, springy carpet,
+each with his locked hands under his head for a pillow, they were
+asleep.
+
+During his year in college, Larry had often said that he had an alarm
+clock in his head, proving the assertion by his ability to wake up at
+any given hour in the night merely by fixing that hour in his mind
+before going to sleep. Upon this day-nap occasion in the Lost Canyon
+wood he set the alarm for three o’clock, and, true to his boast, it
+lacked but a few minutes of three when he sat up and rubbed his eyes
+and looked around sleepily to try to make out where he was and how he
+came to be there.
+
+It all came back in a moment, and he reached over to shake Purdick, who
+was still sleeping like a log.
+
+“Wake up, Purdy,” he said. “Time to eat a bite o’ pie.”
+
+Purdick came up with a snap. “Gee!” he yawned; “I sure did cork it orf
+in me ’ammick that time! How long have we been at it?”
+
+“Six hours solid. And I’m as hungry as a wolf. Let’s see what you’ve
+got in that haversack.”
+
+The eatables were produced and they fell to like famished savages.
+Purdick had provided pretty liberally, but what with the early
+breakfast, the hard travelling that had followed it, and the lapse of
+time, they didn’t leave much of what Purdick had thought would suffice
+for at least two meals.
+
+“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Larry, meaning the gorging which
+left only a couple of bacon sandwiches for that possible second meal.
+“We’ll catch up with our supplies by late supper-time, at the very
+worst, and I know you’d rather carry your share of the grub under your
+belt than in the haversack.”
+
+“I sure would,” Purdick admitted. He had never before known what it was
+to have such a gorgeous appetite as the mountain air was already giving
+him. “I see where we’re never going to be able to stay out all summer
+without back-tracking to civilization for more eats every few minutes.”
+
+Larry laughed and sprang afoot.
+
+“Just now we’re going to back-track to Mule-Ear Pass. Feel up to it?”
+
+“I feel up to anything. As the fellow says in that old English stuff
+that the English Prof. made us take for side-reading last winter: ‘Fate
+can not harm me――I have dined.’ Let’s get a move and have it over with.”
+
+That was a simple way of stating it: “Let’s get a move and have it over
+with,” like swallowing a dose of medicine. But there were a good many
+wearisome moves to be made before they won up to the final ascending
+loop in the snow trail, and they saw now――had been seeing ever since
+they struck the snow path――how impossible it would have been to get the
+burros up the mountain in the thawing daytime.
+
+They had been talking about this, and their good luck in being warned
+beforehand by Mr. Broadwick in Nophi, when Larry said:
+
+“I hope Dick didn’t have any trouble going down on the other side. I’ll
+bet it’s no one-man job to get a packed burro out of a drift if it
+breaks through where there’s any depth.”
+
+“I should say not,” Purdick agreed. “But I guess Dick made it all
+right. What I’m wondering is how far he had to go before he could pull
+up and wait for us.”
+
+“It won’t be long, now, before we’ll find out how far he had to go,”
+said Larry, and they went on toiling up the last of the slippery grades.
+
+By the time they had topped the pass and had their first good look
+over into the mountain wilderness beyond, the sun had gone behind the
+high-lifted crests of the Little Hophras. What they saw between the two
+ranges was a roughly tumbled intervale which could hardly be called a
+park because it was so cut up by spurs from the surrounding mountains.
+It was rather a series of parks, some wooded and some bare, with a
+scattering of the great rounded hills known from Montana to Arizona as
+buttes.
+
+To their great comfort they saw that the snow did not extend nearly as
+far down the western slope of their range as it did on the eastern; as
+a matter of fact, they had gone scarcely a mile down the descending
+trail before they were out of the snow belt altogether, and with only a
+narrow zone of the stiffening slush and mud to cross before they came
+to good going again.
+
+With the snow trail left behind, and no signs on it to indicate that
+Dick had had any trouble negotiating it with the burros, they were
+expecting to overtake him at every turn in the descending path. But
+the expectation seemed to be in no hurry to get itself fulfilled. Turn
+after turn was made, and still there was nothing to show that Dick had
+passed that way.
+
+By this time sunset was fully come, and though there was a fine
+afterglow on the peaks, the dusk was falling rapidly in the canyons and
+valleys.
+
+“I don’t like this,” said Larry, halting at last in a little grassy
+glade. “Dick had no reason to try to make distance on us. And he
+wouldn’t go far enough from the trail so that he couldn’t watch for us.
+I wish we had one of the guns so we could signal to him.”
+
+Purdick had crossed to the farther side of the glade and was stirring
+something on the ground with the toe of his boot.
+
+“Somebody’s been here,” he said. “Here are the ashes of a fire.”
+
+Larry joined him quickly and stooped to lay his hand on the ashes.
+
+“They’re cold,” he announced. “But somebody has had a fire here within
+a few hours. If it was Dick, why didn’t he stay here? And if it was
+somebody else――――” The sentence was broken because he was down on his
+hands and knees looking for tracks in the short-grass turf. It didn’t
+take him long, poor as the fading light was, to find tiny hoofprints
+in the soft soil. “It was Dick’s fire,” he said definitely. “He has
+been here, and he built the fire――and when he went away he didn’t put
+it out.”
+
+“Well,” queried Purdick, “what does that mean?”
+
+“It means just one of two things, Purdy: either Dick had some reason
+for leaving in a hurry, or else he was made to leave.”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. That fire went out of
+itself――burned out; you can see that by the ashes. And Dick is too good
+a woodsman to go off and leave his camp-fire burning unless he had a
+mighty good reason for it.”
+
+Purdick was feeling in the haversack, which contained only the
+mineralogy book and two biscuit sandwiches. What he said showed that he
+was still too much of a townsman to suspect that anything serious had
+happened to Dick Maxwell.
+
+“Gee!” he exclaimed. “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much over yonder in the
+canyon. Dick has vanished with the grub, and it’s getting dark, and
+we’ve got just two sandwiches to chew on. I call that pathetic.”
+
+“Wake up!” said Larry sharply. “We’ve got to find Dick, and do it
+_now_――not because we haven’t enough grub for supper, but because it
+looks as if Dick is in trouble of some sort! Get down here and help me
+to find out which way these burro tracks are pointing. Get busy, quick,
+before the light is entirely gone!”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV
+
+ DADDY LONGBEARD
+
+
+When Dick Maxwell was left alone on the summit of Mule-Ear Pass, he
+watched his two companions running along the spur ridge as long as he
+could see them. But after they were fairly out of sight he began to get
+ready for the descent of the western trail.
+
+When he attacked it, he found the downward trail on the western slope
+much less difficult than that over which they had gained the pass from
+the east. So, by the time the daily thaw was setting in, Dick had his
+two-jack train well down into the timber and was casting about for a
+good place in which to camp and wait for Larry and Purdick.
+
+Oddly enough, as he thought, the good places were slow in revealing
+themselves. Upon leaving the snow slopes and entering the timber, the
+little-used trail, after crossing and recrossing the little torrent in
+the gulch a number of times, seemed to fade out gradually. Being only a
+sort of apprentice pathfinder, Dick didn’t notice the fading at first.
+What he was looking for was a bit of grass for the burros in a place
+where Larry and Purdick would have no trouble in finding it, and him,
+when they should come over the mountain.
+
+It was getting pretty well along toward noon when Dick began to wonder
+if something wasn’t wrong. For one thing, the trail seemed to have
+disappeared entirely, and for another, he suddenly realized that the
+noise of the stream, which he had been holding in the back of his mind
+as a guide, had been gradually growing fainter and fainter until now he
+couldn’t hear it at all.
+
+Plainly, it was time to call a halt and do a little thinking. Though he
+had been taking it easy, and letting the jacks do the same, he knew he
+must have covered considerable distance in the course of the forenoon.
+And every added mile he was traveling was making it just that much
+harder for Larry and Purdick to overtake and find him. Moreover, the
+little pack beasts couldn’t go on forever without feeding. He must find
+grass, and find it soon, or the burros would suffer.
+
+Having reached that sensible conclusion, he hitched the patient little
+animals to a tree, and made a wide circuit in search of a patch of
+grass. Luckily, he soon found one in a little open glade, and to this
+he drove the burros, relieved them of the packs, and turned them loose
+to graze.
+
+Munching his own midday meal while the jacks were feeding, Dick did
+some more thinking. Little by little the conviction that he had lost
+his way grew upon him, and the consequences began to loom up. Since he
+himself had packed their haversack, he knew that Larry and Purdick had
+barely enough for two meals. If he and the provisions were lost so that
+the two who had been left behind couldn’t find them, they’d go hungry.
+
+Confronted by this nettlesome fact, Dick ate his own dinner hurriedly.
+The only thing to do was to turn back and find out where he had left
+the trail. But when he came to consider this matter of back-tracking,
+confusion set in. In which direction had he wandered? Was the stream
+he had been following to the left or to the right?
+
+He was swallowing the last mouthful of biscuit and cold bacon when the
+confusion of ideas climaxed in the admission that he didn’t know which
+side of the stream he had crossed to last. There had been a number
+of the crossings, and he hadn’t taken any notice of the particular
+direction he was going. It was a bemuddling state of affairs, but the
+need for action was none the less pressing. Larry and Purdick mustn’t
+be left to wander all over the lot, famine-stricken, just because their
+provision freighter hadn’t had sense enough to stay where he could be
+found.
+
+Dick got the packs ready and waited impatiently for the burros to fill
+up. They were doing their hungry best; anybody could see that. Still,
+it was taking time.
+
+“Chew――chew fast, you little beggars!” he grumbled at them, stretching
+himself out on a bed of fir needles and watching them as they cropped.
+“We’ve got to be making tracks out of this, if you did but know it.”
+
+Now, when one has lost half a night’s sleep, and, on the heels of
+the loss, has tramped up one side of a mountain and down the other,
+a bed of dry conifer needles is likely to prove a pretty subtle
+temptation――not to go to sleep, of course, with the urgencies making
+it perfectly plain that one really mustn’t do that, but just to close
+one’s eyes and doze for a minute or two. Dick locked his hands under
+his head and lay gazing at the industrious burros. He had to look down
+his nose to see them, and that, too, is dangerous, if one doesn’t
+mean to go to sleep. Two or three times he found his eyes closing
+automatically; and at last, with the thought that he might just as
+well doze off for the half-hour that it would take the jacks to fill
+themselves up, he was gone.
+
+That was that. But, unlike Larry, Dick had no alarm clock in the back
+part of his head that he could set to go off promptly at the end of
+half an hour. Quietly in the silence of the little glade, which was
+broken only by the industrious grazing of the little pack beasts, the
+half-hour slipped by, and then another and yet another.
+
+The burros had finished the filling-up process and were beginning to
+sniff the air for water. Inch by inch the tree shadows lengthened as
+the good old earth turned over in its daily wallop, and still Dick
+slept on. When he was finally awakened by one of the jacks nosing him
+over to find out if he were anything that a donkey could top off with
+by way of dessert, he leaped up with a yell and looked at his watch. It
+was nearly five o’clock. He had lost over four hours of the day!
+
+Reproaching himself remorsefully for having been so heedless as to go
+to sleep on his job, Dick hustled the pack saddles into place, loaded
+them, and was ready to hike. Since all directions looked alike to him,
+he set off, with the westering sun at his back, thinking that that
+course must at least take him, sooner or later, to the upper edge of
+the timber where at the worst he could get a wider look at things than
+could be had in the forest.
+
+But he had scarcely got the small procession in motion before he began
+to have trouble with the jacks. Though they had hitherto gone on
+amiably enough in any direction they happened to be headed, they now
+seemed determined to edge away to the left. Again and again Dick pushed
+and dragged them back into the uphill path, but before he could take
+his place at the tail of the procession they would be crabbing aside
+and circling――always in the same direction.
+
+“Aye――Fishbait; what’s the matter with you?” he shouted at the leading
+burro; and then, all at once, he knew. The jacks had had a feed, but
+no water. And now they were smelling water somewhere to the left and
+wanted to go to it.
+
+“All right, little donks!” he said, laughing at his own dullness; “I
+guess you know what’s what better than I do. Find the creek and get
+your drink, and then we’ll follow it back to where the trail begins to
+show up for us again.”
+
+As it turned out, it was only a short distance, as wilderness distances
+go, to the water the burros had been so anxious to reach; but, by the
+same token, the sun was now sinking pretty fast, and Dick saw that
+he would have to hurry if he wanted to get anywhere before the early
+forest dusk should overtake him. Accordingly, as soon as the burros had
+had their drink, he headed them up the stream, congratulating himself
+that the way out of the lost tangle had been found so easily.
+
+Again that was that. But before he had gone very far in the new
+direction that old saying about not laughing until you are out of the
+wood began to suggest itself. He tried to tell himself that it was all
+right; that he had found the creek, and if he should follow it up far
+enough it was bound to take him back to the trail. Just the same, there
+was nothing at all familiar in the surroundings, and the creek itself
+looked different.
+
+Still, there was nothing to do but to push on, and he was doing it
+industriously a full hour later when the daylight quit on him and he
+saw that it was no use trying to go much farther. Camping for the
+night seemed the only thing left for him to do, but when he thought of
+stopping he was a good bit worried. There were still no signs of the
+lost trail, and nothing in the least rememberable in what he could see
+of the landscape.
+
+This was the condition of affairs when, rounding a sharp turn in the
+creek ravine, he saw a light up ahead. In the distance it looked as
+if it might be a fireplace fire shining out through the open door of
+a cabin. A fire and a cabin meant at least two mighty welcome things,
+just then: human companionship, and a chance to find out where he had
+wandered to.
+
+Being Western born and bred, Dick thought he was pretty well prepared
+for anything that might jump up in the woods, however strange it might
+appear at first sight. But the man who came to the cabin door at his
+shouted: “Hello, the house!” presented a picture that was almost
+startling. Tall, stoop-shouldered, with a shock of hair as white as
+snow, and a great white beard that reached fully to his waist, Dick
+could think of nothing to compare him to except a picture in the
+“Arabian Nights”――the Old Man of the Sea. But the resemblance to that
+horrific personage vanished instantly when a voice, as gentle as a
+woman’s, said:
+
+“Well, hello, stranger! ’Light and come in. Ye’re welcome as sunshine.
+I hain’t seed a livin’ human sence the good Lord knows when!”
+
+Dick didn’t know what he was to alight from, being already on his feet,
+but he did know the customary Southern salutation which usually applies
+to a person on horseback.
+
+“You’re not any gladder than I am,” he laughed. “I guess I’m lost good
+and plenty. Wait until I can take the packs off the burros, and――――”
+
+“Shore enough!” said the gentle old voice. “Didn’t see that ye had a
+couple o’ jacks. Reckon my old eyes ain’t so good as they used to be.”
+And he hobbled out and helped Dick to get the packs off.
+
+Once in the cabin and seated before the open fire, Dick unburdened
+himself――partly. He told how he and his companions had come over the
+pass together and that Larry and Purdick had gone back after a book
+that had been overlooked when they broke camp in Lost Canyon. But he
+didn’t say anything about the race with the would-be hold-ups.
+
+The old man was chuckling gravely when the tale was finished.
+
+“So ye rambled round in the woods and got lost, did ye? Well, now――ye
+shore did it right and proper! You’re a good ten mile from the Mule-Ear
+trail, right this minute. Been travelin’ away from it ever sence ye got
+down the mount’in, I reckon.”
+
+Dick jumped as if he had been shot.
+
+“Good goodness!” he ejaculated. And then: “I’ve got to get back to it
+some way, to-night! Those fellows will have a fit if they don’t find
+me! Besides, they took only a snack with them and they won’t have
+anything to eat. I’ve got all the camp duffle and grub! I thought, all
+the time, I was working back toward the trail as I came up the creek.”
+
+“Ye would’ve been, if ye’d hit the right creek,” said the patriarch
+mildly. “This ain’t Silver Creek――that comes down from the pass gulch;
+it’s a branch that runs into Silver about twelve mile west. Reckon ye
+must’ve crossed over from one to t’other when ye was ramblin’.”
+
+“Sure!” said Dick, astonished and provoked to think that he hadn’t had
+any better sense of direction. “But you see how it is? I’ve got to get
+back, dark or no dark, and if you’ll just let me cook a pot of coffee
+over your fire――――”
+
+“Sho, now!” said the old man; “you lemme talk a spell. I could p’int
+ye right, but ye never _would_ find your way over to Silver in the
+dark; ain’t right shore I could do it myself. You listen to ol’ Daddy
+Longbeard: you jest camp down with me for the night, and right early in
+the mornin’ I’ll set ye on your way. Them boys ye tell about’ll make
+out to take care o’ theirselves for one night, I reckon.”
+
+Dick hesitated. Now that he had found somebody who could direct him, at
+least in a general way, it seemed all the more needful that he should
+eat and run. But on the other hand, the burros had had a long day,
+counting from the start out of Lost Canyon, and they needed the night
+halt――to say nothing of himself. Again, there was something almost
+pathetic in the way the old man pressed his invitation. Dick tried to
+imagine how it would seem to him if he hadn’t seen a living human since
+the good Lord knew when.
+
+“I guess maybe you’re right,” he said at length. “It’s more than likely
+that I’d get lost again in the dark. If you’re sure it won’t be any
+trouble to you to have me stay――――”
+
+“Trouble? None such! I’ll shore take it mighty handsome if ye’ll stay
+and lemme see if I’ve forgot how to talk to folks. But I reckon ye’re
+hongry. Set down and I’ll give ye what I’ve got, and right welcome.”
+
+“Nothing like that!” said Dick. “We’ll open the packs and the supper
+will be on me. We’re grub-staked for a good long time.”
+
+That was the beginning of a real, old-time, sociable evening. Over the
+supper which was presently cooked, Dick told his old entertainer all
+about the plans for the summer outing, what the three were going to
+look for――and hoped they might be able to find.
+
+“Jest listen!” said the patriarch musingly, after Dick had rattled off
+the names of half a dozen of the rare metals, tungsten, molybdenum,
+vanadium, chromium and so on. “All them there minerals that I never
+even heerd the names of. Us old back numbers don’t know nothin’ but
+gold and silver, and maybe copper and lead. The world shore do move.
+How are ye aimin’ to tell these here what-you-may-call-’em minerals
+when you find ’em?”
+
+At this, Dick gave a little class-room lecture on field tests; how one
+examined a specimen by its lustre, hardness, color, streak and weight,
+and how a few simple blowpipe tests could also be made with no more
+apparatus than any prospector might easily carry with him.
+
+To all of this the old man listened with a sort of wistful curiosity.
+Though he had said little about himself, Dick knew, of course, that
+he must be either a miner or a prospector; there could be no other
+reason for his living a hermit life in the mountains. From his earliest
+childhood Dick had been hearing stories of men who buried themselves in
+the wilds, digging year after year in some prospect shaft or tunnel,
+and coming out to the towns only when the “grub-stake” was exhausted
+and money had to be earned to buy more. The interior of the little log
+cabin had every appearance of age and long occupancy. The rafters were
+smoke-begrimed and the fireplace showed the wear and tear of many fires.
+
+“Ye shore are tellin’ me a heap o’ things I never knowed, son,” said
+the old man, when Dick paused, “and I jest been a-wonderin’. Are ye too
+nigh wore out to take a li’l’ climb up the hill?”
+
+“Not at all,” said Dick; then, with his own good-natured grin: “Want to
+show me your mine?”
+
+“Huh!” said the patriarch; “how’d ye know I got a mine?”
+
+“That’s easy,” Dick laughed. “You wouldn’t be living out here alone if
+you hadn’t.”
+
+Without another word the old man took down an old-fashioned lantern
+from its peg on the wall and lighted it.
+
+“I’m allowin’ maybe you might help me some,” he said, in the same
+half-wistful tone. “You’re a sort of a minin’ ingineer, ain’t ye?”
+
+“Nothing like it,” Dick denied, with another laugh. “I’ve just finished
+my first year in college, and I’m not taking ‘Mining,’ at that. But my
+father owns a half-interest in a gold mine in the Timanyoni, so I’m not
+exactly a tenderfoot. If I can help you, I’ll be glad to.”
+
+“Lemme show ye,” said his host, and together they left the cabin and,
+turning aside from the bed of the little stream, climbed a rocky
+steep beside a huge dump which looked, even in the starlight, like an
+enormous gray beard hanging from the mountain side.
+
+At the top of the dump the old man led the way into a tunnel, a sizable
+hole driven, as the lantern light showed, into the solid granite.
+Once they were fairly inside, the old man lighted a miner’s candle
+and put the lantern aside. With the better illumination they pushed
+on into the heart of the mountain. As they went deeper and deeper,
+Dick marveled at the proof of tireless industry the tunnel exhibited.
+It was roomy enough to admit of the old man’s walking upright in it,
+tall as he was, and Dick could see that the rock through which it was
+driven was of the hardest. Some two hundred feet back from the entrance
+the drift widened out into an irregular-shaped cavern, and the old man
+stopped and waved his candle to show the size of the opening.
+
+“Right here’s where I lost the vein――pinched out on me slick and
+clean,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been plum’ shore she was a true
+fissure, I reckon I might’ve quit short off. But I kep’ on till she
+showed up again, away over here,” and he led Dick to a corner of the
+cavern where the tunnel began again, this time pitching down as well as
+on into the mountain.
+
+Another two hundred feet was covered down the steepish incline before
+they came to the end of things, and Dick wondered how the old man ever
+stood it to wheelbarrow the broken-rock “spoil” up the long grade and
+out to the dump. But nothing is too hard for one who has been bitten
+by the precious-metal bug, and that the old hermit had been so bitten
+was shown by the eager enthusiasm with which he passed the candle
+flame over the face of the rock wall in which the tunnel ended, making
+the light follow the crooked course of a thin, dark-colored seam that
+extended diagonally up and down it.
+
+“There she is,” he said excitedly. “That’s what I’ve been follerin’ for
+four solid years――takin’ out the winters that I’ve had to work in the
+smelter to get money for to buy the grub-stakes.”
+
+Dick wasn’t particularly soft-hearted, but the thing almost moved him
+to tears. Here was a man, evidently nearing the end of a long life,
+digging and burrowing in the heart of a great mountain year after year,
+working tremendously, as one must to make any headway in solid rock,
+and with only this thin, knife-blade seam of a vein to lead him on.
+
+“Good goodness!” he exclaimed, catching his breath; then, forgetting
+his grammar completely: “Is that all the thicker it is?”
+
+“Right now it is,” said the old man. “But it’s been a heap thicker’n
+that sometimes; been as much as a half-inch in two-three places.”
+
+“But see here!” Dick exploded; “a half-inch of ore isn’t anything! Why,
+good gracious――it would have to be all pure gold or silver to pay with
+that thickness!”
+
+“Shore; I know,” said the patriarch serenely. “But I’m hopin’ she’s a
+true fissure. I allowed maybe, with your book-learnin’, ye could tell
+me for certain shore if she _is_ a true fissure.”
+
+“I can’t,” said Dick; “but what difference does it make whether it is
+or isn’t a true fissure?”
+
+“Huh!” said the old man patiently. “Hain’t yer schoolin’ teached ye
+that? Don’t ye know that a true fissure _allus_ widens out if ye go
+down deep enough on it?”
+
+True enough, Dick did know; not, indeed, the fact as the old miner
+stated it, but the other fact that a great many of the older prospectors
+firmly believed it. But he hadn’t the heart to say that modern mining
+studies had proved that the “widening” didn’t always follow as a
+necessity.
+
+“Black sulphuret of silver――argentite――isn’t it?” he said, digging a
+bit of the vein matter from the seam with the point of his pocket knife.
+
+“You named her right, son. And she’s all-fired rich, what there is of
+her. Some o’ these days, maybe, one o’ the holes I’m drillin’ ’ll bring
+her down a foot wide, and then――――”
+
+Dick, born and brought up in a region where mines and mining were as
+the daily bread, knew well the picture of ease and comfort and luxury
+the “and then” was bringing up in the old man’s mind. Taking the
+candle, he passed it up and down the face of the heading. At no point
+was the vein of argentite much thicker than the back of his knife blade.
+
+“Here’s hoping good and hard that it will widen out for you one of
+these fine mornings,” Dick said; and then the old man took the candle
+and led the way back up the incline.
+
+It was in the cavern-like place where the vein had been lost that Dick
+asked his guide to wait a minute and let him look around. The break in
+the continuity of the vein of argentite was evidently caused by what is
+technically known as a “fault,” a crack in the earth’s crust made by
+some volcanic upheaval. In many such cracks one side or the other has
+slipped up or down or sidewise, and there had apparently been some such
+a slip here.
+
+“You had lots of courage to go on digging when you struck this
+‘fault,’” said Dick. “We struck one in our mine in the Timanyoni, and
+it was forty feet thick.”
+
+“Uh-huh,” said the old man; “a lime-horse. That’s what this was.”
+
+Dick stooped down and picked up a bit of the broken rock stuff with
+which the crack had been filled in some later convulsion than that
+which had opened the gash in the earth’s crust.
+
+“Doesn’t look quite like a lime-horse,” he commented, examining the
+fragment by the light of the candle. “Seems too heavy for any of the
+calcareous rocks. Ever have it assayed?”
+
+The old man shook his head. “Naw; it ain’t nothin’ but
+rock――fault-fillin’.”
+
+Dick put the bit of stuff in his pocket, meaning to look at it again by
+the better light of the cabin lamp. And with that the matter rested,
+for the time being.
+
+When they were back in the cabin the patriarch lighted his corn-cob
+pipe and wanted to hear more about the “queer” metals the three young
+prospectors were going to look for. Dick did his best by way of
+explaining, telling of the uses of some of the metals――tungsten in
+electric lamps, vanadium as an alloy for steel, carnotite as the source
+of the wonder-working radium.
+
+The old man chuckled.
+
+“Reckon ye wouldn’t bother to locate a gold mine ’r a silver mine if ye
+was to find one, would ye?” he said in gentle raillery.
+
+“Oh, yes, we would,” said Dick, laughing.
+
+“Well, if ye do, don’t go and do like pore old Jim Brock did――get
+yourselves holed in for the winter a-workin’ it and starve t’ death.”
+
+At this mention of Brock, the discoverer――and loser――of the Golden
+Spider, Dick pricked up his ears.
+
+“Did you know James Brock?” he asked.
+
+“Shore I did. Him and me was pardners for a couple o’ summers.”
+
+“Then you know about the Golden Spider?”
+
+“I know that’s what Jim called his gold strike that he made over in the
+Little Hophras,” was the reply which seemed to be made guardedly.
+
+“It’s a lost mine,” said Dick. “Nobody’s ever been able to find it. Did
+you know that?”
+
+“I heerd it, last winter, down at Nophi. I reckon nobody hain’t looked
+in the right place.”
+
+“Where is ‘the right place’?”
+
+Daddy Longbeard shook his head.
+
+“I’m too old to go skyhootin’ round the mount’ins lookin’ for somebody
+else’s mine, when I got one o’ my own,” he said evasively.
+
+“But could you find the Golden Spider, if you should look?” Dick
+queried eagerly.
+
+“Maybe,” was the short reply, and there wasn’t another word added to it.
+
+“Did you know that my uncle, Mr. William Starbuck, took care of James
+Brock for the little while he lived, and that Brock gave him the mine?”
+
+“Yep; I heerd that, too.”
+
+Without knowing at all why it should be so, Dick felt that he was
+treading upon forbidden ground in questioning his host about James
+Brock’s mine, so he stopped short, and, just for a diversion, began
+to examine, by the better light of the cabin lamp, the piece of rock
+picked up in the “fault.” In appearance it was a little like a fragment
+of steel-gray limestone, yet it seemed heavier than any non-metallic
+rock.
+
+“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?” he
+asked.
+
+[Illustration: “Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some
+kind?”]
+
+The old miner wagged his beard in denial.
+
+“There ain’t nothin’ in it,” he replied. “It’s just crack-fillin’.”
+
+Dick went over to where the packs had been placed, opened one of them
+and got out the box containing the blowpipe set.
+
+“Huh!” said the old prospector. “Tote your assayin’ outfit right along
+with ye, do ye?”
+
+“Oh, no,” Dick qualified; “only a few things to help us make field
+tests. I can’t tell you anything about quantities――values――because it
+takes a real assay to do that, but we can at least find out whether or
+not there is any metal in this stuff, which seems too heavy to be just
+common rock.”
+
+Getting out the blowpipe, its alcohol-turpentine lamp, the small
+porcelain mortar and pestle, and the little hammer, he proceeded to
+break a few chips from the specimen and grind them in the mortar,
+with the old prospector looking on curiously while he worked. Adding
+a little borax for a flux, Dick put the tiny sample on the block of
+prepared charcoal, lighted the lamp and began to blow.
+
+In a short time the sample fused to a dark-gray globule and the
+charcoal around it was covered with a white coating. Carefully
+withdrawing the tip of the blowpipe so as to make the blast produce the
+reducing flame, Dick saw the white coating disappear, giving a bluish
+color to the flame. Filling his cheeks again, he kept on blowing, and,
+after quite a prolonged heating, the dark-gray globule turned to a tiny
+yellow metallic button, and at this Dick put the blowpipe down and blew
+out the lamp flame.
+
+“What did you do with the stuff that you took out of that ‘fault’
+while you were hunting for the lost argentite vein?” he asked.
+
+“Wheelbarrered it out and threw it on the dump,” was the old man’s
+answer.
+
+“Well,” said Dick definitely, “it’s kind of lucky there is plenty more
+of it left in the ‘fault.’ See this little button that’s left on the
+charcoal?”
+
+The old man squinted his eyes and tried to see, but the button was no
+larger than a very small pinhead.
+
+“Take the glass,” said Dick, handing him the pocket magnifier.
+
+“Shore! I see it now. What-all is it?” asked the squinter.
+
+“Silver and gold,” said Dick calmly. “That ‘lime-horse’ of yours
+isn’t a lime-horse at all; it’s a vein of sylvanite, according to the
+blowpipe test. Didn’t you see that white stuff on the charcoal go off
+in a blue flame when I heated it? That was the tellurium in the ore.
+You’ve struck a telluride mine without knowing it, and you’ve probably
+thrown a small fortune away in the stuff that you wheelbarrowed out and
+threw on the dump. But, as I say, there seems to be plenty more of it.
+Gee! You’re a rich man, and you never suspected it!”
+
+“But――but, how can you tell?” stammered the old prospector. “That li’l’
+speck o’ metal ain’t no bigger than a gnat’s ear!”
+
+“Of course it isn’t,” said Dick. “But when you remember that it came
+out of a sample that you could hold on your thumbnail ... why, good
+goodness! the stuff’s simply got to be rich in either silver or gold,
+or both!”
+
+The old man turned in his home-made chair and sat perfectly still for
+quite a little while, staring intently into the heart of the fire on
+the rude stone hearth. When he spoke again it was to say: “I ain’t
+heerd ye say nothin’ about me goin’ havers with you, son.”
+
+“Why, no!” said Dick. “Why should I say anything like that?”
+
+“Most fellers would. They’d go into court and swear that _they_ made
+the discovery. You did make it, ye know. I might ’a’ gone on diggin’ in
+that mount’in till kingdom come, without ever payin’ any attention to
+anything but that streak o’ sulphurets.”
+
+“That’s all right,” Dick hastened to say. “I’m mighty glad I happened
+to think of testing the stuff, and you don’t owe me anything at all.
+Why, good land――I’m your _guest_!”
+
+Slowly the old man heaved himself out of his chair, and, crossing the
+room, he began to arrange Dick’s bed in the single built-in bunk. Dick
+protested at once, saying that he could roll himself in his blankets
+before the fire. But the newly made bonanza king wouldn’t have it that
+way.
+
+“No,” he said; “the best I’ve got ain’t none too good for you, son.
+Besides, I reckon I don’t want to go to bed, nohow. I reckon I got to
+set up and think a spell afore I can ever go to sleep again.”
+
+Seeing that it would be a real charity to give the old man a chance to
+“set up and think,” Dick made ready to turn in. It was not until he was
+sitting on the edge of the bunk to take his lace boots off that the
+old man fished in a grimy cigar-box and brought out a printed map so
+old and worn that it was falling apart in the creases. Spreading the
+map out on Dick’s knees, he pointed to a pencilled circle enclosing a
+certain area that looked as if it were all mountain and canyon.
+
+“I let on to you that Jim Brock and me had been pardners once, son, and
+so we was. I don’t know where Jim’s mine is, but I do know some’eres
+near where he was prospectin’ when he found it. That circle’s maybe
+five mile acrosst it, and I reckon if you was to look close enough
+inside of it, maybe you’d find the Golden Spider. Put the map in your
+pocket. It’s your’n.”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER V
+
+ FOOTLOOSE AND FREE
+
+
+When Larry and Purdick thought they had found the place where Dick had
+stopped and made a fire, and had then had some mysterious thing happen
+to him, they soon realized that they couldn’t hope to trail the burro
+hoofprints very far in the growing dusk. But they did manage to follow
+them to the nearest crossing of the little stream, and here, where
+a patch of wash sand made the record as plain as a book page, Larry
+heaved a sigh of relief.
+
+“If we didn’t have such good forgetteries――both of us――we needn’t have
+been scared up so badly, Purdy,” he said. “Don’t you remember what Mr.
+Broadwick told us yesterday――about two men coming over here ahead of us
+with supplies for the Little Eagle in Dog Gulch? They are the fellows
+who made the fire and didn’t put it out――not Dick.”
+
+“How can you tell?” asked the town-bred one.
+
+“You can see for yourself,” Larry returned, pointing down at the bed of
+damp sand. “There were at least four burros making those tracks, and
+Dick has only two. See how the hoofprints overlap, again and again?”
+
+Purdick looked and saw.
+
+“That’s better; that means that Dick is still somewhere on ahead of
+us.”
+
+“Yes, and we won’t catch up with him before morning. We can’t follow
+this trail in the dark. We’ll just have to camp for the night and make
+the best of it.”
+
+Since this seemed to be the only sensible thing to do, they picked out
+a place with a big cliff-like boulder for a background. Here, after
+they had lopped some tree branches for a bed and built a fire which,
+reflected from the big rock at their backs, promised to supply the
+warmth of the blankets they didn’t have, they ate the two remaining
+bacon sandwiches.
+
+“Not much of a supper,” Larry commented, munching his share of the
+short ration; “not after the tramp we’ve had. But it’s a lot better
+than none.”
+
+“If it didn’t sound like trying to be funny, I’d say you said a
+mouthful――both ways from the middle,” said little Purdick with a grin.
+“I was just thinking what a beautiful fix we’ll be in if we don’t
+happen to find Dick and the eats in the morning.”
+
+“Yes,” said Larry. “We brag a good deal about our civilization, and
+how much we’ve gained on the old cavemen; but I’ve often wondered what
+would happen to one of us up-to-date folks if he were dropped down in
+the middle of a wilderness like――well, like this, for instance, with
+no tools or weapons and nothing to eat. Would we have to go hungry
+to-morrow if we shouldn’t find Dick?”
+
+“Golly!” said Purdick, “I’m sure _I_ should. Why, we haven’t seen a
+single eatable thing since we started out yesterday noon!”
+
+“Game, you mean? I suppose that’s because we weren’t looking for
+it. But there is plenty of game in these mountains, just the same;
+big game, at that. What I’ve wondered is if the up-to-date man,
+bare-handed, could manage to catch any of it.”
+
+“Not this one,” laughed Purdick.
+
+“Fish, then?” Larry suggested. “These clear mountain streams are full
+of trout, you know.”
+
+“Yea!” Purdick chuckled. “Imagine a fellow catching trout with his
+hands!”
+
+“I’ll bet it could be done――if the fellow were hungry enough,” Larry
+maintained. “But I’m not going to sit up and argue with you. I’m all
+set to turn in and sop up a little more sleep.” And with that he
+burrowed in the tree-branch bed and turned his back to the fire.
+
+It was deep in the night that Larry, sleeping the sleep of the seven
+sleepers, felt himself shaken by the shoulder.
+
+“Wake up!” Purdick was saying, and his teeth were chattering. “L-l-look
+over there――across the creek!”
+
+Larry raised his head and looked. The camp-fire, backed up by a
+good-sized windfall log they had dragged down to it, was burning quite
+brightly, but its circle of light did not reach much beyond the little
+stream brawling and splashing a few feet away. On the opposite side of
+the stream a thicket of young cedars came down close to the water’s
+edge, and in the heart of the thicket two balls of green fire appeared,
+steady and unflickering.
+
+“Speaking of game,” Larry whispered; and then: “Keep perfectly still
+until we see what it is.” And, as a measure of safety, he reached
+cautiously for the short-handled axe.
+
+They did not have to wait long. In a moment there was a little stir
+in the thicket and the balls of fire began to move slowly. Larry,
+more wood-wise than his bedmate, knew that what they were seeing were
+the eyes of some animal that had been attracted by the light of the
+camp-fire, but he couldn’t tell what it was. If it should happen to be
+a bear, lean and famished from its winter hibernation――as Larry well
+knew, there were still grizzlies to be found in the Hophras.... But at
+this point he pulled himself together and let good old common sense get
+in its word. The eyes were too high up from the ground to be those of a
+bear, unless the animal were standing upon its hind legs, and, besides,
+they were too large to figure as the little pig-like eyes of any kind
+of a bear, even a grizzly.
+
+While they kept perfectly still and looked, the animal to which the
+eyes belonged came out of the thicket and advanced cautiously to the
+water’s edge. It proved to be a mule-deer, a full-grown buck, easily
+recognizable by its large ears, brown-and-white face, and short,
+black-tipped tail. After staring fixedly at the camp-fire for a few
+moments, it drank at the stream and then moved away, vanishing as
+silently as it had come.
+
+“Gee!” said Purdick, as the deer disappeared, “are they as tame as all
+that?”
+
+“Tame enough, when they don’t get the human scent,” Larry replied. “The
+wind was wrong for him. Dick and I saw them often last summer in the
+Tourmaline. How about the fire? Are you sleeping warm enough?”
+
+“Toasty,” Purdick asserted, and with that they burrowed again.
+
+The dawn was breaking golden in the upper air when they turned out
+the next morning and Larry regretfully dipped water with his hat to
+extinguish the splendid bed of coals that should have figured as their
+breakfast fire.
+
+“It’s a rotten shame to spoil a fire as good as this,” he said, “but we
+haven’t anything to cook on it.”
+
+“How many miles to breakfast?” Purdick asked.
+
+“You tell, if you can,” Larry laughed, and they started out to follow
+the trail.
+
+Fortunately for the empty stomachs, they didn’t have to go very far
+before they saw Dick and the burros coming over a wooded hill to the
+right. At the “reunion,” as Dick called it, they quickly built a fire;
+and while the coffee water was heating and the bacon sizzling in the
+pan, Dick told how he had lost his way and found a hermit.
+
+“We were up before day, and Daddy Longbeard――I don’t know any other
+name for him――came along with me far enough to make sure that I
+wouldn’t get off the track again,” he wound up. “When he left me, two
+or three miles back yonder in the woods, he was still acting like a man
+half stunned――over what I told him last night about his mine.”
+
+“Sure you didn’t make any mistake about that ore, are you?” Larry
+inquired.
+
+“Not a chance! It’s a telluride, all right enough, and plenty rich, I
+should say, from the size of the button I got out of one small test
+sample.”
+
+“Well, I guess you paid for your night’s lodging, anyway,” Purdick put
+in; but Dick Maxwell laughed and shook his head.
+
+“No; it was the other way round; the old man paid me for telling him
+about his bonanza. See here what he gave me.” And he showed them the
+worn map with the magic circle on it.
+
+Of course, this revival of the romantic possibilities wrapped up in
+the summer’s outing stirred up some excitement, and the coffee boiled
+over and threatened to put the fire out while they were studying the
+old map. It was Larry who reached up and took hold of things and
+brought them down to the every-day level again.
+
+“The Golden Spider is all right, fellows, if we should happen to run
+across it, but we all know that there isn’t one chance in a million,
+not even with the help of Daddy Longbeard’s circle――which, after all,
+is only a guess, as he said it was. We don’t want to get bitten by
+the gold prospector’s bug and go crazy like so many of ’em do. We’re
+out for good old practical business, and we mustn’t forget that Mr.
+Starbuck is paying the bills. Let’s eat breakfast and then hit the grit
+for the summer work field.”
+
+“Right you are, Larry, old scout!” said Purdick, getting back on his
+job of frying the breakfast flapjacks. “I can begin to see now how easy
+it is for people to go nutty on this gold proposition. Turn to and eat
+these pancakes while they’re hot――they’ll stay with you longer that
+way.”
+
+By and large, it was Larry’s summing-up of their job that morning
+that set the pace for the next three weeks. During that interval
+they crossed the inter-mountain region by easy stages, prospecting
+in the hills as they went, and learning, by actual contact with it,
+something of the wonderful geological structure of the country they
+were traversing. In no part of the United States does the earth’s
+crust exhibit more marvelous wrinklings and upheavals and apparent
+contradictions than in the mountain regions of western Colorado and
+eastern Utah, and each day brought new discoveries and fresh problems
+to attack.
+
+“How in the world anybody with no schooling could hope to find anything
+valuable in these rocks and clays is beyond me,” said little Purdick,
+one evening when, by the light of the camp-fire, they had been poring
+over the “System of Mineralogy,” and trying by blowpipe and acid tests
+to identify what seemed to be a specimen of wolframite, the base which
+furnishes the metal tungsten.
+
+“That’s easy,” Dick returned. “The average prospector is like old Daddy
+Longbeard. He is looking for gold or silver, and he is able to identify
+a few of the commoner ores by sight. But a good many of his discoveries
+have been by sheer accident, like that of the lead carbonates at
+Leadville.”
+
+“How was that?” Purdick wanted to know.
+
+“The way I’ve heard it was that the man who made the discovery was
+looking for gold-bearing quartz. One way to find a ‘mother’ vein is to
+take a stream that shows gold ‘colors’ when you pan out the sand in it,
+following this trail of ‘colors’ up-stream until you come to a place
+where the ‘colors’ don’t show any more, and then you prospect in the
+hills roundabout.
+
+“This prospector was working up one of the streams east of Mount
+Massive, and he noticed that when he washed for gold ‘colors’ there
+were leavings in his pan; a black sand that was too heavy to wash over
+with the common sand when he shook the pan. Just out of curiosity, he
+saved some of this sand and threw it into his specimen sack along with
+some quartz samples he had; did that and then forgot it. Afterward,
+when he took his samples to an assayer to have them tested, he dumped
+the sack on the bench in the laboratory, black sand and all, and the
+assayer was thorough enough to test the sand as well as the quartz. And
+that’s what made the city of Leadville.”
+
+“But good land!” said Purdick, “there are more gold-and-silver-bearing
+‘ites’ in this book than anybody could ever learn to know by sight
+unless he crammed for them!”
+
+“Sure,” Dick replied. “There was old Daddy Longbeard, digging for
+goodness only knows how long in rich gold ore without ever so much as
+suspecting it.”
+
+Larry Donovan grinned. “All of which is interesting, but unimportant,”
+he put in. “The fact remains that we’ve been out three weeks and
+haven’t yet found anything worth staking a claim on.”
+
+Dick stretched his arms over his head and yawned luxuriously.
+
+“But the other fact remains that we’re having one bully good time.
+Purdy, you old rat, you’re actually putting some flesh on your bones.
+And I’ll bet a hen worth fifteen cents that not an ounce of it is
+fat――nothing but good old hard, stringy muscle.”
+
+Purdick drew a long breath. “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened
+to me,” he said. “The hardest thing I’m going to have to learn when we
+go back to the towns is how to sleep under a roof again. But speaking
+of finding things: I picked up a queer-looking piece of stuff down
+there by the creek where I went to get a drink this afternoon. I forgot
+to show it to you,” and he took the specimen from his pocket and passed
+it around.
+
+Looked at through the magnifier, or even without the glass, the
+specimen was a very beautiful thing. It looked like a sliver of
+limestone, one side of which was covered with a thick incrustation of
+fine little red crystals, six-sided prisms glowing with a peculiar
+lustre that was neither garnet nor ruby, but a shade between. Since
+they were out to test every unfamiliar substance they came across, the
+blowpipe was put into service once more, and Dick blew until his cheeks
+ached.
+
+Heated in the original mass there was nothing doing, so they powdered
+a few of the crystals in the porcelain mortar, mixed the powder with
+borax and salt of phosphorus, and tried it again. In the oxidizing
+flame――the hottest flame that can be produced with the blowpipe――a
+clear glass bead, dark yellow in the heat, was quickly formed, and this
+bead, when cooled, turned to a light yellow color.
+
+Larry was turning the leaves of the mineralogy book and running a
+finger over the subject heads.
+
+“I was reading about something that did that way, just the other day,”
+he said, “but I can’t remember what it was. By jing!――what the dickens
+was it? Something that’s dark yellow, hot, and light yellow when it
+cools. Shucks! If I didn’t have such a good forgettery――――”
+
+Purdick had been watching the experiment narrowly. “Try it in the
+reducing flame, Dick,” he suggested.
+
+Dick did it. With the tip of the blowpipe withdrawn just outside of the
+candle flame he held the yellow glass bead inside of the tip of the
+inner cone of combustion that is intensified by this manner of blowing.
+Almost at once the bead turned a brownish color, and Dick carefully
+withdrew it to see what the cooling reaction would be. The change which
+took place was marvelous and very beautiful. As it lost its heat the
+little bead turned to a brilliant chrome green.
+
+“I’ve got it!” snapped Purdick. “Larry, look in the index for
+vanadinite!”
+
+Larry searched, found, turned to the proper page.
+
+“It says that vanadates, in the absence of other colored metallic
+compounds, may be detected by their reaction with borax and salt of
+phosphorus before the blowpipe――and goes on to describe just what we’ve
+been looking at.”
+
+“Hooray!” Dick applauded, “a vanadium mine! This begins to look like
+business. Think you could find the place again, Purdy?”
+
+“I’m sure I can,” was the ready answer. “It’s about a mile back over
+our trail of to-day. You remember when we were coming along on that
+little mesa bench above the creek, and I scrambled down the slope to
+get a drink and joined you again about a quarter of a mile farther
+along? Well, that was the place――right along the creek.”
+
+“We’ll go back there to-morrow morning, shan’t we, Larry?” Dick asked.
+“If this stuff is there in any workable quantity we ought at least to
+stake off a claim. What’s vanadium worth as an alloy for tool steel and
+such?”
+
+Larry took a well-thumbed little note-book from the pocket of his shirt
+and consulted it.
+
+“Don’t know what it’s worth now; but a while back, ferrovanadium,
+carrying thirty-five to fifty per cent. of vanadium, ran from two
+dollars and a half to five and a half a pound――some valuable little
+metal, I’ll say!”
+
+“It sure is!” exclaimed Purdick, with his eyes widening. “If we can
+only find enough of it to make it worth while.... I wish I’d had sense
+enough to look around a little when I found that bit. But I didn’t.”
+
+“Never mind; there’s another day coming,” said Larry, “or if there
+isn’t, all the vanadium in the world won’t make any difference to us or
+to anybody,” and he began to fix the fire for the night and to unroll
+the blankets, while Dick put the testing apparatus away in its leather
+carrying case.
+
+Their camping place for that night was in a small pocket gulch rimming
+in a little flat watered by a trickling rill that dripped over a low
+cliff at the back of the pocket. The flat afforded good grazing for
+the pack animals, there was wood on the rocky slopes for the fire, and
+red-fir tips for the beds.
+
+In the morning, while Purdick was getting breakfast, Larry and Dick
+prepared the notices to post on the vanadium claim, leaving blanks
+in which to write in the boundaries and landmarks when they should
+determine what they were. As Larry was sharpening the stakes to be
+driven to mark the claim, Dick called attention to the narrow entrance
+to the pocket gulch, and said, “Say, Larry; what’s the matter with
+cutting one of those lodge-pole pines out of that clump up there and
+letting it fall across this doorway? That’ll make a corral out of the
+gulch, and we can leave the burros and the camp dunnage when we go back
+to stake off the claim. Everything will be perfectly safe here.”
+
+Larry looked up from his stake trimming. What Dick said was quite true.
+With a tree felled across the gulch entrance for a barrier, the burros
+wouldn’t stray, though of that there was little danger anyway, so long
+as there were grass and water in the pocket. As to the safety of the
+camp dunnage there was even less question. With the exception of a few
+abandoned prospect holes, the inter-mountain wilderness in which they
+had been tramping and camping for three weeks had yielded no signs of
+human occupancy, past or present. Still, Larry hesitated. The first of
+the unwritten laws of the camper in any region is never to separate
+himself very far from his supplies and his means of transportation.
+
+“I don’t know about that, Dick. Maybe I’m a lot too cautious, but――――”
+
+“Pshaw!” Dick broke in, “everything will be as safe as a clock! We
+haven’t seen a sign of a human being for three weeks, and I’ll bet
+there isn’t one within forty miles of us this very minute. If we fix
+it so the jacks can’t stray off, there isn’t a thing that can happen.
+Besides, we may want to stay down there at that place of Purdy’s
+projecting around for a good part of the day, and if we do, we’ll have
+our camp ready to come back to without having to make it again.”
+
+Larry laughed.
+
+“You’re just too lazy to draw your breath, Dickie; that’s all that is
+the matter with you,” he said; but he didn’t offer any more objections
+to Dick’s plan, and after breakfast the tree was cut down to block the
+gulch entrance, and the three of them started back for the vanadium
+prospect, leaving the camp just as it was, save that they were woodsmen
+enough to put out the camp-fire, and thoughtful enough to wrap up the
+rifles and the dunnage and put the packs oh top of a flat boulder where
+the jacks wouldn’t trample on them in their grazing ramblings. For the
+day’s work they carried only a pick, a shovel, the geologist’s hammer
+and the short-handled axe.
+
+Notwithstanding Purdick’s confident assertion, it proved to be a good
+bit more than a mile back to the mesa foot where he had picked up the
+bit of vanadinite. Worse than that, after they reached the approximate
+place he found that he couldn’t identify the spot where he had found
+the specimen. It was a limestone outcrop, and there was a stretch of
+a quarter of a mile or so along the creek edge where one place looked
+very much like another.
+
+So, when the time came for them to sit down and eat the noon snack they
+had brought with them, they were still looking for the deposit of which
+the specimen was a fragment and were beginning to wonder why it was so
+hard to find.
+
+“You’re a hoodoo, Purdy,” said Dick, joshing the town-bred one. “Are
+you right sure it was yesterday, and not the day before, when you
+picked up that piece of stuff?”
+
+“Of course I am!” was the indignant reply. “And it was right along
+here, too. If I’d had any idea it was ore――――” He stopped short and
+made a dive for something lying at his feet. “There!” he broke out
+triumphantly, “here’s another piece of it, right now!”
+
+There was no mistaking the fact. There are few crystals in the world
+more beautiful than those of the lead vanadates, and once seen, they
+are not easily forgotten. The newly found fragment was evidently a chip
+off the same block, as Dick put it, and, hurriedly finishing the snack,
+they renewed their search for the “mother vein.”
+
+After all, the vein or deposit was not so hard to locate, now that
+they knew where to look for it. Of course, they had no means of
+ascertaining the extent of the deposit or its commercial value, if
+it had any, in a place so remote from civilization. None the less,
+they staked it off accurately, located it as well as they could on
+the Geodetic Survey map upon which they were carefully tracing their
+wandering course from day to day, and posted the notice, protecting
+it as well as they could by digging a niche in the shaley cliff and
+pegging the notice at the back of it where it would be at least a
+little sheltered from the weather.
+
+All this business of stepping off and measuring, and finding landmarks,
+and making a sketch of the mesa and creek bottom, and searching
+carefully over the surrounding area for other possible deposits of the
+mineral, took most of the afternoon. And after all was done, Larry was
+pessimistic enough to say that it was probably a day wasted.
+
+“I did a good bit of reading-up on these rare metals last week while we
+were waiting for Mr. Starbuck,” he said, “and from what I could learn,
+the reduction processes――getting the metal out of the ore――is the long
+end of the pole with all of them; vanadium and all the rest. So, unless
+your mine is big enough to warrant the building of a reduction plant on
+the spot――and not many of them are――you’re up against the proposition
+of transporting a ton of the stuff to some chemical works, and out of
+the ton they’ll get maybe a pound or so of the metal.”
+
+“Well,” said Dick, “what of that?”
+
+“Use your old bean,” Larry invited. “Suppose your vanadium is worth
+five dollars and a half a pound――which is the highest price I found
+quoted. We’re at least forty miles from the nearest railroad, which
+means forty miles of jack-freighting for the ore. How far would five
+dollars and a half, or twice or three times that much, go toward
+paying the cost of jack-freighting a ton of stuff over forty miles of
+no-trail-at-all?”
+
+“Oh, gosh!” said Dick. “When it comes to throwing cold water, you
+can beat a hydraulic mining outfit! Let’s go back to camp and cook
+us a real supper. I’m hungry enough to eat a piece of boiled dog.
+We can come back to-morrow with the tools and dig the ten-foot deep
+‘discovery’ hole that we’ll have to make before we can record the
+claim.”
+
+The return mile-and-considerable-more seemed even longer now than it
+had in the morning. In the search for the vanadium deposit they had
+done a good deal of scrambling and climbing, and the mild excitement
+of the search had kept them from realizing how much ground they were
+covering.
+
+“I’ll bet you couldn’t wake me with a dynamite blast after I turn in
+to-night,” Dick was saying as they approached the entrance to the
+pocket gulch, “and I wouldn’t lug this pick another mile if it was the
+only one in the world. But see here! What’s been happening?”
+
+They had reached the pine-tree which had been felled to block the
+entrance to the pocket gulch, and it looked as if somebody had driven
+an army truck over it. Its branches were broken down and twisted off,
+and the trunk itself was scarred and barked as if the suppositious
+truck wheels had been shod with spurs.
+
+Thoroughly alarmed at the evidence of so much violence, they forgot
+their weariness and hurried on into the gulch. What they found when
+they reached the camp site was as appalling as it was bewildering. The
+packs had been dragged from the top of the big flat rock where they had
+left them in the morning and were literally torn to pieces, with their
+contents scattered all over the place; that is, what wasn’t gone was
+scattered.
+
+For when they came to look, they found that many things were missing.
+The entire stock of bacon was gone, the flour and meal sacks had been
+torn open and their holdings spilled and trampled into the ground,
+the few boxes of hard biscuits they had been saving against a bread
+emergency had been broken open and rifled, the salt lay in the ashes of
+the camp-fire, the sugar was gone, and the cotton sack in which it had
+been carried looked as if it had been ground through a sausage mill; in
+short, all the food supplies they had, excepting only those that were
+in tight tin cans, had been either stolen or destroyed.
+
+“Well!――of all the blithering earthquakes!” Dick gasped. “Who or what
+under the sun would do a thing like this to us?”
+
+Larry did not speak. His eyes were blazing, and he seemed to be holding
+his breath. Deep down inside of him the Donovan temper, a wild,
+Berserk rage that had given him no end of trouble in his boyhood, was
+struggling to get the upper hand. But little Purdick was still able to
+talk.
+
+“And even this isn’t the worst of it!” he said. “The burros are gone!”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VI
+
+ SHORT RATIONS
+
+
+After the first burst of wrathful astoundment at finding their camp
+wrecked and looted, the three victims of whatever fury it was that had
+visited the gorge in their absence began to count up their losses.
+
+It was the food losses, of course, that were the most serious. Purdick,
+in his capacity of camp cook, knelt to gather up what he could of the
+scattered flour and corn meal, but there wasn’t very much of either
+that could be salvaged. While Purdick was trying to save some of the
+eatables, Larry and Dick reassembled the scattered dunnage and camp
+equipment, endeavoring to make some estimate of the length and breadth
+of the disaster.
+
+“Just see here!” said Dick, picking up the mineralogy book which was
+lying open and face down at some distance from the general wreck, with
+a lot of the leaves partly torn out. “What would anybody but a maniac
+want to treat a book like that for?”
+
+Larry was overhauling the blankets and pack wrappings.
+
+“You can search me,” he gritted. “I can’t tell you that――any more than
+I can tell you why these blankets are all cut and slashed in holes. It
+must have been either a maniac or a devil!”
+
+“A mighty hungry devil,” Purdick put in. “There isn’t a smell of the
+bacon left, and we’re shy on everything but the canned stuff.”
+
+“I can’t imagine a man, or any bunch of men, mean enough to treat us
+this way!” Dick raged. “Why, it’s simply savage!”
+
+By this time Larry had got the Berserk Donovan temper measurably in
+hand again.
+
+“Gather up, fellows, and let’s see where we land,” he said shortly.
+“The milk’s spilt and there’s no use crying over it. How about the
+eats, Purdy; what have we got left?”
+
+Purdick checked the commissary remains off on his fingers.
+
+“A few cans of tomatoes and peaches and pressed potato chips, the can
+of coffee, enough of the flour and meal to make us two or three eatings
+of pan-bread, and one can of corned beef. That’s about all: and there’s
+no salt and no sugar.”
+
+“Suffering cats!” Dick exclaimed. “And we’re at least forty miles from
+anywhere! Good land, Larry; don’t you suppose we could trail these
+robbers when it comes daylight again and fight it out with them?”
+
+Larry was examining the leather carrying case in which the simple
+testing apparatus, the blowpipe, charcoal, and the few chemicals were
+packed. The case had not been broken open, but the stout leather was
+scratched and gashed as if some one had tried to cut into it with a
+dull knife.
+
+“You say ‘robbers,’ Dick,” he said thoughtfully. “I guess there was
+only one robber. Look at these cuts on this case. What kind of a knife
+do you suppose it was that made them?”
+
+He passed the leather case over to his two companions. The deep scars
+were roughly parallel and five in number. Dick was the first to
+understand. “A bear!” he gasped, “and a whopper, at that!”
+
+Larry nodded.
+
+“I never heard of a grizzly being this far south. I’ve always
+understood that there were only a few of them left in the United
+States, and that those were away up around Yellowstone Park. But I’ll
+bet the robber was a grizzly, just the same. Look at the width of that
+paw!”
+
+“And look at the eats that are gone――only you can’t look at them,”
+Purdick chimed in. “He must have been empty clear down to his toes to
+get away with all that stuff. Do they eat everything they can chew?”
+
+“Mighty nearly everything――if it was a grizzly,” Dick offered.
+
+Purdick’s eyes widened. “I’m wondering now if he’s eaten our burros,”
+he said.
+
+“Not quite that bad, I guess,” Larry qualified. “He was probably too
+busy with our stuff here to pay any attention to the jacks. It’s most
+likely they got scared and bolted. They could get out, easily enough,
+over that broken pine.”
+
+“In that case, our first job is to go and round ’em up, while there’s
+daylight enough to track ’em,” Dick suggested. “Let’s take the guns,
+this time. It’s gnawing at my bones that we might just happen to run
+across Old Ephraim, and I wouldn’t mind trying to even things up a bit
+with the old scoundrel.”
+
+“Sure, we’ll take the guns,” Larry agreed. “Whereabouts are they?”
+
+That was a question which apparently didn’t mean to get itself
+answered――not in any hurry, at least. The guns had been wrapped in the
+packs; they were all three sure of that. But now they were nowhere to
+be found; and since one discovery leads to others of a like nature,
+they were not long in finding out that the cartridge belts had
+disappeared with the rifles.
+
+“That looks pretty bad,” said Larry, after they had searched all around
+the flat boulder upon which the packs had been left in the morning. “A
+bear wouldn’t steal three Winchesters and all the ammunition we had.”
+
+“What’s the answer?” Dick demanded anxiously.
+
+“Sort it out for yourself,” said Larry. “The bear couldn’t have taken
+them――that’s all.”
+
+“But if some man or men were here, why wasn’t something else taken?”
+
+“Perhaps the man――or men――didn’t think there was anything else left
+worth carrying off,” Larry said; and then he repeated: “It looks pretty
+bad, fellows; looks as if somebody wanted to disarm us.”
+
+Purdick’s jaw dropped.
+
+“There’s only one bunch that might want to make sure we couldn’t fight
+back――those three hold-ups,” he thrust in. “Do you suppose they’ve
+followed us away in here?”
+
+“We can suppose anything we like,” Larry answered. “There’s sure room
+enough. But let’s see if we can find those jacks. That’s the first
+thing to do. I only hope the gun-stealers haven’t run them off――stolen
+them, too.”
+
+In the absence of any real weapons the three armed themselves as they
+could, Larry taking the axe, Purdick the geologist’s hammer, and Dick,
+knocking the pick from its handle, took the handle for a club. Just
+beyond the felled pine they picked up the burros’ tracks, and were
+somewhat relieved when they found, from the distance between the
+hoofprints showing the length of the stride, that the little animals
+had left the gulch on a “dead” run.
+
+“It was a bear-scared runaway, and not a man-steal,” Larry announced
+confidently, when they had measured the length of the strides, “and if
+that guess is right, we’ll find them before long. They wouldn’t run
+very far. That’s one good thing about a jack; he isn’t a panicky beast,
+whatever else he may be.”
+
+This comforting conclusion had its fulfilment before they had followed
+the burro tracks very far up the valley of which their camp gulch was
+an offshoot. The two burros were found quietly grazing in a little
+patch of short-grass, and when they were herded, it was no trouble to
+drive them back, though they did exhibit some signs of alarm when they
+were urged over the broken tree and into the small gulch.
+
+“I guess the bear scent is still here――for them,” Dick suggested.
+“I shouldn’t wonder if we had to hobble them to keep them in here
+overnight.”
+
+Back at the scene of the wreck, they made a fire, and little Purdick
+prepared to do what he could toward getting a supper out of the
+remnants. It turned out to be a Barmecidal feast――if that means that it
+lacked the chief essential of a camp meal――which is quantity. Though
+they were all as hungry as they had a right to be after the day of hard
+tramping and searching, they ate sparingly, knowing that they were
+likely to be hungrier still before they could hope to reach any base of
+supplies.
+
+It was a pretty silent meal, taking it all around. In a single day
+their plans for the remainder of the summer had been knocked into a
+cocked hat, so to speak. As they had prefigured things, they had meant
+to work around to the small mining-camp of Shotgun in the southern
+Hophras by the latter third of July; to renew their supplies there;
+and to spend the remainder of the vacation in exploring the eastern
+hogbacks and slopes of the Little Hophras. But that was impossible now.
+
+“Shotgun’s at least sixty miles from here,” Larry said, measuring the
+distance on the Government map which he had spread out on one of the
+slashed blankets, “and we can hardly hope to make any such hike as that
+on what little grub we have left.”
+
+“No,” Dick assented promptly. “But what else can we do?”
+
+Larry was tracing a line straight to the west from their assumed
+position on the map.
+
+“It is less than thirty-five miles from here to Natrolia on the
+railroad――in a direct line,” he said.
+
+“Yes; but Natrolia――and the railroad――are on the other side of the
+range!” Dick protested.
+
+“Well,” Larry offered; “it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other;
+sixty-odd miles over and among these little mountains――with no trail to
+follow, or half that distance over one big mountain――also with no trail
+that we know anything about.”
+
+“I’m as green as grass, now that you’ve got me away from the streets
+and sidewalks,” Purdick put in, “but I should say it’s a question of
+the time either hike will take. How about that? We’ve grub enough,
+such as it is, for a couple of days, or maybe three, if we go on short
+commons.”
+
+“It’s a guess, either way,” Larry admitted. “We’ve been dawdling along
+so that we don’t really know what we could make on a sure-enough forced
+march.”
+
+“What is the best day’s distance we have covered, this far?” It was
+Purdick who wanted to know, and Dick answered him.
+
+“Not over seventeen or eighteen miles, at the most, I should say.”
+
+Purdick nodded. “Say we can make twenty, by pushing the jacks a bit,
+and keep it up for three days. That would take us to this Shotgun
+place, or within a few hours’ march of it. Let me look over these
+canned remnants again,” and he suited the action to the word.
+
+“Well?” queried Larry, when Purdick had made his estimate.
+
+“Bad medicine,” was the verdict. “There’s enough of the stuff to go
+round if we spread it thin, but we can’t march very hard on tomatoes
+and peaches and dried potato chips. There’s one little can of corned
+beef, but that will give us only a taste apiece for one meal. And as
+to the flour and corn-meal, you can see where we stand when I tell you
+that I used half of what I could scrape up for our suppers to-night.”
+
+Larry was shaking his head again. “I’m afraid it’s the short cut over
+the mountain for ours. It’s just as you say, Purdy; we can’t march very
+far on half-rations. Let’s see what we can get out of this Survey map
+for information about routes and altitudes.”
+
+For some little time they pored studiously over the excellent map.
+There were no trails marked in the direction in which they would be
+forced to go to reach Natrolia, and no passes in the range named as
+such. All they could do was to go by the altitude contour lines, and
+the lowest marking they could find that was anywhere near in the
+direct line was something over 9,000 feet. Since the altitude of their
+camp was about 6,000 feet, that meant a climb of more than 3,000 feet
+straight up through a trackless wilderness, and a descent of the same
+or a greater distance on the other side of the range.
+
+“Looks pretty tough, fellows,” said Dick, after they had made the
+map tell them all it could, “but I guess we’re in for it. I vote for
+Natrolia.”
+
+“I guess I do, too,” Larry agreed, though not with any great amount of
+enthusiasm.
+
+Little Purdick grinned. “I’m in the hands of my friends,” he said. “If
+you two say we’ve got to climb the ladder, I’m with you as long as I
+last.” And then, as they were preparing to turn in early so as to get
+an early start: “Any danger of that grizzly coming back in the night,
+do you reckon?”
+
+Larry laughed. “I guess not; not if he’s eaten all you say he has. If
+he comes, we’ll do like the darkey did with the mule――twis’ his tail.
+You can roll in between Dick and me, Purdy. That’ll give him something
+to chew on before he gets to you.”
+
+It was after they had made up the fire for the night, and were
+burrowing in the torn blankets, that Purdick said: “Seems to me we’re
+dismissing this business of the hold-ups a lot too easily. If those
+fellows are going to follow us around all summer, we’ll never know what
+minute is going to be the next. Now that they’ve got our war stuff,
+what’s to prevent them from dropping down on us any old time and taking
+the maps away from us?”
+
+“Just one little thing,” Larry answered. “If they think we know where
+the Golden Spider is――and if you heard their talk straight that night
+in Lost Canyon, that’s what they do think――they’ll wait and let us find
+it for them. They’ve taken the guns to make sure that we can’t put up a
+fight when the time comes.”
+
+“Huh!” said Dick; “if they’ve been following us for three weeks and
+haven’t yet found out that we’re not looking for any Golden Spider,
+they haven’t much sense; I’ll say that much for them.”
+
+“Do you suppose they came here before the bear had torn us up, or
+afterward?” Purdick asked.
+
+“That is something we’ll probably never know. Better forget it and go
+by-by. If we haven’t a hard day ahead of us to-morrow, I’ll miss my
+guess. Good-night.” This from Larry, and he set the good example by
+turning over and going to sleep.
+
+When they roused up at daybreak the next morning they found that the
+weather, which during the three weeks of tramping and camping had been
+as perfect as mountain summer weather can be, had changed remarkably
+during the night. The sky was overcast, and among the higher peaks of
+the Little Hophras a storm was raging.
+
+“More bad medicine,” said Larry, struggling out of his blankets to
+liven up the camp-fire. “If that storm moves a little farther south,
+we’re likely to run square into it as we climb. Hustle us a bite to
+eat, Purdy, and Dick and I will saddle the jacks. We can’t get too
+sudden a start.”
+
+The breakfast, what little there was of it, was eaten hurriedly; and
+with the faint echoes of the distant thunder coming down to them like
+the almost inaudible beating of a great drum, they made their way out
+of the camp gulch, setting a course due west by Dick’s pocket compass,
+and beginning the forced march.
+
+For an hour or so it was not so difficult. Though they had thought that
+the scattered buttes among which they had been prospecting for the past
+few days were the foot-hills of the Little Hophras, they soon found
+that they were not, and the forenoon was half gone before they reached
+the true foot-hills and began the actual ascent of the range.
+
+During this interval the storm, or a series of storms, had continued to
+rage among the higher steeps, and they knew, in reason, that much water
+must be falling on those lofty slopes. Of this they soon began to have
+dismaying proof in the rapid rising of the streams they had to cross
+from time to time; and one creek in particular――the one through whose
+canyon-like gorge they hoped to find a path to the upper heights――was
+running like a mill-race. At the mouth of the canyon, Larry called a
+halt.
+
+“I don’t know about tackling this thing with all the water that is
+coming down through that slit, fellows,” he said doubtfully. “If it
+rises much higher it’ll fill the canyon from wall to wall.”
+
+“Oh, we can make it, all right,” said Dick, always the venturesome one
+of the three. “It’ll be a cold day if we can’t find room for our feet
+and two toy-sized jacks. Heave ahead.”
+
+Now a canyon, as everybody knows, is at first a sheer chasm worn down
+through the rock by the stream for which it is the outlet. But in most
+canyons age-long erosion and the action of frost have thrown down more
+or less detritus from the walls to form a sort of dump or talus on
+one or both sides of the waterway, so, when the stream is low enough,
+the canyon becomes navigable, so to speak, for a man afoot or for a
+sure-footed pack animal.
+
+The small canyon which the three were now entering was no exception
+to the rule. At the entrance the talus on the right-hand bank of the
+stream was broad enough to have afforded room for a wagon road, and it
+so continued as far up the gorge as they could see from the portal.
+The danger, if there were any, could only come through a tumble into
+the stream which, though not as yet so very deep, roared and thundered
+among the boulders in its bed in a muddy torrent that would have made
+short work of man or beast if either were unlucky enough to fall into
+its clutches.
+
+For a half-mile or so they stumbled on in single file over the sloping
+talus, which still stayed on their own side of the torrent, and
+still afforded a footway, precarious enough, in all conscience, but
+nevertheless practicable. It was at the third turn in the crooked
+pathway that Larry, who had been studiously watching the stream as they
+went along, stuck in another word of caution, shouting to make himself
+heard above the noise of the flood.
+
+“The water’s rising every minute!” he exclaimed. “It must be raining
+cats and dogs up there on the higher levels. If a little cloudburst
+should happen along right now, we’d be trapped like so many gophers in
+a hole.”
+
+“It sure does begin to look that way,” Dick called back. “Let’s push
+on faster and see if we can’t find a place to hang up until the creek
+begins to fall a bit. It can’t rain up yonder forever.”
+
+Accordingly, they tried the pushing expedient, and kept it up until
+they came within a hair’s breadth of losing one of the jacks. The
+little animal――it happened to be the rearmost one of the two――stepped
+on a loose stone, slipped, scrambled frantically to regain its footing,
+and ended by falling heavily on its side with its feet fairly in the
+rising torrent. Dick, who was next in the Indian-file procession,
+“motivated” instantly, as a psychologist would say. With a quick leap
+he sprang upon the fallen burro’s head and got a death grip on its
+hackamore leading halter. Larry and Purdick closed in quickly, and a
+three-man lift got the laden animal upon its feet again. But it was a
+close call.
+
+“That settles it,” Larry commented, after the little adventure had been
+made to end without disaster. “We can’t hurry the jacks in such going
+as this. If we do we’ll lose both of ’em.”
+
+“I guess you’re right,” Dick conceded; “as right as the rain that’s
+bringing this creek up so fast.” And thereupon they began to feel their
+way more circumspectly.
+
+But care isn’t the only thing that is necessary in taking a hazard; a
+little foresight is sometimes a lot more needful. It was unquestionable
+now that the torrent was mounting fast; getting bigger by leaps and
+bounds. And as it rose, the talus pathway grew narrower and narrower,
+until at last the Indian-file procession was squeezing itself flat
+against the right-hand rock wall to keep out of the water. When this
+came about, even Dick began to lose his nerve.
+
+“We’d better turn back and get out of this!” he called over his
+shoulder to Larry, who was bringing up the rear. “We’ll never get past
+that next shoulder――never in this world!”
+
+It did look dubious――more than dubious. Just ahead of them the canyon
+made a sharp elbow turn around a jutting cliff, and the stream, forced
+almost to reverse itself in the acute angle, was tearing the talus
+away in huge mouthfuls as it surged back from its plunge against the
+opposite cliff. As they stopped to look ahead, it became evident that
+in a very few minutes there wouldn’t be any talus left. But when they
+looked the other way, down the perilous path over which they had just
+come, they saw at once that their retreat was wholly cut off. In one
+place behind them the shelving slope had been entirely washed away and
+there was no footing left.
+
+“We’ve got to make that turn ahead!” Larry yelled, and, squeezing
+himself past Dick, Purdick and the trembling jacks, he took the lead,
+dragging manfully at Fishbait’s halter, and shouting at the others to
+come on.
+
+It was touch and go. As they approached the elbow turn the loose-piled,
+rocky débris under foot seemed to be dissolving into soft mush, and
+little Purdick, who was now at the tail end of things, went in almost
+to the tops of his lace boots. To make matters worse, the air was
+suddenly filled with a hoarse, murmuring roar that was deeper and more
+terrifying than the thunder of the augmented torrent. Purdick didn’t
+know what it was, but the other two did. Dick dropped back and pushed
+Purdick into the second place.
+
+“Keep going!” he panted. “There’s a cloud-burst flood coming down the
+canyon, and if we can’t turn that corner and find standing room beyond
+it, we’re goners!”
+
+Fortunately――how fortunately they were soon to realize――the corner was
+turned successfully, and on the upper side of the jutting cliff there
+was not only safer footing: there was a small side gulch coming down
+steeply into the main canyon. Up this gulch to higher ground they urged
+the stumbling burros, and even as they did it, the murmuring roar grew
+louder and the solid earth seemed to be trembling under their feet.
+
+Shouting, pulling, hauling and working like maniacs, they pushed and
+dragged the two pack animals up to the very head of the little side
+gulch, and they barely had done it when a wall of water, mountain high,
+it seemed to them, and black with débris and forest wreckage, came
+sweeping down the main gorge, rolling great boulders, hogshead size,
+before it as if they were pebbles. And with the terrifying flood, as
+if borne on its crest, came a dank wind that sucked up into the small
+side gulch as it passed, chilling the three who were bracing themselves
+to hold the burros――and their own footing――like the breath from an ice
+cavern.
+
+Like a good many of nature’s cataclysms, a cloud-burst flood does
+not last forever. While they were still shivering from the effect of
+the passing blast, the deafening roar withdrew into the down-canyon
+distances, and in a few minutes the waters began to subside.
+
+“A little of that goes a long way, especially when a fellow hasn’t had
+much breakfast to start out with,” said Larry with grim humor. Then:
+“I hope we’re all of us as thankful as we ought to be. If that flood
+had caught us anywhere between here and the mouth of the canyon, we
+wouldn’t have known what hit us――at least, not one half-second after it
+did hit us.”
+
+“But Great Cats!” gasped little Purdick, whose teeth were still
+chattering, “we’ll never get out of here, as it is! You know, well
+enough, that that flood hasn’t left us anything to walk on, either
+up-stream or down!”
+
+“Wait,” Larry said; and even as he spoke the water began to sink away
+as if by magic. In an incredibly short time the torrent had subsided,
+not only to its former level, but much below it――so much below it that,
+lacking a trail-path bank, the stream bed itself offered a practicable
+trail.
+
+“It’s all to the good, I guess,” said Purdick, “only I’m not just used
+to seeing things happen this way. Back in my native land the rivers
+don’t scare you to death one minute and skip out of sight the next.
+Let’s go.”
+
+It was high noon and past when they won out into the upper region of
+thunder storms and cloud-bursts, and by that time the skies had cleared
+and there was nothing but a trickling rill here and there to tell of
+the late deluge. As nearly as they could judge, they had about fifteen
+hundred feet more of elevation to make before they could cross the
+range, and after a cold lunch of canned tomatoes and the remains of the
+pan-bread that Purdick had baked at breakfast-time, they attacked the
+final ascent.
+
+On this part of the climb they were obliged to become pathfinders in
+grim earnest. There was no sign of a trail, and again and again they
+found themselves in a _cul de sac_; up against cliffy heights that no
+mountain goat could climb, much less a loaded pack animal. Luckily
+they had no snow of any consequence to contend with. The three added
+weeks of summer sunshine had taken it all save the deep drifts in
+the gulches, and these were melting rapidly. But the zig-zagging and
+exploring, the tramping up and down and back and forth in the effort
+to find a practicable trail to the summit, tried them to the utmost.
+
+It was after nightfall when they finally topped the range, and they
+could see nothing of what lay before them for the next day. But as to
+that they were too tired to care. Purdick made coffee over an alcohol
+candle, and they opened two of the four cans of peaches, agreeing to
+save the potato chips and the corned beef for a greater emergency.
+Eating in silence because they were too weary and exhausted to talk,
+they nearly fell asleep over the meagre meal; and as soon as it was
+swallowed, they rolled themselves in their blankets under the lee of
+the only big rock they could find on the bleak mountain top, and were
+asleep in much less time than it takes to tell it.
+
+It was perhaps just as well for their peace of mind that all three of
+them were much too tired to dream dreams or see visions. Or to travel
+in their astral bodies, as the old necromancers used to say a dreamer
+did. Because, in that case, they might have seen, at no great distance
+to the north of where they had made their hazardous and heart-breaking
+ascent of the mountain, a perfectly good trail leading up and over and
+down to the railroad town of Natrolia on the other side.
+
+Also, they might have seen, camping in an outpost grove of the timber
+beside this good trail, and only a little way from the summit of the
+pass over which it led, three men, one of whom was poking up the coals
+of the camp-fire with the end of a crutch, to the better cooking of a
+panful of bacon slices, saying, as he poked: “It’s all right, I tell
+yuh! They’ll make f’r the Shotgun camp after more grub, and we can
+stock up at Natrolia and beat ’em back to the Buttes by two good days,
+at least. Yuh can’t lose me in this neck o’ woods, Tom Dowling. If
+yuh wasn’t solid bone from the neck up, yuh’d have found that out long
+ago. Artill’ry? Nix, they won’t load up with no more shootin’-irons at
+Shotgun. ’At’s one thing old man Shanklin at the Shotgun Mine don’t let
+nobody sell on his reservation.”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VII
+
+ TOMATOES AND PEACHES
+
+
+Pretty stiff from their forced march and the chill of the night spent
+on the cold mountain top without fire, the three castaways――for so
+they were now calling themselves――were up with the dawn. Now that they
+had daylight to show them their surroundings, they saw that by going a
+little farther along the mountain to the left they might have camped in
+timber and had wood for a fire.
+
+“More spilt milk,” Dick lamented when he saw how they had missed what
+little comfort they might have had. “I guess we are more or less
+tenderfoots yet.” And then he went over to the clump of dwarfed trees
+and gathered some wood for the coffee fire, coffee being the only thing
+they had to cook.
+
+Inasmuch as they were by this time pretty well starved out on a diet
+of tomatoes and peaches, they agreed to call this breakfast on the
+mountain top the emergency they had been economizing for; so Purdick
+opened the can of corned beef and served it with potato chips.
+Fortified by a breakfast which was at least stimulating in quality,
+even if it did lack something in quantity, they prepared for the
+descent of the western slope.
+
+From the western brow of the mountain they had a magnificent view of
+the world at large, as Dick phrased it: mountains and plains, and
+then more mountains and plains, stretching away almost to infinity
+and backgrounded in the dim distance by the serrated range of the San
+Miguels. But it was the immediate foreground that interested them
+most. At the foot of the peak upon which they were standing there was
+a range of hogback hills, looking, from their height, no larger than
+a plow-turned furrow in the landscape; and just beyond the hogback,
+on the edge of a bare plain that was exactly the color of well-tanned
+buckskin, lay the little cattle-shipping station of Natrolia, a
+collection of odd-shaped dots, with one round dot larger than the rest
+which they took to be the railroad water tank.
+
+“There she is,” said Dick. “If we only had an aeroplane, or even a
+bunch of gliders, it wouldn’t take us very long to coast down there. It
+looks as if a good gun ought to be able to drop a bullet on that water
+tank from here.”
+
+“It’s a lot farther than it looks,” Larry put in.
+
+“Don’t you know it!” said Purdick; and then: “Say, isn’t that a
+railroad train just coming into the town?”
+
+What he was pointing at looked like a tiny worm barely moving along a
+dimly defined line on the borders of the buckskin plain, and trailing
+off from the head of the worm there was a thin black smudge――the smoke
+from the engine’s stack.
+
+“Our east-bound Flyer,” Dick said, naming the train. Then: “It doesn’t
+seem believable that that crawling worm of a thing will be in Brewster
+by dinner-time this evening, does it? But we can’t stay here all
+morning admiring the scenery, grand as it is,” he went on. “Which way
+do we aim for the go-down, Larry――north or south?”
+
+The question was asked because it was perfectly apparent that they had
+to aim either one way or the other in order to find a place where the
+descent could be made. In the straight-ahead line there was nothing
+doing. As far as they could see in either direction――which wasn’t very
+far because the mountain summit was as crooked as a snake――the western
+slope was as near to being an abrupt precipice as it could be and still
+figure as a slope.
+
+Larry shook his head, and it surely was a tricksy fate that led him
+to say: “There doesn’t seem to be much choice; perhaps we’d better go
+south.” This when, all unknown to them, less than half a mile distant
+to the north lay that excellent trail by which they could have reached
+Natrolia early in the afternoon――and by so doing would have changed the
+entire complexion of any number of things.
+
+But of the trail and its possibilities they knew nothing, so they
+turned――fatefully, as we say――to the southward, skirting the brow of
+the mountain, without gaining a single foot of descent, for two long
+hours before they came to a slope which seemed at all practicable for
+the burros. Even then their progress was exasperatingly slow. Time and
+again one of the jacks would slip and roll down into some gulch from
+which it took no end of time and labor to rescue it; and when that
+didn’t happen, they would be heading canyons too steep to be crossed,
+or going a mile or so out of their way to find a gulch through which
+they could chimney down from one bench of the great mountain to another.
+
+Struggling manfully with all these difficulties, and even cutting out
+the noon halt to save time, night overtook them long before they were
+low enough down to get another sight of the Natrolia hogback, and they
+had to camp.
+
+“Thank goodness, we’re down in the grass altitudes again, anyway,”
+said Dick as he pulled the packs from the burros’ backs and turned the
+little beasts loose to graze. “I don’t know how long a jack can go
+without feeding, but we’ve certainly given Fishbait and Lop-ear a tough
+siege of it since yesterday noon.”
+
+Larry grinned. “‘A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,’ doesn’t it?”
+he quoted. “Nothing like an empty tummy to make you sympathize with
+other things that can’t get enough to eat. How about it, Purdy? Where
+do we land for supper?”
+
+“Tomatoes and peaches. I’ll cook the tomatoes, if you’d rather have ’em
+hot.”
+
+“Oh, my suffering ancestors!” Dick groaned. “I’ll never be able to look
+a peach-tree or a tomato-vine in the face after this! I’m as hollow as
+the biggest bass drum that was ever built, and you tell me you’ll pass
+me a plate of sloppy peaches with tomatoes on the side! Let’s have a
+barbecue and roast old Fishbait.”
+
+They joked one another about it over the camp-fire, as good sportsmen
+should, but the hard work and slender fare were really beginning to
+take hold. And the worst of it was, the battle wasn’t won yet; a
+fact upon which Larry enlarged to Dick after the camp-fire had been
+back-logged for the night, and Purdick, once more wearied to the point
+of collapse, was asleep in his blankets.
+
+“I didn’t want to load Purdy up any heavier than he is loaded already,”
+was the way Larry began on the disturbing fact, “but I have a horrible
+suspicion that we are a good way from Natrolia and a fresh supply of
+eats yet. I’ve been kind of keeping tab on our side-steppings all day,
+and we’ve made a pretty stiff lot of southing. Don’t you think so?”
+
+“I know it,” Dick replied gloomily.
+
+“You’re still up to it, aren’t you?” Larry asked.
+
+“Up to another day of it, I guess, though I’ll have to confess that I
+don’t feel much thicker than a sheet of paper through the middle.”
+
+“My fix, too,” said Larry. “But that’s all right; we’re tough and we
+can stand it. Purdy’s the lad I’m worrying about. Did you notice that
+he was eating almost nothing at supper?”
+
+Dick nodded. “You’d say a fellow couldn’t possibly starve past the
+getting-hungry point on two days of short rations; but Purdy isn’t
+normal yet――not outdoor normal. We’ll have to watch him to-morrow, and
+if we see he’s breaking, we’ll just dump one of the burro loads and
+make him ride.”
+
+Larry shook his head. “You don’t know Purdy as well as I do. That
+little rat is the clearest kind of grit, all the way through. He’ll
+drop dead in his tracks before he’ll ever let us help him over the
+bumps.”
+
+“Huh!” said Dick, spreading his blankets for the night. “When the time
+comes, we won’t ask his royal permission. We’ll just hog-tie him on old
+Fishbait’s back, if we have to. Good-night. I’m going to dream of all
+the good things there are to eat in this world.”
+
+The morning of the third day of enforced abstinence dawned as
+beautifully as nearly all of their mornings had, thus far, and for
+breakfast they finished the canned things and――figuratively speaking
+at least――licked the cans. Purdick seemed all right again after his
+night’s rest, but neither Dick nor Larry guessed what an effort he had
+to make to swallow his small share of the peaches and tomatoes.
+
+“Feeling equal to a few more miles this morning, Purdy?” Larry asked,
+as they were putting the pack saddles on the burros.
+
+“I’m still staying with you,” returned the small one gamely. Then:
+“You mustn’t worry about me, Larry. There have been times in the past
+when I had to go short on the eats for a good deal more than two days
+hand-running, and I never thought anything of it. I’ll get my second
+wind, after a little.”
+
+“I’m not worrying,” said Larry; but that was not strictly true.
+
+With a start fairly made, Dick took careful compass bearings, utilizing
+every open space they came to as a lookout from which to determine,
+if possible, the amount of southing they had made during the previous
+day. As the day wore on without bringing anything that looked like a
+familiar landmark into view, the case began to look rather desperate.
+
+By the middle of the afternoon they were down in a region of foot-hills,
+and the going was much easier; but though they still kept working
+persistently north and west, no gap in the hills opened to show them the
+buckskin-colored plain they had seen from the mountain top. By this
+time, Dick and Larry both were growing more than anxious about Purdick.
+Twice Dick had made that suggestion about unloading one of the jacks and
+turning it into a riding animal, but Purdick had stoutly fought the
+idea, saying that he was getting along all right. But both of his
+hardier companions could see plainly that he was putting one foot before
+the other by a sheer effort of will.
+
+At four o’clock Larry called a halt, ostensibly to let the burros feed
+upon a patch of luxuriant grass in the ravine they were at that time
+traversing, but really to give Purdick a chance to throw himself down
+and rest――which he promptly did. When it came time to go on again, the
+small one said his say briefly.
+
+“I’m all in, fellows,” he said. “You leave me a couple of the blankets
+and go on without me. When you find the town――if you ever do find
+it――you can come back after me. As things stand now, I’m only a drag on
+the wheels.”
+
+“Yes; I think I see us leaving you!” Dick scoffed. “You’re going to get
+up and climb on old Fishbait’s back. We can’t be far from Natrolia now,
+and he’ll carry you all right.”
+
+Purdick sat up and his pale cheeks flushed suddenly.
+
+“What do you take me for?” he snapped, but there was something
+suspiciously like a sob at the end of the snap. “I told you both before
+we came west that I was no good, and now I’m proving it. It――it just
+_kills_ me to think that I can’t stand up and take things like other
+fellows――like you two do!” And with that, he whirled over and buried
+his face in the grass.
+
+Larry drew Dick aside and spoke in low tones.
+
+“It’s up to us,” he said. “He won’t ride, and I doubt if he could stick
+on the burro’s back if he tried. Stay here with him while I scout up to
+the top of that knob over there and see if I can find out where we are.”
+
+Left alone with Purdick, Dick sat down and waited. For a long five
+minutes Purdick lay on his face and made no sign, but at last he
+turned over and raised himself on an elbow.
+
+“Where’s Larry?” he asked.
+
+Dick pointed. “There he is――climbing to the top of that hill for a
+look-see. Feeling any better?”
+
+Purdick sat up and locked his fingers around his knees.
+
+“I’m so mad I can’t see straight, Dick. It’s fierce to be tied down to
+a no-account body like mine. I’m not worth the powder it would take to
+blow me up!”
+
+“Oh, hold on!” Dick protested. “This has been a pretty stiff tug for
+all of us. I’m not feeling so very much of a much, myself, just now,
+and neither is Larry.”
+
+“But you’re not beefing about it, either of you,” Purdick put in.
+
+“Neither are you,” Dick asserted. “When it comes down to pure sand,
+you’ve got more than either of us. You’ve been tramping on sheer nerve,
+all day long. I know it, and Larry knows it.”
+
+By this time, Larry was coming back down the hill, and he didn’t look
+as if he had seen anything encouraging from the top of it.
+
+“What luck?” Dick asked; and Larry shook his head.
+
+“Nothing but more hills and hollows. No sign of any plain, any town, or
+any railroad.”
+
+Little Purdick heaved himself to his feet, getting up like a camel――one
+pair of joints at a time.
+
+“Come on,” he said. “There are only a few more hours of daylight left,
+and I’ll make myself last that long if it kills me.”
+
+When he said this, neither of the others tried to argue with him. They
+knew it wouldn’t do any good. So the line of march was taken up again,
+upon a course as nearly due north as the nature of the region would
+permit. By holding this direction they knew absolutely that they must
+come to the railroad, sooner or later; and once in touch with that,
+they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be very far from the town.
+
+Much to Dick’s surprise, though not so much to Larry’s――for Larry knew
+him best――Purdick held out bravely; and when it was finally decided
+that they must camp for the night, which they did just before dark,
+Purdick helped gather wood, and himself made the fire for the boiling
+of the coffee water: a final brewing of coffee being the only thing
+they had left in the stripped commissary.
+
+After the warm drink had been served out, and the jacks picketed for
+the night, there was nothing more to do, and they all turned in to let
+a long night’s sleep do what it would toward relieving the hunger ache
+and fitting them for another surge on the morrow.
+
+It was maybe a couple of hours later that Purdick, always a light
+sleeper, and now particularly so when even the slightest doze-off made
+him dream of banquets, found himself sitting bolt upright and listening
+to a noise that was not unlike the never-to-be-forgotten earth-shaking
+thunder of the cloud-burst in the canyon. While he was trying in a
+bewildered half daze to determine what it was, a bright glare of light
+flashed among the trees, the noise deepened to a crashing clamor that
+brought the two others out of their blankets with a bound, and all
+three of them saw, at a distance of not over two hundred yards at the
+farthest, a long passenger-train shooting past the mouth of the little
+ravine in which they were camped.
+
+“E-e-yow!” Dick yawned, as the noise scuttled away in the western
+distance. “Wouldn’t that pinch your ear good and hard? Here we stopped
+two short steps and a jig dance from the railroad track and never knew
+it! Listen!”
+
+What they heard this time was the mellow shout of a locomotive whistle
+blown in a station signal.
+
+“Natrolia,” said Larry. “And it can’t be more than a couple of miles
+away, at that! What time is it, Dick?”
+
+Dick, being nearest the firelight, looked at his wrist watch.
+
+“Five minutes of nine,” he announced.
+
+Larry shook himself out of his blankets and stood up.
+
+“I’m the biggest of the bunch――and the toughest, I guess. You two
+fellows lie down and take another cat-nap while I saunter into town and
+buy a few morsels of grub. If our whistle guess is right, I ought to be
+back inside of an hour.”
+
+Of course, there was a generous protest to this, urged immediately by
+both of the others, but Larry argued them down. There was no need of
+all going when one could easily bring out provisions for a single meal,
+and if they should all go, they’d have to take the jacks, making the
+tired beasts stumble along for whatever distance it might be over the
+ties and ballast of a railroad track in the dark. So Larry had his way
+and went alone, taking the haversack.
+
+Left to themselves, Purdick and Dick didn’t go to sleep again; they
+groped around and got more wood and built up a good fire so as to
+have a bed of cooking coals if Larry should happen to bring something
+that needed cooking. That done, they sat around and waited, and about
+the time they were thinking that Larry might possibly have reached
+Natrolia, he came tramping back into the circle of firelight, with the
+haversack loaded to bursting dimensions, and with an armful of packages
+besides.
+
+“Already?” Dick shouted, jumping up to relieve the burden-bearer.
+
+“You said it. It’s less than a mile――just around the shoulder of this
+butte behind us. The store was shut, but I found the proprietor over at
+the hotel, and he opened up for me. Get out your pots and pans, Purdy.
+I’ve got some stuff here that’ll warm the cockles of your cookee heart.”
+
+Charles Purdick, Lawrence Donovan and Richard Maxwell, junior, may
+live to sit down to many banquets――at least we hope they may――but it
+is safe to say that that late supper, cooked and eaten under the stars
+in the little valley back of Natrolia, will always figure for them as
+the most gorgeous meal of a lifetime. Larry had not stinted his buying.
+There were potatoes to fry, and a thick, juicy beefsteak to be cut into
+squares and broiled on forked twigs, hunter fashion, before the fire,
+and more coffee to brew, with sugar to sweeten it and the unheard-of
+luxury of a can of condensed milk for cream, and bread――two loaves of
+good, home-made bread that the storekeeper’s wife had made Larry take
+when she heard his story of their starving time. And to top off with,
+Purdick fried flapjacks made out of the carton of prepared pancake
+flour that Larry had thoughtfully added to the haversack load.
+
+By all the rules of the eating game they should have made themselves
+beautifully sick, stuffing this way at the end of three days of short
+rations and no rations. But youth, Mother Nature, and a healthy,
+vigorous, outdoor life――taking them all together――can sometimes defy
+all rules; and the only result of the big feed was to make the feeders
+sleep like logs; and even Purdick, the lightest sleeper of the three,
+didn’t awaken until a long freight train, clattering past on the
+near-by track a little after sunrise, aroused him.
+
+Being so near to Natrolia, they decided not to wait to cook a camp
+breakfast, and, loading the jacks, they trailed into the little
+cattle-shipping town, gave the burros a feed in the shipping corral,
+and then made an assault upon the so-called “hotel,” taking it by storm
+and putting away a breakfast of ham and eggs and potatoes and coffee
+and cakes with near-maple syrup quite as heartily as if the gorgeous
+banquet of the night before had already vanished into a limbo of dim
+but precious memories.
+
+After breakfast came the re-stocking of provisions for a return to
+the field on the other side of the mountains, and from the genial,
+“old-timer” storekeeper who supplied them they learned that they had
+gone a long way around to miss a perfectly good and practicable trail
+over the Little Hophras; one which would take them back――as it would
+have brought them over――in something less than a day’s tramping.
+
+Dick laughed when the good-natured, bearded man behind the counter told
+them this. “I guess we ought to be bored for the hollow-horn, all of
+us, Mr. Wilkins,” he said, “for not looking around a little before we
+struck out. But the Government maps don’t show any such trail.”
+
+“No,” replied the storekeeper; “there wasn’t any when the maps were
+made.”
+
+“You’re sure it’s passable?” Larry asked.
+
+“Plum’ sure. Three men came in over it two days ago, did just what you
+boys are doin’――stocked up――and went back. They’re prospectin’, like
+yourselves, I take it.”
+
+All three of the boys exchanged glances at this mention of three men.
+
+“Did you know any of those men, Mr. Wilkins?” Larry inquired.
+
+“No; kind of a rough-lookin’ bunch, and one of ’em was a cripple,
+though he got around on one leg and a crutch sprier than either of the
+other two.”
+
+Larry took Dick aside while Purdick was checking the list of supplies
+with the storekeeper.
+
+“They’re our three,” Larry said in low tones. And then, impatiently:
+“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that they are
+barking up the wrong tree; that we don’t know any more about the Golden
+Spider than they do!”
+
+[Illustration: “I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know
+that they are barking up the wrong tree.”]
+
+“There doesn’t seem to be any way,” Dick countered. “But I can tell you
+one thing, Larry: I’m not going back into the mountains where they are
+without something to defend myself with, if it’s nothing more than a
+potato popgun.”
+
+“I’m with you on that,” said Larry. “Let’s look over Mr. Wilkins’s gun
+showcase and see if we can find anything that we can afford to buy.”
+
+They moved up to the front of the store, where there was a wall-case of
+guns and pistols. Almost at once they saw three Winchesters standing
+side by side in the rack, all alike, and all looking as if they were
+second-hand. Larry went closer and examined the stock of one of the
+guns carefully.
+
+“That’s my rifle, Dick,” he whispered. “There’s that bruise on the
+stock that it got that day last week when old Fishbait rolled down
+among the rocks with it in the pack. And the other two are yours and
+Purdy’s!”
+
+“Gee!” said Dick, his eyes widening. “Those rascals stole them and sold
+them to Mr. Wilkins! Shall we tell him?”
+
+Larry’s answer was the kind he usually made when the emergency demanded
+action. Going back to the counter where the storekeeper was still
+figuring with Purdick, he said:
+
+“Mr. Wilkins, we didn’t tell you all that happened to us at that camp
+of ours over in the back country. The bear that tore us up was a pretty
+sly old Silver-tip. Besides eating up most of our grub, he took our
+guns and all of our ammunition.”
+
+The bearded storekeeper laughed.
+
+“What’s this you’re givin’ me now?” he asked.
+
+“Straight goods,” said Larry soberly. “We had three Winchesters of the
+latest model, chambered for high-powered ammunition, and a good supply
+of cartridges for them.”
+
+For a minute or so the big storekeeper didn’t say anything. Then:
+
+“You ain’t stuffin’ me with that bear story, are ye?”
+
+“No; there was a bear, all right, and it was the bear that ate our grub
+and tore things up for us.”
+
+“But after that, some other kind of a bear come along and swiped your
+guns and ca’tridges?”
+
+“That is the way it looks to us,” Larry said.
+
+“Well, what you goin’ to do about it?”
+
+“We are going to buy those three second-hand Winchesters you have
+up in that case at the front,” Larry answered, looking the big man
+squarely in the eyes.
+
+The good-natured storekeeper laughed rather grimly.
+
+“I reckon you’ve got me dead to rights,” he said; “and I ought to
+’a’ knowed better. I bought them guns from the three scalawags I was
+tellin’ you about; the three that was here day before yesterday. They
+allowed they didn’t need ’em and was tired o’ luggin’ ’em around.”
+
+“We’ll buy them back from you,” said Dick, going into his shirt after
+his money belt.
+
+But at this the big man shook his head.
+
+“Nope, I reckon I can’t let you do that. I ain’t tried to live honest
+for fifty years to begin bein’ a ‘fence’ for crooks at my time o’ life.
+If them guns are yours, you take ’em.”
+
+There was some little haggling over this part of it, Dick saying that
+the storekeeper wasn’t to blame, and all that. But the big man was
+immovable; he had bought stolen goods, and it was up to him to pay the
+penalty. So he made them take the guns without money and without price,
+and threw in the cartridge belts and the ammunition, which, it seemed,
+had been sold with the rifles.
+
+What with all this chaffering and buying and talking, and the time it
+took Larry and Dick to write letters to their folks in Brewster (which
+letters, as may be imagined, didn’t say anything about the hardships of
+the past three days), it was the middle of the forenoon before they got
+a start up the perfectly good trail, considerably past noon when they
+stopped to eat on top of the range, and quite late at night before they
+left the trail and made camp in a wooded ravine not very far from the
+place where they had located the vanadium deposit, though much higher
+up the mountain. And on all that long faring they had neither seen nor
+heard any signs of the three hold-ups who, according to the Natrolia
+storekeeper’s account, had preceded them over the same trail not more
+than twenty-four hours earlier.
+
+Around the camp-fire that night they canvassed the situation as it
+had been revealed to them by the events of the past few days, and
+determined upon their course of action.
+
+“It’s all tom-foolishness of the worst kind,” was the way Larry the
+practical summed it up. “These crooks are going upon the supposition
+that we know something that we don’t know. If they could be convinced
+that we don’t know anything more about this mythical gold mine than the
+man in the moon, and that we haven’t the slightest intention of trying
+to find it, they’d drop us like a hot cake.”
+
+“That is all true enough,” Dick cut in. “But how are we going to
+convince them?”
+
+“We can’t, unless they’ll show up and give us a chance to talk to them.
+As long as they’re not convinced, I suppose they’ll go on dogging us
+around. I hate to have to turn in every night with the feeling that we
+may wake up in the morning to find that we’ve been robbed again, but I
+guess there is no help for it.”
+
+It was little Purdick who suggested the helpful plan.
+
+“We mustn’t take any chances,” he said; “and, since there are three of
+us, we needn’t. You two bunk down and I’ll take the first night watch.
+At midnight I’ll wake you, Dick, and at three o’clock you can call
+Larry. It runs in my mind that we’ve been sleeping too much, anyway.”
+
+Both Larry and Dick grumbled a little at this sort of war-like
+messing-up of their vacation when, as a matter of fact, it was, or
+ought to be, utterly needless. But they agreed to Purdick’s plan in the
+end as being the really sensible thing to do, and shortly afterward
+they turned in and left the small one sitting with his back to a tree
+and his rifle across his knees, determined to stay awake if the thing
+were humanly possible.
+
+For an hour or more he found it entirely possible. Apart from the deep
+breathing of his two sleeping companions and the nibbling noises made
+by the grazing burros, there were no sounds to disturb the solemn
+silence of the immensities. Having to study pretty hard for what he was
+getting in college, Purdick had a pretty safe recipe for keeping awake.
+It took the form of memory exercises; the recalling, word for word, of
+certain formulas like this: “If the point of suspension of a pendulum
+have an imposed simple vibration of _y_ equals _a_ cosine _st_ in a
+horizontal line, the equation of small motion of the bob is _mx_ equals
+minus _mg_ times _x_ minus _y_; over _l_”――things like that.
+
+Just now, being intensely interested in the science of mineralogy, he
+was repeating the names of all the “ites” he could remember by their
+different groups, with the chemical composition of each; and he had
+just got as far as, “Pyrargyrite: silver three atoms, antimony one
+atom, sulphur six atoms,” when he sat up and rubbed his eyes and began
+to wonder if, after all, he had gone to sleep and was dreaming.
+
+For while he stared and stared again, the camp-fire, with its back-log
+and bed of glowing coals, began to sink slowly into the ground, the
+unburnt ends of the back-log uprearing as the fire sank away. Before
+he had time to gasp twice, there was a gurgle and a hiss, and the fire
+disappeared as if by magic, leaving the tree-shadowed ravine in total
+darkness.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VIII
+
+ THE ICE CAVERN
+
+
+For a second or so after he had seen the camp-fire disappear as if a
+conjuror had waved his wand over it, Purdick was too greatly astounded
+even to yell. Twice he opened his mouth to shout at his two sleeping
+companions, but no sound came. With his teeth rattling in something
+that was a good bit like panic, he felt his way over to where Dick and
+Larry were lying rolled in their blankets and shook them awake.
+
+“Wake up! S-s-something’s happened!” he stuttered.
+
+“What is it?” said Dick sleepily, getting up on an elbow. Then: “Hello!
+What made you let the fire go out?”
+
+“I didn’t!” Purdick protested. “S-s-something sus-swallowed it!”
+
+Larry sat up, fumbled in the knapsack that he had stuffed under his
+head for a pillow, and found matches and a candle-end. When he struck a
+light, the mystery was explained――partly. In the place where the fire
+had been there was a round hole possibly three feet in diameter, and
+out of it a faint wreath of smoke and steam was issuing.
+
+“Well, I’ll be dogged!” Dick exclaimed. “Wouldn’t that jar you? Did it
+go all at once, Purdy?”
+
+“Right while I was looking at it. First I saw the bed of coals
+sinking, and then the back-log broke in two in the middle and the ends
+began to rear up. I thought I must be dreaming.”
+
+“Good, substantial old dream, all right,” said Dick. “Let’s see where
+that hole goes to, and what made it.”
+
+The “what made it” was evident enough when they crept, rather
+cautiously, to the edge of the well hole and examined it by the
+light of the candle. Under the thick bed of leaf mould carpeting the
+bottom of the small ravine in which they had pitched their night camp
+there was a layer of ice, the remains of a miniature glacier formed,
+possibly, many winters before. By the merest chance, their fire had
+been built over this ice layer and the heat had gradually melted a hole.
+
+“How far down does it go?” Purdick asked, leaning over the brink of the
+well and trying to look down.
+
+There was no answer to that question. The light of the candle wouldn’t
+penetrate very far, but as far as it reached it showed the hole still
+going on down. Larry went to where the jacks were grazing and got one
+of the picket ropes. Tying a piece of wood to the end of the rope, he
+lowered it into the hole. As nearly as they could measure, the chasm
+was about fifteen feet deep. And the stick and the rope came up wet.
+
+“Water in the bottom,” said Larry. “An underground stream; you can hear
+it splashing. That’s what makes this ravine so dry. Anybody want to go
+down and get a drink?”
+
+Dick yawned. “I’m too sleepy to go cave-exploring. Let’s make another
+fire and pigeonhole this thing till morning. It’ll keep, I guess.”
+
+Acting upon this eminently sensible suggestion, they built a fire
+in another place, gathered enough wood to keep it going through the
+remainder of the night, and after they had talked a little while, Dick
+and Larry turned in and Purdick resumed his watch. According to their
+agreement, Purdick roused Dick at midnight and took his own turn at the
+blankets, and at three o’clock Dick called Larry.
+
+At daybreak the two who had slept through the last of the night watches
+turned out to find Larry already cooking breakfast.
+
+“Haven’t been down in the hole to take a bath, have you?” asked Dick,
+rubbing his eyes open.
+
+“Not yet,” Larry grinned. “Thought I’d let one of you fellows try it
+first. I lowered the bucket and got the coffee water out of it, though.
+Help yourselves, if you want to wash up.”
+
+Dick let the bucket down and brought it up brimming. “Pour
+for me, Purdy, and then I’ll return the compliment,” he said;
+and as Purdick took the bucket and gave him the first slosh:
+“Gee-whizzikins-whillikins! Talk about your liquid ice! Whoop-ee! but
+that’s cold!”
+
+“Sure it’s cold,” said Larry with another grin. “Didn’t expect it to be
+hot, did you――out of an ice well?”
+
+While they were at breakfast they speculated a good bit on the
+peculiarity of an ice cavern being there in the bed of the little
+ravine in the heart of summer, and Dick was all for exploring it. So,
+after the meal, a boatswain’s chair was rigged at the end of the picket
+rope, and Larry and Purdick lowered the curious one into the well,
+taking a turn around a convenient tree for a snubbing hitch. When Dick
+was hauled out he had a fairy tale to tell.
+
+“It’s the most wonderful thing you ever saw!” he declared. “There’s a
+cave down there big enough to drive a truck through, and it goes right
+on down the mountain somewhere. As far as you can see, it’s lined with
+ice in the most beautiful crystal formations, dazzling, blinding white,
+just from the little light it gets from up here. We ought to take a day
+or so off and explore it.”
+
+Larry shook his head.
+
+“It’s a side-issue,” he said firmly, “and we mustn’t forget that we
+are under pay. There are those two tungsten prospects and the vanadium
+claim, on all of which we’ve got to do the discovery work required by
+law before we can record and hold them. After we’ve done that we can
+come back here, if you want to, and take a look at your ice cave. But
+business comes first.”
+
+“Oh, I guess you’re right――you most always are,” Dick admitted, making
+a wry face. “But I’m going to hold you to that coming-back promise
+before we leave this part of the country. I want to see where this cave
+goes to.”
+
+Having settled it that way, they packed and struck out for one of the
+tungsten prospects they had found some ten days earlier, reaching it in
+good time to pitch a sort of semi-permanent camp near-by.
+
+Wolframite, scheelite, ferberite and huebnerite, all mineral
+combinations from which the metal tungsten is obtained, occur in a
+number of curiously different formations, sometimes in the limestone,
+sometimes in the red sandstones and shales, sometimes in veins whose
+walls are granite or gneiss. What the three young prospectors had
+found, or believed they had found, in this first location was a vein of
+scheelite――which is the tungstate of calcium――lying along a “fault”
+contact between vein walls of granite and gneiss.
+
+It was a good-sized vein, big enough to be pretty valuable if it
+were really scheelite, and they ran another test on it to make sure,
+before they should waste any labor on the “discovery” work required by
+law――namely, the sinking of a shaft or the driving of a tunnel for at
+least ten feet on the vein.
+
+The test, in which Larry handled the blowpipe and Dick and Purdick made
+the notes, seemed entirely successful. The creamy yellowish ore fused
+with considerable difficulty in the blowpipe flame, as the book said it
+should; powdered, it dissolved freely in hydrochloric acid, leaving a
+greenish-yellow residue, and this residue, rubbed with a knife-blade on
+a bit of paper, changed at once to a bluish-green color.
+
+“That’s the stuff,” said Dick. “Now try it with the phosphoric acid.”
+
+Larry poured a little of the dissolved ore into a glass tube with a
+closed end, added phosphoric acid, and held the tube in the flame of
+the alcohol heating lamp. When the mixture began to give off the fumes
+of volatilization, he took the tube from the flame and let it cool. In
+a minute or two the test sample turned a beautiful blue.
+
+“Right, again,” said Dick. “That’s what it ought to do. Now dissolve it
+in water and see if the color will disappear.”
+
+Larry added the water, and immediately the blue color vanished.
+
+“Check once more,” Purdick said, with his finger on the place in the
+mineralogy book where the various steps in the test were set forth,
+with their results. “Now a pinch of the iron powder.”
+
+“There you are,” Larry summed up, when, with the addition of the iron,
+the blue color came back. “I guess we’re pretty safe to begin digging
+to-morrow morning.”
+
+Accordingly, the first thing the next morning they got out the hammer
+and drills, dynamite, caps and fuse, and became stone quarriers,
+setting themselves the task of driving a “discovery” tunnel on the
+vein, because it was easier to tunnel than to sink a shaft. Being new
+to the quarrying trade, they made slow work of it, blistering their
+hands plentifully the first day or two, and learning only by laborious
+experience in drilling the hard rock how to place their blasts where
+they would do the most good.
+
+Taking one thing with another, they spent nine of the long summer days
+on this job before Larry’s pocket tapeline told them they had the
+necessary ten feet of depth; after which it took part of another day to
+lay off the claim and stake it and post it with the proper notice. In
+honor of the leading burro, they named the lode the “Blue Fishbait.”
+
+Shifting that afternoon to the location of the other tungsten deposit
+they had discovered, they went through the same process here. In this
+place, however, the mineral, which was wolframite or ferberite, was
+in a softer formation; which was lucky because it was so situated
+that they couldn’t uncover it by tunnelling, and had to sink a shaft
+ten feet down on the vein. Larry took half a day to hack out a rude
+windlass with the hand-axe, and again they set to work drilling and
+blasting.
+
+A week sufficed for this second “discovery” development, and once more
+they moved on, this time to the vanadium deposit they had uncovered
+and located on the day of the bear’s visitation. By this time they
+had acquired a good bit more skill in handling the hammer and drills
+and dynamite, and were able to make the rock fly in fairly adequate
+quantities at each shot. It was Dick, the impatient one, who was
+continually urging speed and still more speed. This workaday rock
+digging, merely for the purpose of earning the right to record a claim,
+didn’t appeal to him, and he was eager to have it over with, and to get
+back to the really interesting part of the prospecting――ranging the
+mountains back and forth and looking for new lodes.
+
+“Gee, fellows!” he said, as they sat around their camp-fire one night
+at the vanadium claim, “do you realize that this is the second week in
+August, and that we’ve got to be back at Old Sheddon the first week in
+September?”
+
+“I’m realizing it mighty hard,” Purdick asserted. “I want what Old
+Sheddon is trying to give me in the way of an engineering course, but
+I haven’t had enough of this bully old wild life here in the mountains
+yet, not by a jugful.”
+
+Larry’s broad smile was good-naturedly joshing.
+
+“What you’ve been needing all your life was a quarryman’s job outdoors,
+Purdy,” he commented. “It’s sure making a man of you. You don’t look
+much like the little white-faced hospital rat you were when you came in
+with us in June.”
+
+Purdick pulled up a shirt sleeve, made a fist and slowly curved his arm
+upward. “Look at that muscle!” he bragged. “Essence of striking-hammer
+did that. Talk about your hour a day in the gym. Make it ten hours a
+day with the hammer and drills in the woods and you’ll get somewhere.”
+
+“Just listen at the feather-weight, will you?” laughed Dick; adding:
+“But Larry’s right, Purdy; you look twice the chap you did a month
+ago. And it does me good to see the way you eat. The old grizzly that
+cleaned us out a while back had nothing on you.”
+
+“M’m,” said Larry thoughtfully. “Speaking of grizzlies, and such
+things: I wonder what has become of the three hold-ups? We’ve been
+so busy with all the rock drilling and blasting that I’d just about
+forgotten them.”
+
+“Got discouraged and dropped us, I guess,” Dick put in. “If they
+hadn’t, we would have heard from ’em before this time. And that brings
+on more talk. Have we definitely decided not to have a try at looking
+for old Jimmie Brock’s lost gold mine?”
+
+Dick’s question reopened a subject which had been pretty well ignored
+thus far during the busy summer. Of the three, Dick was the only one
+who had ever taken the matter of the lost gold mine at all seriously,
+and at times when Larry or Purdick pinned him down, he joked about it,
+as they did. But now he confessed that he was just romantic enough,
+or foolish enough, to want to spend at least a little of the time
+remaining to them in a search for the Golden Spider.
+
+His argument was fair enough. He said, and it was true, that the three
+rare-metal discoveries they had made amply justified them in using the
+remaining two weeks as they pleased; that his uncle would be more than
+satisfied with their summer’s work as it stood; and that that same
+uncle, in telling them about the Golden Spider and giving them James
+Brock’s pencil sketch, had fully expected that they would do as he
+himself had done――make a search for the lost mine.
+
+In the end it came to a compromise, as most questions with two
+perfectly good and debatable sides usually do. For one of the two
+remaining weeks of their stay they would go on prospecting for the
+industrial metals, working their way back toward that part of the
+Little Hophras included in the penciled circle drawn by Daddy Longbeard
+on the worn map he had given Dick. And when they got within the circle
+the search for the Golden Spider should take precedence for the final
+week.
+
+“Not that anything will come of it,” Larry maintained. “These mountains
+are full of fairy tales just like that, and you know it as well as I
+do, Dick. But if you want to put in a few days looking for a pot of
+rainbow gold, it’s all right with me.”
+
+“And with me,” little Purdick agreed; and so it was settled.
+
+Upon the completion of the discovery work on the vanadium claim the
+compromise agreed upon in this camp-fire talk was made the order of
+the day. For a week they combed the foot-hills and hogbacks of the
+western range faithfully, working slowly up to the region included in
+Daddy Longbeard’s magic circle, and finding nothing in the way of rare
+metals save in one place where, in a mass of finely brecciated granite
+and porphyry they discovered a lot of thin quartz veinlets carrying a
+little molybdenite from which the metal molybdenum, an alloy for tool
+steel, is extracted.
+
+They marked this place on their map, but did not stop to locate
+the claim, the quantity of molybdenite in the tiny veins being so
+small that they decided it would not pay for the working. One day’s
+prospecting beyond this brought them fairly within the Daddy Longbeard
+circle, and, somewhat to their surprise, they found themselves camping
+within a short distance of the trail over which they had come from
+Natrolia, and no very great distance from the high-lying ravine of the
+ice cavern.
+
+“I told you we’d have to come back to that ice cave,” said Dick, in
+the after-supper talk around the camp-fire. “I move you that we go up
+to-morrow and explore it. Do I hear a second to that motion?”
+
+“Oh, if you can’t be happy until you do――of course,” said Larry.
+“You’re just about as likely to find the Golden Spider there as
+anywhere else. You’re crazy on this golden insect proposition, Dick.”
+
+“The world owes lots of its progress to crazy people, you old
+stick-in-the-mud――or to people that other folks called crazy. Don’t you
+know that?” Dick retorted. “Besides, a spider isn’t an insect. It’s an
+arthropod, and has eight legs, while the insects have only six. I’m
+astonished that you know so little.”
+
+“I’ll bet you ninety-nine people out of a hundred call ’em insects,
+anyway,” Larry maintained.
+
+“I’m the hundredth man,” Dick boasted. “I believe in spiders, golden or
+otherwise. What are we going to do with our bonanza, when we find it?
+Have you fellows decided upon that yet?”
+
+“_When_ we find it!” Larry snorted. “Better say ‘if,’ and say it in
+capital letters, at that.”
+
+“It wouldn’t be ours, if we should find it,” Purdick objected.
+
+“Of course it would,” Dick asserted. “Didn’t you hear what Uncle Billy
+said? James Brock gave it to him, and he gave it to us. But, as far as
+that goes, it isn’t anybody’s mine, the way it stands now. Or rather,
+it belongs to anybody who may come along and relocate it. The law says
+that a certain amount of work must be done every year to hold a claim,
+and it is three years since poor old Jimmie Brock died.”
+
+“Then those three hold-ups would have as good a legal right to it as
+anybody, if they should find it?” Purdick asked.
+
+“Sure they would, if they happen to beat us to it; or if they could
+jump it and take it away from us before we could get it recorded in
+our names. That’s probably what they meant to do: run us off, and two
+of them hold it while the other could light out for the nearest land
+office and get it recorded.”
+
+Little Purdick laughed and took a small shot at himself, as his habit
+was.
+
+“I’m not very brave. I guess I’m rather glad those fellows have dropped
+us,” he said.
+
+“Umph!” Larry grunted, stretching himself luxuriously on his blanket.
+“Who was it that followed the crutch cripple that night in Lost Canyon,
+I’d like to know? But of course _that_ didn’t take any nerve.”
+
+“That’s all right; sleuthing a cripple is one thing, and a stand-up
+fight is another,” Purdick qualified. “I guess I wouldn’t be much good
+in a real, for-sure scrap.”
+
+They went on talking for a little while, Dick getting back to his
+cocksureness that the Golden Spider would be found, and Larry throwing
+cold water in bucketsful, as he usually did when the lost mine was
+under discussion. As once before, it was little Purdick who broke in to
+turn the talk current into another channel.
+
+“Talking about minerals――and we’ve been eating and drinking and
+sleeping them all summer――I’d like to know what this is,” he said,
+taking a piece of brownish stone from his pocket. “I picked it up when
+we were scouting along this afternoon and dropped it into my pocket and
+forgot it.”
+
+Larry and Dick both examined the specimen and could make nothing of it.
+“Brown stone” was the only name that fitted it, and it had no lustre,
+and no metallic “streak” when it was scratched. The only hint it gave
+of being other than it seemed to be――a bit of soft brown stone――was in
+its weight. Dick looked at his wrist watch.
+
+“It’s early yet,” he said. “Get out the blowpipe and chemicals, Purdy,
+and we’ll run a test on it.”
+
+Since the specimen crumbled quite easily, it was only a matter of a few
+minutes to grind a small part of it to powder in the porcelain mortar.
+To the powder was added a little borax to serve as a flux for any metal
+there might be in the sample, the mixture was heaped upon the cake of
+prepared charcoal, and the blowpipe flame was turned upon it, Dick
+furnishing the breath for the blast.
+
+In due time the tiny heap began to fuse and disappear, but not all
+of it. In the small burned cavity in the charcoal cake lay a bright
+pinhead button of metal: light yellow while hot, but cooling to a
+deeper yellow when the blowing stopped.
+
+During the long summer of prospecting the three apprentice mineralogists
+had had experience enough in ore testing to know at once that only one
+metal in the entire list――and only one form of it, at that――could be
+thus smelted pure from the vein matter in a simple blowpipe flame. Dick
+was the first to find speech.
+
+“Free gold!” he gasped. And then: “That stuff is disintegrated quartz!
+Pity’s sake! I ought to have known it at sight. Goodness knows, I’ve
+seen enough of it in the mineral cabinets at home to know what it looks
+like.”
+
+Larry was dropping a few drops of strong nitric acid into a test tube
+while Purdick lighted the alcohol heating lamp. Carefully depositing
+the tiny globule of metal in the acid, Larry heated the closed end
+of the tube in the alcohol flame. This was to determine the pureness
+of the gold. If it were alloyed with silver, the hot acid would
+immediately dissolve the silver. But there was no chemical reaction
+visible, and the tiny globule remained apparently undiminished in size;
+which meant that it was practically all gold.
+
+“It’s the pure quill,” Larry declared, speaking for the first time
+since the testing began. “Now then, Purdy, where did you find it?
+That’s the next thing.”
+
+But now Purdick was in despair.
+
+“I can’t tell――can’t remember, to save me. I’m not even sure that I
+should know the place if I should see it again. I just picked up that
+bit of stuff as I’ve been picking up hundreds of other bits of rock in
+the last few weeks, and I don’t know what made me keep it, unless it
+was the queer, rusty-iron color. I do remember now that I thought it
+was a bit of iron ore and wondered what it was doing up here among the
+granites.”
+
+“Well,” said Dick with a grim little smile, “you’ve discovered a gold
+mine and you’re in the same fix that we all are with the Golden Spider.
+You had it, and you’ve lost it.”
+
+“Could you go back over the route you took this afternoon?” Larry asked.
+
+“I’m afraid I couldn’t do even that much.”
+
+“Was it higher up the mountain than this――or lower down?”
+
+Purdick put his face in his hands and tried to think, and the harder he
+tried the more confusing the recollections――or no recollections――became.
+
+“I don’t know,” he said at length. “You know we all separated in the
+afternoon, agreeing to meet here. I remember climbing two or three
+gulches, and working around one place where there was a steep slope and
+a pile of broken rock. At the top of the slope, as I recall it, there
+was a cliff. I remember that, because I had half a mind to climb up
+to the cliff to find out what kind of rock it was. But the slope was
+pretty steep and I didn’t.”
+
+“And was that where you picked up this piece of quartz?” Dick asked.
+
+Purdick made helpless motions with his hands.
+
+“Don’t ask me,” he protested. “The more I try to remember, the worse
+off I get.”
+
+“Well,” Larry put in, with a copying of Dick’s grim smile, “you’ll
+always have it to tell that you once discovered a gold mine――a real
+bonanza, at that. Let’s turn in and hope that you may dream out the
+place. I guess that’s about the only hope there is left.”
+
+A few minutes later they had made their simple preparations for the
+night. Though they had long since concluded that the three would-be
+mine jumpers had given up the chase, they still kept up the habit they
+had formed of dividing the night into three watches, more because it
+was a habit than for any imaginable danger that might threaten them or
+their belongings.
+
+On this particular night it was Dick’s turn to take the first watch
+up to midnight, and after Larry and Purdick were asleep he put some
+pitchwood on the fire and got out the mineralogy book, meaning to kill
+some of the waking time by reading. Most naturally, after the test
+they had just made, he turned to the various sections on gold and gold
+testing, and was soon so deeply interested as to forget what he was
+sitting up for, to become completely oblivious to his surroundings.
+
+It was perhaps for this cause that he failed to hear a slight rustling
+in a clump of young spruces on the opposite side of the fire; failed,
+also, to see a shadowy figure hopping away into the night――the figure
+of a man walking with the aid of a crutch. If he had heard and seen,
+and had known that the vanishing spy had been a listening witness to
+all that had been said and done at the camp-fire, it is safe to say
+that nothing less than manacles and a gag would have kept him from
+leaping up and giving the alarm.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER IX
+
+ THE SPIDER’S WEB
+
+
+On the morning following the test made upon the bit of gold quartz that
+Purdick had picked up, Larry, who had the watch from three o’clock to
+daybreak, found himself getting so sleepy in the final hour of his
+watch that he had to get up and stir around to keep awake.
+
+Renewing the camp-fire so that there might be a good bed of coals for
+the breakfast cooking, he contrived to kill time until it was light
+enough to enable him to see the surrounding objects. Then, as Dick and
+little Purdick were still sleeping soundly, he picked up the hammer
+they used for breaking samples and started out for an early-morning
+walk, meaning to have a look at a curious rock and earth deposit he had
+come upon the evening before, after it was too near dark to examine it
+closely.
+
+Turning to the left along the bench or ledge over which they
+had climbed to reach the camping place, he pushed on around the
+mountain until he came to the rock and earth slide that he wanted to
+investigate. Finding it nothing more than an interesting example of one
+of the prehistoric upheavals that have folded the earth’s crust into
+so many singular and apparently impossible combinations in the western
+mountain ranges, he was about to turn back when he saw, just at his
+feet, a curious round hole in the clay of the slide.
+
+Now there is one good thing that prospecting for minerals does for
+anybody who goes at it seriously: it develops a habit of scrutinizing
+the whys and wherefores of things――any little thing; the habit of
+prying observation which is usually credited, in stories, to the
+detective, but which really belongs to every thoughtful student in any
+field. Larry stooped to examine the hole in the clay. It was a little
+over an inch in diameter and about two inches deep, circular at the
+bottom and elliptical at the top.
+
+Squatting beside it, Larry stared at it reflectively. His first
+assumption was that it had been made by a bug or insect of some sort,
+but that conclusion was set aside when he remembered that no burrowing
+bug that he had ever heard of made a hole just like this. After a
+little, he took the tape measure from his pocket and with it described
+a circle three feet in diameter with the curious hole for its center.
+Then he got down on his hands and knees and crawled around the circle
+with his eyes on the ground, making two complete circuits before he was
+satisfied.
+
+“Nothing doing,” he muttered, as he got upon his feet again; and then,
+with a slow grin: “Muttonhead!――of course there wouldn’t be, at three
+feet!”
+
+Resorting to the tape again, he struck a wider circle, spacing it
+six feet from the hole. This time there were results――or one result,
+at least. At a point just beyond one side of the bigger circle there
+was another hole, the exact mate of the one he had first discovered;
+round at the bottom and elongated considerably at the top. Noting the
+direction of the elongation and the lining-up of the two holes, he
+paced off another six feet, and there, under his eyes, was a third hole.
+
+With his lips pursed in a soundless whistle he climbed to the top of a
+near-by boulder and let his gaze sweep the slopes below. The morning
+calm was on the landscape, with no breath of air stirring to whisper
+in the trees. The boulder-top height commanded a view for miles in
+three directions, but there was nothing to be seen but the statuesque
+procession of buttes and valleys, mountain slopes and wooded gulches.
+
+Preparing to go back to camp, Larry did a characteristic thing; that
+is to say, it was characteristic of him. One of the three holes was in
+a sort of plastic clay, much like that used by sculptors in modeling.
+Going down on his knees, he dug carefully all around the hole with his
+pocket-knife, lifting out a chunk of the clay about the size of a pint
+cup with the hole intact in the middle of it. Wrapping the lump of clay
+in his handkerchief, he swung away to retrace his steps to the camp in
+the farther gulch.
+
+Both Purdick and Dick were up when he got back, and Purdick had
+breakfast nearly ready.
+
+“Hello, you old early bird,” Dick called out. “Got a handkerchief-ful
+of worms already?”
+
+Larry didn’t say what he had. Putting the handkerchief-wrapped
+“specimen” in the cleft of a rock, he turned in to help Purdick dish up
+the breakfast; and later, while they were eating, he said nothing about
+his curious find. But when the last flapjack was eaten, he reached for
+the lump of clay, unwrapped it, and showed it to the others.
+
+“What do you make of that?” he asked.
+
+Both Dick and Purdick examined the “specimen” closely.
+
+“What’s the answer?” said Dick, looking up.
+
+“That’s what I’d like to have you tell me. I found three of those holes
+a quarter of a mile away around the mountain. They were about six feet
+apart, and all alike.”
+
+It was Purdick’s shrewd intelligence that jumped to the one inevitable
+conclusion. “A crutch print!” he breathed; “_the_ crutch print!”
+
+Larry nodded. “That was the way I doped it out.”
+
+Without another word Purdick got up and began to circle the camp site
+with his nose to the ground. In the little grove of spruces to the left
+he found what he was looking for.
+
+“Half a dozen of ’em over here,” he announced; “one deep one, as if the
+crutch had been leaned on for a good while.”
+
+For a little time nobody said anything, and when the silence was
+broken, it was Dick who broke it.
+
+“The guess we made last night――that these scamps had given up and gone
+away――doesn’t go,” he said soberly. “They’re still camping on our
+trail, and those marks over there under the spruces must have been made
+after we camped here last night. If we hadn’t been keeping watch, we
+would probably have lost our guns again.”
+
+“Well?” said Larry.
+
+“Meaning that you want me to say what I think we ought to do?” asked
+Dick.
+
+“Something like that――yes.”
+
+“All right; I’ll say it. I’m about fed up on this thing, and here’s my
+fling at it. Let’s leave Purdy here with the jacks and dunnage, while
+you and I go after these fellows and read the riot act to them――tell
+them they’ve got to quit chasing us around and spying on us or there’ll
+be trouble.”
+
+Larry shook his head slowly.
+
+“That won’t do, Dick,” he objected. “In the first place, we don’t
+know where to go to look for them, and in the second, they’d be three
+to two, and they’d just laugh at us. More than that, we can’t prove
+anything on them; couldn’t even in a court, unless we could bring the
+Natrolia storekeeper to testify that they sold him our rifles.”
+
+“Well, we could at least give them fair warning,” Dick persisted; “tell
+them that we’ll shoot on sight if anybody comes messing around our
+camp.”
+
+Again Larry shook his head.
+
+“Even at that we’d have the weak end of the thing. This is all wild
+land, and they’ve got as good a right in any part of it as we have.
+No; the only thing to do is to go on as we’ve been doing. They won’t
+interfere with us so long as we don’t find the Golden Spider――and
+that’s a good bet that they’ll never interfere with us at all.”
+
+“Everything goes,” Dick acquiesced. “But I’ll say this much: if they
+come monkeying around any time while I’m on watch there’ll be blood on
+the moon. As I say, I’m fed up. Let’s call it a back number and move
+on up to that ice cave. To-day’s as good a day as any to do a little
+exploring among the ‘pretties.’ ... Oh, chortle, if you want to!”――this
+to Larry. “When you go down in there and see what I saw, you’ll say
+it’s worth all the trouble.”
+
+It was while they were loading the jacks that Purdick said:
+
+“There’s one thing that we’ve sort of overlooked. If that cripple was
+spying and listening last night, any time before we turned in, he must
+have seen us run the test on that piece of gold quartz.”
+
+“Supposing he did,” said Dick.
+
+“It’s all right, of course――if he saw and heard everything that was
+done and said, heard me say that I couldn’t remember where I found the
+piece of quartz. But if he only saw and heard part of it.... You see
+what I’m getting at. We tested a piece of gold ore, and it was rich
+enough to make us all go bug-eyed. Gold ore, to that bunch, means the
+Golden Spider. Supposing he rambled off with the notion in his head
+that we’ve discovered the lost mine at last?”
+
+“Humph!” Dick grunted. “In that case, I’ll probably get my shot at one
+or two of ’em sooner than I expected to. Got Lop-Ear cinched, Larry?
+All right; let’s go.”
+
+The distance up to the ravine of the ice cave proved to be less than
+they thought it was and it was soon traversed. Upon reaching the site
+of the former camp they found that a curious change had taken place in
+the ravine bottom. The round hole melted by the heat of their camp-fire
+was very considerably enlarged, not sidewise, but lengthwise, and the
+ice had disappeared――thawed away completely, showing the bare rock
+walls of a narrow crevice on either side, though there was still a
+miniature torrent racing along at the bottom of the crack.
+
+By reason of these changes it was no longer necessary to use the rope
+as a means of descent into the depths. At its up-mountain end the
+ice-freed crevice ran out in a series of rude, stair-like steps, down
+which it was easy to scramble. It was Dick who led the way into the
+cave, after they had unloaded the burros and picketed them.
+
+“Gee! all my pretty ice stalactites are melted and gone,” he lamented;
+and then: “Whew! feel that current of warm air, will you? No wonder the
+ice has disappeared. Where do you suppose the warm wind is coming from?”
+
+His assertion concerning the disappearance of the ice decorations was
+verified when they got far enough down to get a glimpse into the great
+chamber he had seen and tried to describe after his two companions had
+hauled him out of the well hole at the end of the picket rope. There
+was no ice to be seen anywhere, though the walls were still wet in
+spots as from some melting reservoir overhead.
+
+Larry lighted a candle and began to examine the walls of the chamber,
+and Dick laughed.
+
+“Once a prospector, always a prospector,” he said jokingly. “Expecting
+to find a bonanza down here, old scout?”
+
+“Not quite,” Larry answered. “I was just wondering if this is a
+water-cut canyon――or was once, before it got filled up and covered
+over.”
+
+“What else would it be?” Purdick asked.
+
+“I’m not much of a geologist,” Larry returned, “but we all know this:
+that every mineral vein in the world was once just a crack in the
+rocks that got filled up at some later time with gangue matter and
+mineral-bearing stuff. It just occurred to me to wonder if this isn’t
+one of the cracks that failed to get filled up――in this part of it, at
+least.”
+
+“You couldn’t tell,” Dick put in.
+
+“No; not positively, of course. But I believe I’m right, just the
+same. This wall rock doesn’t show any trace of water-wearing. It’s as
+clean as if the crack had been split open only yesterday.”
+
+Dick laughed. “Let’s make the geology a little more practical and go
+on. I’d like to see how far this thing extends, and what makes the warm
+wind.”
+
+Their passage through the crevice was unobstructed for quite a
+considerable distance. Slowly the daylight from the crack-like opening
+in the ravine bottom receded, growing fainter and fainter until at
+length it disappeared entirely and they were dependent upon the candle
+to light their way. And still the crevice held on, going deeper and
+deeper into the mountain, narrowing in some places to tunnel width, and
+then widening out again into a spacious corridor.
+
+They had gone possibly a quarter of a mile from the ravine entrance,
+though in the silence and darkness it seemed like a much greater
+distance, when Larry called a halt.
+
+“Hold up a minute, fellows,” he cautioned. “We’re getting too far away
+from our base of supplies. After what we found out this morning, it
+won’t do to leave the jacks and all our belongings sticking around
+where anybody can pick them up and walk off with them.”
+
+“Gee! I forgot all about that,” said Dick. “Let’s hurry back. Maybe
+those crooks have cleaned us out already!”
+
+Purdick had the candle at the moment and was digging with the pick
+end of the geologist’s hammer at a soft streak of something in the
+left-hand wall.
+
+“I wish we had another candle,” said he. “I’d like to stay here long
+enough to see what this is. It looks like a small vein of galena.”
+
+“Never mind that now!” Dick exclaimed. “We can come back again, if we
+want to. We mustn’t leave our traps alone another minute!”
+
+Hurrying as well as they could over the broken stone floor of the
+crevice, and stumbling now and again into the small torrent that was
+coursing through it, they won back to the daylight crack and climbed
+out. Their alarm had been needless. The jacks were grazing peacefully
+in the ravine, and the camp dunnage was lying just as they had left it.
+
+Dick laughed rather shamefacedly.
+
+“What is there about an underground job to make a fellow get panicky
+all in a minute?” he asked. “When you mentioned what might happen up
+here while we were all down yonder in that cellar, I could just see
+those three crooks digging out through the woods with every last thing
+we had in the world.”
+
+“Umph!” said the practical-minded Larry. “Great thing to have a vivid
+imagination. Got enough of the exploring, or do you want to go back?”
+
+“_I’d_ like to go back,” Purdick asserted. “I more than half believe
+that I found a vein of mineral just as you fellows turned in the fire
+alarm.”
+
+Larry was looking down at the rude flight of natural steps up which
+they had just clambered in getting out of the crevice.
+
+“If you fellows think it’s worth while, I believe we can get the jacks
+down there,” he suggested. “If we do that, we can carry the dunnage
+down and load the jacks in the cave.”
+
+“And take ’em with us?” Dick said.
+
+“Why, yes, as far as we go――or as long as the going is possible for
+them. Why not?”
+
+“There isn’t any ‘why not,’” Dick broke out, with a swift return of the
+exploring enthusiasm; and he and Purdick went to catch the burros.
+
+But after the little beasts had been brought to the head of the
+precipitous stairway, the old adage, that one man can lead a horse to
+water, but twenty can’t make him drink, seemed to apply to donkeys as
+well as to horses. Fishbait shied and braced himself like the end man
+on a tug-of-war rope, and Lop-Ear, taking the cue from his file leader,
+did the same.
+
+Now there certainly wasn’t, or wouldn’t appear to be, any sufficient
+reason for going to any great amount of trouble to get the burros
+down into the cave; but human beings are curious creatures, in a good
+many ways. Realizing fully that, in all probability, the game wasn’t
+at all worth the candle, the three set their heads determinedly upon
+getting the pack animals underground, and the more the jacks held back,
+the more determined they became. So, after a good deal of pulling
+and hauling and pushing and heaving, the little pack animals were
+finally got down to the comparatively level floor of the crevice,
+the packs――less cumbersome now because the provisions were running
+low――were adjusted, a couple of candles were lighted, and once more the
+exploring expedition――which had now become a caravan――moved forward.
+
+Once in the depths, the burros gave no more trouble; indeed, as Dick
+remarked, they trudged along much as if they had been reared as mine
+mules. Reaching their “farthest north” of the previous exploration,
+they stopped long enough to let Purdick examine his galena find, which
+turned out to be, not galena, but a small pocket of pyrites not worth
+bothering with.
+
+Beyond this point the slit in the rock narrowed again, and became quite
+tortuous in its course; so narrow and so crooked in places that they
+had some trouble in getting the loaded jacks through. The torrenting
+stream which had been underfoot in the first few hundred yards had now
+taken to disappearing and reappearing, dodging underground and then
+coming out again to flow for a time through a channel in the floor of
+the cavern. The roof of the natural tunnel, ten or twelve feet high
+where they had entered it, now came down in some places so low that
+they could reach up and touch it with their hands; touch it, and also
+see what it was made of.
+
+“I don’t much like the looks of this stuff overhead,” Larry said,
+holding his candle up to light the low-hanging roof. “You can see what
+it is: nothing but loose rocks and forest rubbish that has been blown
+or washed in from the surface. If it should take a notion to fall down
+and plug this runway, we’d be strictly out of the fight.”
+
+“You said something then,” said Dick. “Here’s hoping she doesn’t take
+the notion――not while we’re in here, anyway.”
+
+Now this was a good hope, but in making it Dick failed to put enough
+staying power in it. At one of the tightest places in the narrow
+passage, where the walls were pinched together and the roof was hardly
+man-head high, Dick, who was tail-ender in the procession of three and
+was leading Lop-Ear, was brought up standing by a sudden pull on the
+halter from behind.
+
+Facing around to let his candle show him what the sudden halt meant,
+he saw that Lop-Ear, or his pack, or both, were stuck in the passage.
+It didn’t seem to be a very bad stick, so he hunted up a niche to put
+the candle in, wrapped the hackamore strap around his hands, and braced
+himself for a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together.
+
+The scheme worked all right, so far as starting the stopped rear-guard
+was concerned. While Dick pulled manfully, the little pack-beast
+dug its hoofs in, humped its back, and came through the squeeze
+triumphantly. But the triumph was short-lived. At the releasing of the
+resistance to his pull, Dick had to run backward a few steps to recover
+his balance. The little involuntary backward run was probably all that
+saved his life, as well as that of the burro. For that was the precise
+instant when the weak-kneed hope that Dick had offered turned loose
+its hold: there was a rumbling sound like a huge earth sigh, a choking
+rush of dust-laden air, and the tunnel roof, in the exact spot where
+the high-piled jack load had touched it, had fallen in and plugged the
+passage.
+
+Dick yelled promptly to his companions, who had passed out of sight
+around the next turn in the corridor, and they both came back to see
+what was wanted. Dick held his candle up to show them the plugged
+passage.
+
+“Humph!” said Larry; “that does settle it. We’re trapped for fair, I
+should say. How did it happen?”
+
+Dick explained. “Lop-Ear was stuck and I pulled on the halter to help
+him through. I guess he humped himself so hard that the pack knocked
+against the roof and loosened it. I wonder how long it’s going to take
+us to dig our way out?”
+
+Larry shook his head. “That’s a horse――or a donkey――of another color.
+Depends on how much of the stuff has fallen. Purdy, run on ahead to
+where we left Fishbait and get the pick and shovel from his pack.”
+
+When the digging tools were brought, they attacked the plug manfully,
+spelling one another with the pick and shovel. A full hour of the
+hardest kind of work got them nowhere. Apparently there was no end to
+the amount of broken rock and earth mould that had fallen in; and,
+worse than that, they had no place to put the stuff as they dug it out.
+All they could do was to pile it up behind them as they dug, and that
+merely shifted the obstructing plug from one place to another.
+
+“They say that curiosity killed the cat,” said Purdick, at the end of
+the hour of hard labor, when they sat down on the pile of débris for
+a breathing spell. “If I hadn’t been so curious about that pocket of
+pyrites and persuaded you fellows to come back into this hole――――”
+
+“Nothing like that,” Dick cut in promptly. “If there’s any blame lying
+around loose, it’s mine. But taking the blame doesn’t get us out of
+here. What do you say, Larry?”
+
+“There doesn’t seem to be much left to say――only more of the same.
+We’re in here, and we’ve got to dig our way out, if it takes a month of
+Sundays.”
+
+“Huh!” Dick grunted. “The grub won’t last for more than two Sundays, if
+it does that; and we can’t feed the jacks on bacon and canned stuff.”
+
+“Well,” said Larry, “you tell it. What else is there to do?”
+
+Dick didn’t tell it, but Purdick did.
+
+“There was a warm current of air blowing through here before that
+stuff fell down and stopped the hole; we all noticed it. Maybe there is
+another way out, at the farther end of this thing.”
+
+“Say, that sounds like a piece of sure-enough common sense,” said
+Larry, jumping up. “Why didn’t we think of that before? Let’s try for
+it, anyhow, before we wear ourselves out with any more of the digging.”
+
+Suiting the action to the word, they clambered back over the pile
+of detritus they had heaped up and got the caravan in trail again.
+Whatever the cavern lacked in width――though now they found it wide
+enough in most places――it made up in length. For hours, as it seemed
+to them, they wandered on and on, sometimes along level passages, but
+oftener going down-hill.
+
+It was far past noon when they stopped to eat a bite of cold meat and
+bread left over from the breakfast cooking, and still there appeared to
+be no end to the crevice.
+
+“Good goodness! we must have come miles through this thing,” Dick
+exclaimed, munching a mouthful of the corn-bread sandwich. “If we have
+to go back and dig out the way we came in――――”
+
+“Here’s hoping mighty hard that we won’t have to do that,” Larry
+interrupted. “How’s your hope, Purdy?”
+
+Purdick’s grin looked pale, but that was only because the candle light
+was poor.
+
+“I’m still betting on that warm wind that we felt when we first came
+in,” he said. “That came from outdoors somewhere; it must have.”
+
+“All right; let’s go find it,” said Larry, bolting his last mouthful;
+and the march into the black depths was resumed.
+
+Not for very long, however. A few hundred feet beyond their halting
+place they came to an obstacle “right,” as Dick named it. In a narrow
+passage which led to a much larger space beyond, a huge boulder had
+fallen in from above, leaving only a rat-hole, so to speak, between its
+bulk and one side of the tunnel; a space through which they could look,
+with the help of the candles, but through which not even little Purdick
+could squeeze himself.
+
+That brought on more talk; pretty serious talk. Dick was for turning
+back and making another desperate assault on the plug that Lop-Ear’s
+struggles had brought down, and his urgings would have prevailed had
+not Purdick, who was staring through the narrow slit ahead, this time
+without the aid of the candles, suddenly broke in.
+
+“Say, fellows! I believe I can see something like a glimmer of daylight
+ahead! Come here and look!”
+
+They all looked, putting the lighted candles well in the background.
+What they saw was hardly daylight; it was nothing more than a grayish
+sort of dusk. But they knew perfectly well that it must come from
+daylight somewhere.
+
+“That answers the question for us,” said Larry definitely. “We have
+the hammer and drills and dynamite. We can drill and blast this rock
+in less time than it will take us to go all the way back and dig out
+through that roof slide. What do you say?”
+
+They didn’t say, particularly. They got out the tools and fell to work.
+It turned out to be a most grueling job, drilling a shot hole in the
+big stone. There was hardly room in which to swing the hammer properly,
+and the one who was “striking” could keep it up for only a few minutes
+at a time. But the sight of the shadowy illumination beyond the
+obstacle kept them going, and they wouldn’t give up, didn’t give up or
+stop, only once for the evening meal, until they had the hole drilled
+well into the center of the boulder.
+
+Next came the loading and firing, and that, too, brought on more talk.
+They knew that the gases liberated by the exploding dynamite would,
+unless there were a ventilating outlet somewhere beyond, fill the
+cavern and stifle them. By this time it was well on into the night,
+and it was Larry’s suggestion that they load the hole in readiness for
+firing, and leave it until morning.
+
+“We’re too tired to chew off any more excitement to-night,” was the way
+he put it; so they led the jacks back to one of the larger chambers
+where the peek-a-boo torrent, as Dick called it, took what appeared to
+be its final dive underground, moved their packs, and, unrolling the
+blankets, turned in on the hard floor to sleep as they could.
+
+It was half-past five in the morning when Larry’s self-tripping mental
+alarm clock went off, and he got up and roused his two companions.
+
+“Time’s up,” he said. “Help me get the mules and the stuff a little
+farther back out of the way and we’ll shoot the moon.”
+
+They made their preparations for the big shot with some little
+trepidation. Dick, who, because his father was a mine owner as well as
+a railroad manager, knew the most about underground mining, was the
+mainstay of the other two.
+
+“We needn’t be nervous,” he said. “Half the time the miners don’t take
+the trouble to go back very far in a tunnel, even when they fire a
+whole round of blasts. What you do is to hold your mouth open and cover
+your ears with your hands. And with all these crookings there’s no
+fear of flying rocks.”
+
+When everything was as ready as they knew how to make it, Larry took
+the lighted candle and went to put fire to the fuse, which they had cut
+long enough to give the firer plenty of time to rejoin his companions.
+When he came back, the hand that held the candle was shaking a little,
+in spite of all he could do. “She’s going,” he announced, and then they
+blew the candles out and cowered against the nearest rock wall in the
+black darkness to wait for the shock.
+
+To all three it seemed as if the waiting interval would never end.
+Time, at such a crisis, moves as if it were leaden-winged. Dick had his
+mouth open, but he held his breath until he was about ready to burst.
+“Gracious!” he gasped, “did we cut that fuse a mile long?”
+
+If either Larry or Purdick made any reply there were no ears to hear
+it. The fire had reached the dynamite at last. There was a sucking
+blast of air that seemed to be trying to tear them loose and fling them
+back into the rearward depths, a noise that was like a collision of
+worlds, and then a sickening gust of the powder fumes to warn them not
+to be in too much of a hurry to run forward to see what the big blast
+had accomplished.
+
+They didn’t hurry. After a wait of about five minutes, Larry relighted
+his candle, and they waited again until the candle flame was burning
+brightly to show that the deadly fumes were dissipating. Then they
+crept forward cautiously. Around the last of the crooking turns in the
+passage they found a litter of broken rock, and they were almost afraid
+to look into the boulder nest. What if the shock had brought down the
+roof, and so trapped them more securely than ever?
+
+It was Dick who got the first look. “Hooray!” he yelled. “We did it!
+She’s wide open――you could drive a wagon through!”
+
+In a hush of eager expectancy they pressed forward over the pile of
+shattered rock. Just beyond the place where the boulder had stopped
+the way, the cavern made an abrupt turn to the left, and at a little
+distance beyond the turn they came out into the blessed daylight at the
+mouth of what appeared to be marvelously like a man-made tunnel.
+
+Gasping and gulping down the fresh morning air into their gas-filled
+lungs, they stood for a moment in the tunnel mouth and looked around
+them. In the foreground there was a deep gulch, and the slope facing
+the tunnel and its backgrounding cliff looked singularly like a small
+mine dump. Purdick was staring down into the gorge as one suddenly
+transfixed. When he found speech it was to say, like a person talking
+in his sleep: “I remember now, it was right down there that I found
+that piece of rotten quartz――the piece with the gold in it.”
+
+When he said that, Dick began to look around. A moment later he dragged
+Purdick and Larry back into the tunnel and pointed upward and outward.
+“Look!” he whispered, with awe in his voice.
+
+The tunnel mouth faced east, and the sun was just rising over the
+opposite mountain to shine full in upon them. In the jagged upper arch
+of the tunnel lip, untouched, as it seemed, by the outrush of gases
+from the big blast, a spider’s web, a perfect wheel, was suspended,
+and at the hub of the wheel sat a great spider waiting for its prey.
+And as the rays of the morning sun fell upon the web, the body of the
+spider hung like a drop of molten gold in a net of silver gossamer.
+Dick’s voice sank to less than a whisper.
+
+“The golden spider!” he breathed. “Good goodness, fellows――are we
+awake, or just dreaming!”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER X
+
+ NOTICE TO QUIT
+
+
+While the three young prospectors, standing just within the mouth of
+the cliff crevice, stared at the spider-web with its eight-legged
+globule of molten gold hanging in the center, a small cloud drifted
+across the face of the rising sun and instantly the golden illusion
+vanished. The halo-like wheel of silken silver became just an ordinary
+spider-web, and the big spider changed its hue to a dusty brown. Dick
+drew a long breath.
+
+“It sure got me for a minute,” he said. “For about two shakes of a dead
+lamb’s tail I thought we were looking at old Jimmie Brock’s golden
+spider――thought we’d blundered into his lost mine by the back door.”
+
+“Well, see here,” said Larry, looking around curiously. “Are you right
+sure that we haven’t?”
+
+“Of course we haven’t. That spider is only a coincidence. Uncle Billy
+didn’t say anything about the mine being in a cave.”
+
+Larry was holding the candle, which he had not yet blown out, up to the
+side wall of the crevice. On the smooth surface of the rock there were
+marks; letters and words partly obliterated but still traceable. “Look
+here!” he called quickly; and this――filling in a missing letter or so
+here and there――was what they read:
+
+ THE GOLDEN SPIDER LODE
+
+ The undersigned claims sixty days to drive discovery tunnel and
+ three months to record on this vein.
+
+ James Brock, Discoverer.
+
+ Dated October 16, ――――.
+
+The year number was effaced, but they knew that the hand that had
+scrawled this notice on the rock had been dead for nearly three years,
+so they could easily supply that.
+
+“For mercy’s sake!” gasped Dick; “old Jimmie’s ‘discovery’ notice!
+It _is_ the mine, after all. Talk about your miracles――why, great
+gracious! if that roof hadn’t happened to tumble down back yonder and
+fairly _made_ us come and look for some other way to get out――――”
+
+“And to think that I was right here at the foot of this slide
+yesterday, and never once thought of its being a mine dump!” Purdick
+gulped.
+
+They all stepped out and looked down. The situation of the mine mouth,
+or cave mouth, was rather peculiar. The cliff which formed the western
+boundary of the gulch was not perpendicular; it was in steps or ledges;
+and the cave opening was on a level with one of these ledges, which
+was, perhaps, eight or ten feet wide in front of the cave mouth,
+forming a sort of dooryard to the opening. From that ledge to the steep
+slope below, there was a drop of maybe twelve or fifteen feet, and this
+had made a convenient dumping arrangement for the old prospector. All
+he had had to do was to shove his waste diggings out to the edge of the
+ledge and let them drop.
+
+Larry looked over the dumping edge at the heap of broken rock below.
+
+“It isn’t any wonder you didn’t connect that pile of rock with this
+hole up here, Purdy,” he said. “It doesn’t look much like the ordinary
+mine dump.”
+
+“But whereabouts is the vein?” Dick demanded, and he was so excited
+that he could hardly talk straight.
+
+Turning back into the cave, they were not long in finding the lode of
+decomposed quartz. At a point in the natural cavern not more than a
+dozen feet from the entrance, another and smaller crevice branched off,
+pitching up-hill at quite a sharp incline and stopping abruptly against
+a wall of rock at a little distance from its branching point. In this
+pocket-like tunnel they came upon a worn shovel and a miner’s pick;
+a hammer with a broken handle, and three stubby rock drills: Brock’s
+tools, left behind when he had sallied out to begin the desperate
+struggle for life through the snows. The quartz vein itself was not
+over a foot wide, but it was exceedingly rich in spots――“lenses,” the
+mineralogists call them. Even by the poor light of their single candle
+the boys could see fine, wire-like threads of native gold here and
+there in the brown mass of the rotten quartz.
+
+For a little time they all lost their heads. It was such a bewildering,
+astounding thing that the lost mine, which they had all been regarding
+as more or less of a myth, so far as they were concerned, should turn
+up this way as a sequel to an adventure into which, as Dick had said,
+they had been fairly driven by the falling roof in the cave.
+
+“Great Land!” he ejaculated. “Think of this thing lying here unclaimed
+and unowned for nearly three long years――and with probably dozens of
+people besides Uncle Billy looking for it! And think of the thousand
+and one chances we had of missing it! If our camp-fire hadn’t just
+happened to melt a hole in that ice a month ago; or if we hadn’t gone
+back yesterday to have a look at the cave; or if――oh, gee! there’s
+simply no end to the ‘ifs’!”
+
+“I――I guess it just was to be,” said little Purdick, who was not half
+so much of a fatalist as this remark would seem to indicate. “We were
+just kicked into it, as you might say.”
+
+“Well,” Dick broke in, all a-nerve to get action of some sort, “what
+do we do, Larry? Can we post a notice, calling it our discovery, and
+hustle out to a land office and record it? Or do we have to stay here
+and do a lot of work on it before we can claim it in our names?”
+
+“I’m not enough of a mine lawyer to know,” Larry confessed. “The law
+says that the discoverer of a lode must either dig a shaft ten feet
+deep on it or, if he tunnels, his tunnel must go in far enough so that
+the vertical distance from the heading to the surface outside must
+be ten feet or more. Brock was the discoverer, and he did more than
+the law requires, as we can easily see. But that was three years ago.
+Whether we, as re-locators, will have to begin all over again, I don’t
+know.”
+
+“That’s all right,” Dick put in; “in that case we’re not going to take
+any chances. We can stay here a week and still get out in time to start
+back to college; and we can do work enough in that time to satisfy
+the law if we get busy and don’t loaf on the job. We’ve dynamite
+enough left, luckily, and we can sharpen the drills the way we’ve been
+sharpening them――in a wood fire. Breakfast first, fellows; and after
+we get the jacks down to where they can feed, we’ll go at it for blood!”
+
+This programme, or at least the first part of it, was agreed to and set
+in motion promptly. Going back into the crevice cave, they brought up
+the burros and packs, and, not to lose time gathering wood for a fire,
+they made coffee and broiled bacon over the last of the solidified
+alcohol cooking candles.
+
+The breakfast was cooked and eaten just inside the mouth of the natural
+tunnel, and after they had finished the hasty meal, they all went out
+on the dump-head ledge to determine the best way of getting the burros
+down to some grazing ground where they could be picketed out.
+
+“Say!” Dick exclaimed, looking over the mountain-scaling difficulties
+that presented themselves, “it’s going to be some whale of a job
+getting the little beasties down there, if you’ll listen to what I’m
+telling you. And if we do get them down, they’ll stay down; we could
+never make ’em climb up here again in the wide world――that’s a cinch.”
+
+“That won’t make any difference. We wouldn’t want to get them back up
+here,” Larry answered. “We’ll most likely want to camp in the gulch
+ourselves, as long as the weather holds good.”
+
+During this little colloquy Purdick had stood aside. He was shading
+his eyes from the sun and looking the mountain-narrowed prospect over
+thoughtfully.
+
+“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he broke in. “Don’t you know, we’ve actually
+come back to within a few hundred yards of the place where we camped
+night before last! When we ran that test on the piece of quartz that
+I found, we were almost right here _at_ the Golden Spider! See that
+butte with a bald spot on top up yonder?”――pointing to the right. “That
+lies right opposite the mouth of the little gulch where we made camp
+that night. Don’t you remember it?”
+
+Now that it was pointed out, they all remembered it. Also, Larry
+remembered something else.
+
+“That isn’t all,” he said. “That clay-and-rock slide where I found the
+crutch prints must be right up above us somewhere. I remember, now,
+there was a broken cliff, just like this, lying below it.”
+
+This mention of the crutch prints made Purdick shade his eyes and look
+again. Dick and Larry went along the ledge a little way to the left
+to see if there were any practicable descent for the burros in that
+direction. When they came back they found that Purdick had Dick’s
+field-glass and was focusing it upon a point farther down the wooded
+gulch.
+
+“Seeing things, Purdy?” Dick asked jocularly.
+
+“I’m afraid I am,” was the low-toned reply. “Take the glass and hold it
+on the mouth of that little pocket ravine away down there to the left.”
+
+Dick took one glance――which was all that he needed.
+
+“Smoke!” he exclaimed. “Wood smoke――a camp-fire!” and he handed the
+glass to Larry.
+
+Larry looked long and earnestly. When he passed the glass back to
+Purdick, the good gray eyes were narrowing.
+
+“I guess that means trouble in chunks,” he announced soberly. “Of
+course, it may not be the crowd that has been camping on our trail
+all summer, but the chances are that it is. Those crutch tracks that
+I found were pointing down that way. Let’s get inside, out of sight,
+before they spot us.”
+
+In the shelter of the crevice cave they held an immediate council
+of war. After a little hurried talk it was decided that there were
+two courses open to them. They could post a re-location notice――for
+whatever effect that might have upon any one who should find the
+mine after they left it――and slip away quietly in the hope that the
+“jumpers” would follow them and so be drawn away from the vicinity;
+or――――
+
+“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted, when Larry had got that far. “You
+said a while ago that you didn’t know what the law is about doing
+‘discovery’ work on re-locations of abandoned claims――which is what
+this one is. If we leave the mine without doing the proper amount of
+work on it, we lose it anyway, don’t we?”
+
+“I was coming to that,” Larry went on. “We can post a notice and map
+the location so that somebody else can find it. Then, when we get back
+to Brewster, your uncle can send somebody in to do the work, and make
+the proper record. Of course we’d take a chance doing that. If anybody
+should come along after we go away, and be dishonest enough to destroy
+our notice, we’d lose out.”
+
+“All right; that is one thing we can do,” said Purdick. “What’s the
+other?”
+
+Larry frowned and looked away at the forested mountain framed in the
+crevice opening.
+
+“The other is the surest thing, if we’ve got nerve enough to pull it
+off. If we quit on the job before it’s finished, any one of a dozen
+things may happen to knock us out. Maybe we can’t throw these fellows
+off the track so easily. If they’re keeping any kind of a lookout,
+they’ll be pretty sure to see us getting the jacks and our dunnage down
+from this perch. That would mean, of course, that they’d wait until
+we were out of the way, and then they’d come up here, find the mine,
+and ‘jump’ it. They could do that, and get their claim recorded, long
+before we could get back to Brewster and send somebody in here to make
+our ownership stick.”
+
+“Well,” Dick cut in impatiently, “go on; what else can we do?”
+
+Larry shook his head.
+
+“The other thing is sort of scary, I’ll admit; or, anyway, it’s full
+of stumps that I don’t see any way to get over. It’s to stay right
+here and do the work that we meant to do, and stand them off if they
+come interfering with us: fight it out with ’em, I mean. They don’t
+know that we’ve got to hike out at the end of a week, and if we can
+put up a good bluff they may think we’re here to stay. Trouble is,
+we’ll be cooped up in here like rats in a trap. They’ll hear the
+dynamiting――can’t help hearing it――and we won’t dare show ourselves
+outside. Worse than that, the jacks will starve――and I’d rather starve
+myself than starve them.”
+
+To the keen surprise of the two others it was little Purdick, pale but
+determined, who rose first to the demands of the occasion.
+
+“I vote to stay and hang on and fight it out,” he said, and if his
+voice were a bit husky it wasn’t from fear. “If we let go――but we just
+mustn’t let go, that’s all! I’m not saying this because I need the
+money worse than you two do: for that matter, I think the mine ought to
+belong to Mr. Starbuck, anyway. But for us to sneak out and leave it to
+a wide-open chance, after we’ve found it.... You know your uncle, Dick,
+and I hardly know him at all; but I’m sure he’ll think mighty small
+of us if we go back and tell him that we found the Golden Spider and
+didn’t have sand enough to stay and hold on to it.”
+
+Dick pounded the small one on the back.
+
+“You’re the right old stuff, Purdy――you sure are!” he broke out
+heartily, and then he chuckled: “And you’re the one who said a little
+while back that you’d be no good in a scrap! I’m with you, right from
+the jump, and I know Larry is, too. Let’s get busy. We don’t even know
+that that smoke down yonder means anything more than some harmless old
+prospector’s cooking fire; and if it does mean anything else, we’re
+not exactly babies to let somebody take our candy away from us without
+raising a squawk. Let’s have a look at the drills, Larry, and see if
+they’re usable.”
+
+That settled it, of course. But there were still some knotty details to
+be worked out.
+
+“We’ve got grub enough, and we can get water by going back in the cave
+to where the torrent disappears,” Larry said. “But we’ve got to have
+fire, and for the fire we must have fuel. It strikes me that our first
+job――before these hold-ups get wind of us――is to get in a good supply
+of wood, and at the same time see if we can’t find something for the
+jacks to eat.”
+
+Not to lose any of the time which had suddenly become precious, they
+fell to work at once. First, they clambered down to the gulch level,
+taking the axe and the guns with them. In a series of little glades
+along the small torrent which drained the deep ravine they found plenty
+of grass, but as they had nothing but their pocket-knives with which to
+cut it, they found it was going to take a good while to harvest enough
+to amount to anything. After a bit, they gave up trying to haggle it
+off with the knives and took to pulling it up by the roots, and in this
+way they soon gathered quite a quantity.
+
+Hurrying as fast as they could, and half expecting every moment to be
+interrupted, they rushed the pile of green hay over to the ledge foot
+by armfuls, and with two of them on the ledge to hoist, and one at the
+bottom to load the picket-rope sling, they shortly had the jack-feed
+stored in the crevice.
+
+That done, they flung themselves upon the job of wood gathering. This
+took more time, and was a lot harder work; but in a couple of hours
+they had accumulated a fairly good stock of fuel, dragging it up the
+ledge precipice as they had the grass, an armful at a time in the rope
+sling.
+
+Though they worked like salvagers at a fire, the job of getting ready
+to stand a siege cut deeply into the forenoon, but still they neither
+heard nor saw anything of the men they were momently expecting to have
+to deal with. It was not until after they were preparing to begin work
+in the gold vein that Larry hit upon the probable reason for their
+immunity thus far.
+
+“Here’s my guess,” he offered. “We have fairly good proof that they’ve
+been trailing us from day to day, and it’s been easy because we haven’t
+tried to cover up our tracks. Their permanent camp is probably down
+yonder where we saw that smoke, and some one of the three has chased
+out to see where we went yesterday. He’d have no trouble in tracking us
+up to the place where we began to burrow in the ground.”
+
+Dick chuckled.
+
+“No trouble up to that point, but a whole lot of it afterward. Do you
+think he could track us into the crevice?”
+
+Larry shook his head. “I don’t know. I suppose he could, if he’s any
+kind of a tracker. But when he comes to the place where the roof fell
+down, he’ll quit and go back; you can bet on that.”
+
+“Gee!” said Dick, “if this gold vein were only a little farther back in
+the cave, where we could drill and blast without being heard from the
+outside, we’d be as safe as a clock. Nobody would ever think of looking
+down here for the outlet to that crack away yonder up the mountain.”
+
+“You can’t tell,” Larry demurred; and then: “You’re right about the
+drilling and blasting, though. We needn’t think we’re going to be
+able to do any great amount of mining in here without being found
+out, if there’s anybody around who wants to find out. That being the
+case, we’ve got to watch out sharp. We’ll work changing shifts in the
+heading; two on and one off; and the man that’s resting can stand guard
+at the cave mouth.”
+
+While Larry was sharpening the drills, with a flat stone for an anvil,
+and with Purdick working the bicycle-pump blower for him, Dick moved
+the green hay back to the enlargement of the crevice where they were
+keeping the burros, and piled the stock of wood where it would be out
+of the way. Next the question of spoil disposal came up. What were they
+to do with the broken rock and vein matter as they blasted it out?
+
+“There is one sure thing,” Larry said. “That stuff is too rich to be
+thrown out on the dump. We’ll have to pile our diggings here in the
+cave and sort the ore by hand the best way we can. It would be like
+throwing twenty-dollar gold pieces away to pitch it into the gulch.”
+
+“You said a mouthful, that time,” Dick agreed. “But it will clutter us
+up awfully if we have to pile the spoil in here.”
+
+“We can sort it, as I say,” Larry pointed out, “saving only the vein
+matter and shoveling the barren rock out over the ledge. But we won’t
+do that until we’re sure we’re not going to be molested. When we begin
+making a fresh dump outside, that will be telling anybody that may
+happen along just what we’re doing in here. And if we don’t do the
+sorting mighty carefully one look at the dump will tell any prospector
+that we’re working a quartz gold vein. We want to keep this thing
+quiet, if we can. Saying nothing about the three hold-ups, it would be
+a fierce temptation for anybody to ‘jump’ it after we’re gone――take
+down our notice and throw it away and pretend that the place was an
+abandoned claim.”
+
+“But nobody could make a barefaced robbery like that hold in law,”
+Purdick protested.
+
+Dick smiled grimly.
+
+“If you had lived in a mining country as long as Larry and I have,
+you’d know that a law-suit over a mine is about the last thing in
+the world that any peaceable person wants to get mixed up in, Purdy.
+When you once begin, there’s simply no end to it. You see, there’s no
+way of getting any real proof that will satisfy a judge and jury. We
+might swear that we discovered this vein on a certain date and posted
+our notice. Then the other fellow would get up and swear that he had
+discovered it at an earlier date and posted _his_ notice. So there you
+are.”
+
+“Let’s be doing,” Larry broke in; and he and Purdick went into James
+Brock’s tunnel and began drilling the holes for the first round of
+blasts, while Dick, with his rifle across his knees, took the first
+guard watch, sitting at the crevice mouth and looking down into the
+gulch through which any intruder must approach.
+
+As the short shifts were planned, each one of the three had an hour on
+and a half-hour off, the watcher taking the place of one of the two
+in the heading at the end of each thirty minutes. Nothing happened
+during Dick’s half-hour at the cave mouth. The faint smoke wreath that
+had been distinguishable in the early morning over the little ravine
+farther down the gulch had disappeared, and the stillness of the
+mountain immensities brooded over the scene. Carefully and at frequent
+intervals Dick swept the surroundings with the field-glass, but there
+was nothing to indicate that there was a human being, or, indeed, any
+living thing, within miles of his sentry-box on the face of the broken
+cliff.
+
+At the end of one shift all around they knocked off for dinner. The
+fire had been kept going, and Purdick made up and cooked enough
+pan-bread to last for a couple of days.
+
+“That’s because we’ve got to go light on our wood pile,” he said. “It’s
+too much hard work to get the stuff up here.” Then to Larry, who had
+had the last half-hour at the cave’s mouth: “Anything stirring outside?”
+
+“Nothing. We might be the only people between the two ranges of the
+Hophras, so far as any sign of life in the gulch goes.”
+
+“But we know pretty well we’re not,” Dick put in, making himself
+a sandwich of bacon and hot pan-bread. “I’ve been figuring and
+calculating on about how long it would take a man to climb from the
+gulch to the place where we ducked into the cave, find out all there is
+to be found out there, and get back. What do you say, Larry?”
+
+Larry laughed. “Anybody’s guess is as good as mine. But that doesn’t
+cut any figure. If their camp is down yonder where we saw that smoke
+this morning, and there is anybody left in it, our first round of
+blasts will give us away. They can’t miss hearing the dynamite at that
+distance.”
+
+“What will they do?” Dick asked.
+
+“You tell――if you know,” Larry returned.
+
+Dick nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure that out, too. Of course, they
+can climb up on the ledge at the place around to the left where we
+shinned up and down――that is, the two with good legs can. But will they
+take a chance on doing that?”
+
+“A chance of getting shot, you mean? I don’t think they’ll be much
+afraid of that. They’re taking us for a bunch of kids――what Purdick
+heard over there in Lost Canyon proves that――and they’ll probably think
+they can scare us off.”
+
+“That brings it right down to brass tacks,” said Dick. “I think we
+ought to make up our minds just what we’re going to do if the pinch
+comes. I’ll say, right now, that I’m not much good with a rifle. If
+I should shoot and try to cripple one of ’em, just as likely as not
+my hand would shake and I’d kill him. And I wouldn’t want to kill the
+worst scamp in the world unless I was sure it was the only way to save
+my own life.”
+
+“I guess we all feel pretty much the same way,” Larry put in.
+“And I’ll have to admit that I’m with you on the poor marksmanship
+proposition, too, Dick. You know how it was last summer when Bob
+Goldrick used to give us an afternoon off in the Tourmaline and let us
+take his rifle for target practice.”
+
+“I sure do,” said Dick, with a sheepish grin. “Seemed as if neither one
+of us could hit the side of a barn.”
+
+It was just here that little Purdick surprised his two camp-mates for
+the second time in one day.
+
+“I can shoot, and shoot straight,” he slipped in quietly.
+
+“You?” queried Dick. “How did you ever learn to handle a gun――in a
+rolling-mill town?”
+
+Purdick’s smile was reminiscent of some pretty hard times in the past.
+
+“I’ve done mighty nearly everything in the world to earn a living,
+first and last, as both of you know,” he explained. “One summer I
+helped in a shooting-gallery, and when business was slack the boss let
+me practice. When he found out that I had a sort of good eye for it,
+he’d make me go out in front and start the game――just to show customers
+how easy it was to make bull’s-eyes. It is easy, too, after you get the
+knack of it.”
+
+“You’re elected,” said Dick; “that is, if you don’t mind being the
+goat.”
+
+Purdick’s smile broadened into a grin.
+
+“You fellows will have to call the shots――say where you want ’em
+placed. That’ll put the responsibility on you.”
+
+It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they made ready to fire
+the first round of blasts on the gold vein. Larry, the careful one of
+the three, did the fuse fixing and tamping of the holes, and when all
+was ready he applied the match and they all retreated to safety in the
+upper part of the natural cavern. There was the usual thunder burst of
+noise, or rather four of them coming in quick succession, the queer
+sensation which every deep-shaft miner knows; a feeling as if one’s
+neck were suddenly pulled out to goose-neck length and then snapped
+back like a retracting rubber band; the rush of compressed air forced
+inward by the expanding gases, followed by the suction of the reaction;
+and the thing was over.
+
+Having had considerable experience with dynamite during the summer,
+they waited for the air to clear. As soon as it became breathable, they
+crept forward to see what the explosive had done. The round of shots
+was a handsome success. The little tunnel was filled with the broken
+rock and vein matter, and the heading, or tunnel end, had been advanced
+the length of the deepest drill hole.
+
+“That’s business,” said Dick. “We can walk her back into the hill any
+old distance we want to――give us time. Now let’s see if the racket has
+stirred up anything exciting on the outside.”
+
+Apparently it hadn’t. Looking out of the cave mouth, they saw no change
+in the surroundings; no indication that there had been any ears but
+their own to hear the roar of the dynamite. Dick wanted to go to work
+at once, clearing away and sorting the ore thrown down while there
+was still daylight enough to enable them to see, but Larry counseled
+patience.
+
+“Let’s give those sneak thieves time enough to come, if they’re going
+to come,” he advised, so they all three stood guard at the mouth of the
+cave for a full quarter of an hour, six eager eyes searching every
+detail of the gulch for signs of an approaching enemy and finding none
+at all.
+
+“False alarm,” said Dick at last. “We’d better get busy before we have
+to light candles to see by. With the sun over behind the mountain, it’s
+going to get dark early in this hole.”
+
+Not to miss any of the precautions they had so firmly agreed upon, it
+was decided that two of them should sort the ore from the rock while
+the other stood guard at the crevice mouth. This arrangement functioned
+all right until Dick, who was one of the two sorters, began to go
+into hilarious ecstasies over the prodigious richness of some of the
+“lenses” that had been shot down, shattered bits of the rotten quartz
+held together by wire-like lacings of native gold. After a time, his
+ravings got to be too much even for Larry, who was doing the guard
+stunt. Again and again he was tempted away from his place at the cave
+mouth by Dick’s, “Oh, gee-whiz, Larry! Duck in here just for a second
+and see _this_ piece! There never was anything like it in this world!”
+
+And then――for the fifth or sixth time Larry had dodged back from his
+post at Dick’s call, and all three of them had their heads together
+over the most beautiful of all the specimens that had yet been dug out
+of the heap of shattered rock. Suddenly the waning daylight sifting in
+through the narrow crevice entrance was cut off, and a raucous voice
+bellowed:
+
+“Say! What the blazes are youse fellows doin’ in our mine, I’d like to
+know? Climb down out o’ this, the bunch o’ yuh, afore I drill yuh so
+full o’ holes that your own mothers won’t know yuh!”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XI
+
+ FINDERS KEEPERS
+
+
+At the summons for which they had been looking――and hadn’t looked
+judiciously enough――the three Golden Spiders, kneeling beside the
+partly sorted pile of ore and broken stone, were taken at a tremendous
+disadvantage. Larry’s rifle was the only one within reach, and this had
+been put down while he was handling the piece of rich ore that Dick had
+thrust at him.
+
+The intruder, a heavily built man with a swarthy face, ragged black
+mustaches and a beard that looked as if it might be a month past its
+last shave, had apparently come well prepared to enforce the notice
+to quit. He carried a rifle in the crook of his arm, and there was a
+formidable-looking pistol sagging in its holster on his right hip.
+
+Dick was the first to get upon his feet, and what he said was no
+measure at all of the scare that was gripping him inside.
+
+“You say this is your mine? I g-guess you’ll have to prove that before
+you can run us off,” he blurted out.
+
+“Prove nothin’!” retorted the invader with an ugly rasp in his voice.
+“Me and my pardners was pardners with old Jim Brock when he worked the
+’sessment on this here claim. You fellers pack up and git out whilst
+yuh can do it with whole skins. Git a move, I say!”
+
+Up to this point little Purdick was the only one who was doing any
+moving. Being behind Dick and Larry, and also having the pile of
+shot-down rock for partial concealment, he was trying by slow inchings
+to get hold of Larry’s gun. He knew it would probably be quick suicide
+for Larry to turn around and try to pick it up, but he thought that
+he――Purdick――might be able to get it if Dick would only go on arguing
+with the big hold-up and so gain a little time. Dick didn’t disappoint
+him. Arguing was the thing Dickie Maxwell did best.
+
+“But see here,” he contended, facing the big man boldly; “you can’t
+chase us out this way. If you’ve got a legal right to this claim, all
+you have to do is to go into court and prove it and we’ll give up.
+But――――”
+
+“There ain’t no ‘buts’ about it!” roared the swarthy desperado,
+loosening the big revolver in its sheath. “I ain’t honin’ to commit no
+murder, but if yuh git me madded――pass me them guns, butt foremost, and
+then git yer traps and pile out o’ here, and do it mighty sudden, ’r
+I’ll blow yuh to kingdom come!”
+
+Again little Purdick was the only one who moved. All his efforts to
+reach Larry’s gun without being caught at it failed. Six inches was
+as near as he could come to touching it. But the small one was blest
+with a brain that could shuttle at the rate of a mile a minute under
+pressure, and all the time he was reaching for the rifle, he was trying
+his hardest to think of some other expedient that would rid them of the
+intruder.
+
+It was the desperado’s final threat that gave Purdick the bright
+idea――that “blow yuh to kingdom come.” The daylight was fading fast,
+and with it Purdick faded, backing out of the scene noiselessly and
+taking scrupulous care to keep himself in line with Dick and the
+sheltering rock pile. When he had crept to where the jack packs were
+lying, it seemed as if it took him an endless time to find what he
+wanted, and his hands were shaking so that they fumbled helplessly
+in the dark. Around the turn in the crevice he could hear Dick still
+trying to argue, with the hold-up breaking in to curse and swear and
+threaten all sorts of hideous things that were going to happen when he
+got sufficiently “madded.”
+
+Purdick’s hurried preparations were finished at last, and with
+trembling fingers he struck a match and held the flame to the frayed
+end of what looked in the match-light to be a length of thick, blackish
+string. The next moment he had darted around the sheltering turn in
+the crevice to fling a yellow cylindrical object at the feet of the
+intruder――a paper-covered cylinder with a spitting, fizzing, black
+string hanging out of it.
+
+“_Dynamite!_” he yelled, and with the yell grabbed Dick’s collar with
+one hand and Larry’s with the other, and in a burst of strength that
+would have been miles beyond him a few short weeks earlier, dragged
+them both headlong over the rock pile and behind it, falling flat on
+top of them to hold them down.
+
+It worked. There was a deafening explosion a few seconds later, but
+there was no intruder in sight to be blown up by it. Instantly, Purdick
+leaped to his feet, caught up Larry’s rifle and ran to the cave mouth.
+The dooryard ledge was empty, but a great crashing in the young trees
+below told what had become of the man with the large threats and the
+small self-control in an emergency. Having escaped the dynamite, he was
+doing his best to get out of rifle range.
+
+Larry was the first to speak when he and Dick joined Purdick at the
+cave entrance.
+
+“We sure had it coming to us――or I did, anyway. I ‘white-eyed’ on my
+lookout job. I had no business to go gold-crazy just because you did,
+Dick.” Then to Purdick: “You bully little old fighting rat――how did you
+come to think of the dynamite?”
+
+“He put it into my head by saying what he did about blowing us all up
+if we didn’t get out. But I had an awful time fixing the cartridge in
+the dark. I was scared stiff for fear I’d leave too much of the stuff
+in the paper and kill us all.”
+
+“Then you didn’t use a whole stick?” Dick asked.
+
+“Good land――no! I guess we wouldn’t be here if I had. I took it all out
+but just a little, and filled the paper up with sand to make it look
+like a whole stick. I thought probably that just the look of it would
+crack his nerve, and it did.”
+
+“Well,” said Larry, with a hunch of his broad shoulders, “we know where
+we’re ‘at’ now, at least. We’ve got to stick and fight it out, after
+this, whether we want to or not.”
+
+“You bet we’ll stick,” Dick asserted; and then: “The cold nerve of
+that outfit! Just plain hold-ups, as we’ve been saying they were. Now
+there’s this about it: we can’t afford to be chicken-hearted with
+toughs like they are. I more than half believe they’d shoot, and shoot
+to kill, if they thought that was the only way to get rid of us.”
+
+“All right,” Purdick put in quietly. “We can shoot, too, if we have to.
+You fellows go in and go on with the ore sorting. I’ll be doorman for a
+while.”
+
+Since it was now nearly evening, with little daylight in the crevice,
+Dick lighted a candle and the ore sorting was continued. Purdick sat
+down with his rifle between his knees and got what satisfaction he
+could out of a reversed and very beautiful sunset. The sun had gone
+behind the great range at his back, and the gulch and its tributary
+ravines were slowly filling with a rising tide of dusky blue that was
+like a mist, only in the high altitudes it isn’t a mist; it is just
+pure color. But it was only in the shadow that the colors were subdued.
+In the upper air the sunlight was still streaming in a gorgeous flood,
+crimsoning the few high clouds and setting the distant peaks of the
+eastern Hophras aglow with a pinkish fire.
+
+Full of hardship as his life had been, Purdick had a keen sense of the
+beautiful in nature, and again and again he had to remind himself that
+he was doing guard duty, and that the siege of the Golden Spider had
+now fairly begun. What would be the next move on the part of the three
+men who were trying to steal the mine? Would they try force again? Or
+would they――――
+
+Purdick grew very thoughtful when the alternative suggested itself.
+If the would-be robbers had been spying thoroughly enough, they must
+know that the cave was not provisioned for a long siege; that in a few
+days at farthest hunger would do what their first attempt at force had
+failed to do. Then there were the burros. They could live for a little
+while on the grass that was stored in the cave, and after that they
+could starve for a few days longer. But the end must come shortly, even
+for the tough little animals.
+
+Little Purdick was in the midst of these ominous cogitations when he
+saw a red flash down among the trees in the gulch bottom to the left,
+something smacked like a pair of clapped hands a few feet over his
+head, and on the heels of that came the rattling echoes of a rifle
+shot. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised his rifle, aimed it at
+the spot where he had seen the flash, and fired. At the double crack of
+the guns, distant and near, Dick and Larry came running.
+
+“What was it, Purdy?” Dick demanded.
+
+“Nothing much. Somebody down there took a crack at me, and I handed it
+back.”
+
+“Did you hit him?” Larry wanted to know.
+
+“I couldn’t tell, of course. I fired at the place where I saw the
+flash. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to let them know that we’re on
+the job. Stand back a little. They may shoot again.”
+
+They waited in silence for a time, but there were no more shots. After
+a time a reddish glow appearing among the trees far down the gulch told
+them that the raiders’ supper camp-fire had been lighted.
+
+“I guess that ends it for a while, anyway,” Larry commented. “They’ll
+hardly try to rush us in the dark.”
+
+“That may be,” Dick allowed. “Just the same there mustn’t be any more
+cat-napping on sentry post for us. They mean business. They’ve spent a
+whole summer chasing us all over the lot, and they’re not going to let
+go now, with the big prize fairly in sight.”
+
+After supper, which was eaten at the mouth of the cave where they could
+keep watch, they made their dispositions for the night. There was a
+bed of dry wash sand back in the cavern, and they shovelled enough
+of this out to the entrance corridor to pad the bare rock floor for
+a makeshift bed. Purdick took the first watch, and when he called
+Dick a little before midnight, there was nothing to report. Dick, the
+easy-going, comfort-loving member of the trio, found it pretty hard
+work keeping awake, with no fire and not much chance to stir around,
+but he managed to stick it out until three o’clock, when he roused
+Larry.
+
+“Nothing doing,” he said in low tones so as not to waken Purdick. “I
+could see the glow of their fire a little when I first came on, but
+that’s gone down now. I don’t believe we’re going to hear anything more
+from them before daylight.”
+
+His prediction proved true. Larry sat through the long hours of
+early-morning darkness and heard nothing, saw nothing until the
+breaking dawn showed him a column of smoke rising above the distant
+pocket gulch to the left. Larry thought he was safe to go back into the
+cave and start the breakfast fire, and he did it, though he would not
+risk leaving his post long enough to go after the coffee water which
+could only be obtained by carrying it from the disappearing stream
+beyond the place where they had blasted the big boulder.
+
+The crackling of the fire roused Purdick, and he sat up, rubbing the
+sleep out of his eyes.
+
+“Anything startling?” he asked.
+
+Larry shook his head. “Nothing yet. They’re getting breakfast, I
+suppose. Their fire’s going, anyhow.”
+
+Purdick unwound himself from his blankets.
+
+“Good example they’re setting us. We’ll do likewise.” And he got up to
+go after the water and fry the bacon.
+
+They ate as they did the night before, sitting at the cavern mouth
+where they could see the gulch in both directions. Immediately after
+breakfast the ore sorting was resumed, with Purdick on watch under a
+new spider web which had been spun during the night. For an hour or
+more Dick and Larry pawed over the heap of broken rock, picking out the
+brown vein matter and piling it on one side, and leaving the barren
+rock to be shovelled out to the entrance and over the edge of the
+dooryard cliff.
+
+It was not until they began getting rid of the rock that hostilities
+opened up. Purdick, who was still on watch, had neither seen nor
+heard anything moving in the gulch below, but as Larry ran the first
+shovelful of stone out to the dumping edge, a rifle clanged somewhere
+in the woods and a bullet spatted against the cliff a foot or so from
+the cave mouth. Purdick was ready, but there was nothing to shoot at.
+A gun flash doesn’t show in the daylight, and the powder in a modern
+high-powered rifle cartridge doesn’t make much smoke; not enough so
+that a single discharge is visible at any great distance.
+
+“So that’s the game, is it?” Larry growled, ducking to cover before a
+second shot could be fired. “We’re not to be allowed to go out on our
+own doorstep. All right; here’s the answer,” and, standing in the cave
+passage where he couldn’t be seen from the gulch, he got rid of the
+spoil by pitching it, a shovelful at a time, into the depths below.
+The dooryard ledge was only about ten feet wide, and the shovel throw
+across it was comparatively easy.
+
+With the working ground cleared, the drilling for another series of
+blasts was begun, the routine of the previous day being followed;
+that is, half-hour shifts all around, with two of them striking and
+drill-holding in the tunnel heading and the other on watch. Larry had
+the first half-hour at the cave mouth, and during that time a number of
+shots were fired from the gulch. They did no harm. The upward angle was
+so great that the few bullets well enough aimed to enter the crevice
+did nothing worse than to knock a splinter of stone from the roof now
+and then. At first, these leaden invitations to quit were a good bit
+unnerving, but they soon learned that the way to let the enemy know
+that he wasn’t accomplishing anything was to keep the _ping-ping_ of
+the striking hammer going steadily, and in a short time the useless
+bombardment stopped.
+
+By noon they were ready to fire another round of blasts in the tunnel,
+and they did it, retreating as before into the depths of the cave, in
+the confident assurance that the sputtering fuses would be a sufficient
+protection against an invasion for the few minutes they would have
+to leave the cave mouth unguarded. The roar of the blasts followed
+quickly, and after the gas had been given time to dissipate itself, the
+sorting process began again, this time with Dick doing guard duty.
+
+“I don’t see but what we can keep this thing up indefinitely, as long
+as our grub lasts,” Dick said, as he took his place as sentry. “This
+old cave is as safe as a fort. They can’t possibly rush us, so long as
+we keep watch and are ready for them.”
+
+“It’s a matter of brains,” Larry offered. “They’re a poor lot if they
+can’t think up something better than anything they’ve tried yet.”
+
+The words were hardly out of his mouth before they all heard what
+sounded like the rumble of a distant explosion.
+
+“What was that?” Purdick demanded, and as he spoke the answer came,
+first in an avalanche of earth and small stones rattling down from
+above upon their “dooryard” ledge, and an instant later in the
+thunderous fall of a huge boulder that, striking fairly upon the ledge,
+bit a huge scallop out of it exactly in front of the cave entrance as
+it went grinding and crashing on into the gulch, mowing down big trees
+in its path as if they were dry weed stalks.
+
+At the first rattling warning, Dick had thrown himself back into the
+crevice, and it was well that he did so, for the impact of the mighty
+projectile upon the ledge was like the explosion of an enormous shell,
+sending flying fragments of stone in all directions.
+
+“Speaking of brains,” Dick gasped, when he could get his breath, “I
+guess they’ve got a few right along with ’em. Gorry! They must have
+shot a whole mountain down on us! Our dooryard’s gone, clear up to the
+hilt!”
+
+Dick’s announcement was no exaggeration. Where there had been a
+step-like ledge and a straight drop from the edge of it, there was now
+a great gash and a steep slope running quite up to the cave mouth. And
+the protection which the projecting ledge had given them from rifle
+fire from below was gone. A good marksman in the gulch could now shoot
+directly into the crevice, still at a high angle, to be sure, but not
+so high but that the bullets could penetrate for a dozen feet or more
+before they would hit the roof.
+
+While the avalanche aftermath of little stones and earth was still
+clattering down from the cliff brink above, the bombardment was
+renewed. Every few minutes, at the crack of a gun in the gulch, a
+whining missile would come through the exposed crevice mouth to hit the
+roof and scatter stone splinters and bits of hot lead all about the
+place.
+
+“Well,” said Dick, after they had quickly withdrawn out of the line of
+fire, “what next?”
+
+“More of the same,” gritted Larry the stubborn. “We’re not dead yet.
+Get back on the sentry job, Dick, and Purdy and I will shovel this
+stuff out of the way and get ready for another go at the drilling. We
+won’t stop to do any more sorting just now.”
+
+Carrying out this programme, it was only a short time until the
+cheerful _ping-ping_ of the hammer upon steel began to sound again in
+the vein tunnel, and, as before, the work noises stopped the firing
+from below. Dick was chuckling triumphantly when, at the end of his
+half-hour, he went up into the tunnel to swap jobs with Purdick.
+
+“You’ve got the combination on ’em, Larry,” he remarked. “Letting them
+know that they’re not stopping us, I mean. They’ll have to think up
+something different, now.”
+
+If they were thinking, the determined mine “jumpers” seemed to be
+taking it leisurely. The afternoon passed without any more warlike
+demonstrations, and by the time the growing dusk was beginning to
+thicken in the gulch the drillers had another round of blasts ready to
+be fired the first thing the next morning.
+
+“Have they given it up and gone away, do you suppose?” Purdick asked,
+after the supper had been dished up and they were eating with
+appetites untouched by the exciting happenings of the day.
+
+“Nothing like that,” Larry asserted. “They’ll hit us again――don’t make
+any mistake about that.”
+
+“What will they try next?” Dick wanted to know.
+
+“Huh!” said Larry. “If I knew I’d be hustling around to get ready for
+it.”
+
+“Seems to me it’s leaning our way yet,” Dick offered. “They’ve found
+they can’t scare us out, or shoot us out, or avalanche us out, and, as
+I said this morning, they can’t rush us when there are only three of
+them, and one of the three a cripple. For that matter, they’ve made
+the rushing business harder now than it was before. With our door-yard
+gone, the only way for them to charge would be right up the smashed-out
+slope, and it would take a lot of nerve to do that when they know that
+there are three rifles here at the top.”
+
+“There is one way, if they only think of it,” Purdick offered. “They
+can starve us out in a few days. Maybe that is what they’ve made up
+their minds to do now. They don’t seem to be doing anything else.”
+
+The suspicious quiet held out until late in the evening, up to the
+moment when Dick and Purdick were preparing fresh sand beds on the
+floor of the cave mouth, while Larry sat with his gun between his knees
+at the edge of the newly made avalanche gash. Then, out of the darkness
+either to the right or left, Larry could not tell which, came a harsh
+voice saying: “Hey! Youse fellies in th’ hole!”
+
+“All right,” Larry called out, bringing his gun up to the “ready.”
+“Spit it out. What have you got to say?”
+
+“Just what my pardner said last night!” rasped the voice. “Ye’re to
+take yer traps and clear out o’ that mine!”
+
+Purdick and Dick were listening with Larry, and Purdick whispered:
+“It’s the cripple――‘Twisty,’ they called him――that’s talking. I’d know
+his voice anywhere.”
+
+“Why should we clear out?” Larry asked. “It’s our discovery. You didn’t
+know anything about this place until you heard us at work in here.”
+
+“That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. We’re old Jim Brock’s pardners,
+and the mine belongs to us!”
+
+“You needn’t take the trouble to hand out that line of talk,” Larry
+flung back. “One of your partners gave us that fairy tale last night.
+We know all about you fellows. You’ve been following us around all
+summer because you didn’t know where James Brock’s abandoned mine was,
+and you thought we did know. We didn’t know, any more than you did; but
+now that we’ve found it, we’re going to keep it.”
+
+There was a short silence to follow this, and Purdick whispered again:
+“Whereabouts is he?”
+
+Larry whispered back: “I don’t know, but I think he’s around to the
+left where we climbed up and down yesterday morning.”
+
+“Keep back a little,” Purdick warned. “If he gets you in range, he’ll
+shoot, just as like as not.”
+
+At the end of the little silence the raucous voice began again.
+
+“Ye’ll not keep it long――not any longer than it’ll take the sheriff to
+get in here fr’m Natrolia.”
+
+“Huh!” Larry snorted. “The sheriff hasn’t got anything to do with us!”
+
+“Yuh’ll see when he gets here. Ye’re jumpin’ our mine.”
+
+“Nothing doing,” said Larry. “I don’t know where you are, but wherever
+it is, you can stay there and talk foolishness all night if you want
+to. It won’t get you anywhere, though.”
+
+Another silence, and then:
+
+“Listen: ye’re nothin’ but a bunch o’ kids, and ye don’t know what
+ye’re up ag’inst. You don’t want to make this a fight for blood,
+because if ye do, there’s only the one way it can end. Ye’re in there,
+and if we give the word, yuh’ll never come out alive.”
+
+It was here that Dick, who seldom consented to be a permanent listener
+in any conversation, chipped in.
+
+“Lots of good it’ll do you to kill us off!” he snapped back. “You talk
+as if there wouldn’t be any hereafter to this thing! James Brock gave
+this mine to my Uncle Billy Starbuck, and you know it because you
+listened in that morning in Brewster and heard Uncle Billy telling us
+about it. Suppose you do turn in and murder us: how long do you think
+it would be before half of Brewster’d be over here looking for you
+three fellows with a rope?”
+
+“We’re takin’ chances on that,” was the short reply. “And listen――here’s
+the last word. You get out o’ that hole, and do it before mornin’, if
+yuh ever want to see Brewster ag’in. D’yuh get that?”
+
+“We hear what you say,” Larry answered.
+
+“Well, here’s my affidavy!” yapped the voice in the darkness, and a
+rifle cracked and a bullet whizzed past the cave mouth so near that
+Larry said he felt the wind of it――as he probably did.
+
+“Give me elbow room!” grated little Purdick, pressing forward with his
+gun, and leaning out past Larry. But the would-be assassin was too wary
+to betray his whereabouts, and though they waited breathlessly for many
+minutes with all their five senses concentrated in the listening nerve,
+they were not able to catch the slightest sound to betray the manner or
+direction of his retreat.
+
+“Well,” said Larry, at the end of the breathless interval, “that fellow
+said that we didn’t know what we were up against, but I guess we do. I
+don’t believe he was bluffing, though maybe he was.”
+
+“Not on your life!” Dick exclaimed. “The gold vein may pinch out in the
+next ten feet, or it may be worth a million dollars. Nobody can tell,
+of course; but on a chance like that, a bunch of desperate men wouldn’t
+stop a minute at wiping the three of us out to get hold of it. And I’m
+not so sure they couldn’t do it and get away with it. We haven’t seen
+another living soul between the two ranges all summer――except my old
+Daddy Longbeard away over yonder under Mule-Ear Pass――and if our folks
+should turn out search parties, they might look for a year without
+getting any trace of us.”
+
+Larry was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Does that mean that you
+think we ought to back-track while we can, Dick?”
+
+“Not a bit of it!” was the stout-hearted rejoinder. “At least, not for
+me. How about you, Purdy?”
+
+Once again the small one surprised his two camp-mates.
+
+“I was just going to say that if you two want to hike out and bring
+help, I’ll stay and do my best to hold on until you can get back.”
+
+“That settles it,” said Larry briefly. “We all stay. Now you two turn
+in and grab off your forty winks. I’m batter up for the first watch.”
+
+Like the night before, this one passed quietly. During Larry’s watch
+the heavens were clear almost up to midnight, but when he called
+Purdick the stars were beginning to disappear and there was a muttering
+of thunder in the air. The rain came later and continued in gusty
+showers until well on toward morning; and at an early hour, when
+Purdick came back from watering the burros in the inner recesses of the
+cave, he brought news.
+
+“The creek is away high,” he reported; “twice the quantity of water
+coming down that there was yesterday. You can hear it fighting its way
+through those underground channels ever so far back.”
+
+“It’s the run-off from the rain,” Larry offered, and letting it go at
+that, he asked Dick if anything had shown up during his watch.
+
+“Little something,” said Dick. “They have moved off somewhere――the
+hold-ups. A few minutes after dawn I saw something stirring down by
+their camp and I got the field-glass. Two of them were crossing the
+gulch to climb the mountain. They were leading a burro, but there
+didn’t seem to be anything on the pack saddle but a couple of picks and
+shovels.”
+
+“Umph! I wonder what that means?” Larry grunted. But as there was no
+answer that any of them could think of, this incident, like that of the
+rising water in the cave torrent, had to be left unexplained.
+
+This day, as they all agreed after it was over and they were eating
+supper at the cave’s mouth, was one that deserved to be marked with
+a red letter. There had been no interruptions whatever: not the
+least sign of their late harriers. Hour after hour the watch had been
+scrupulously maintained at the cave entrance, but for anything that
+could be seen or heard, they might have supposed themselves to be the
+only human beings in all the upheaved world of mountains and valleys.
+
+Then, too, the work had gone splendidly in the tunnel. They had fired
+two rounds of blasts, carrying the heading in several feet farther, and
+the vein still showed no signs of “pinching out.” And the ore continued
+to look as good as it had at first.
+
+Having put in a hard day’s work, they made early preparations for
+turning in, and by eight o’clock Purdick, who had the first watch, was
+sitting at his post and listening to the deep breathing of his two
+companions who were already asleep. It was not until some little time
+after he had settled himself to his watch that he missed the gurgling
+murmur of the imprisoned torrent, which they had been hearing off and
+on all day; and when he did miss it, it suddenly occurred to him that
+they had all been too tired to remember to lead the burros back into
+the cave for their evening watering.
+
+Keeping this in mind to the end of his watch, he spoke of it when he
+roused Dick at midnight. Dick offered to take the burros back, but
+Purdick said no; that it was as much his oversight as anybody’s, and
+he would do it. He was back again in a very short time, and, as once
+before, he brought news.
+
+“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said to Dick, speaking softly so as
+not to disturb Larry, “but the creek’s gone dry――dry as a bone. Nothing
+left but a few pools in the hollows, and the jacks drank them dry.”
+
+“That’s queer,” said Dick. “What do you suppose made it do that?”
+
+“I can’t begin to imagine. The only thing I could think of was that
+maybe the rain flood had made the creek find another underground
+channel somewhere.”
+
+“That’s bad,” Dick commented. “Without water we can’t last any time at
+all. But we can’t do anything about it until morning. You turn in and
+get your snooze.”
+
+For a sentry seat at the cave mouth they had placed a flat rock, and,
+padding the seat with his blankets, Dick settled himself for his
+watch, with his feet tucked up under him and his rifle lying across
+his lap. It was some little time after Purdick’s regular breathing was
+threatening to develop into a snore that Dick heard a curious sound
+like the ticking of a clock. At first he thought it was an insect, the
+bug commonly known as the “death watch.” Yet it didn’t seem just like
+that, either. “Sounds more like water dripping from a leaky faucet,” he
+muttered to himself; and just then the two sleepers lying a few feet
+away on their sand bed began to stir uneasily, and Larry sat up to say,
+“Here――what’s the matter? This sand’s all wet!”
+
+The startled exclamation woke Purdick and he began to struggle out
+of his blanket. “Pity’s sake!” he grumbled. “Is it raining away back
+in this far?” And then explosively: “Say, fellows――Dick! Larry! the
+water’s an inch deep all over this place!”
+
+Dick, the only one of the three who was fully awake and alert, was the
+first to take the real alarm.
+
+“The creek’s doing something to us!” he cried out. “Don’t you hear
+that roar? It’s a flood! And it’s coming this way! Run for it!” Then
+remembering suddenly that, with the door-yard ledge gone, flight out of
+the cave in the darkness could mean nothing but a neck-breaking plunge
+into the gulch below: “The tunnel heading――that’s the highest place
+there is! Climb for it!”
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XII
+
+ NO SURRENDER!
+
+
+The flood in the cave, already three or four inches deep on the floor
+and pouring out of the entrance in a splashing cataract when the
+three boys made a mad scramble for the mine tunnel, rose swiftly to a
+roaring, bellowing torrent as they stumbled in black darkness up the
+inclined drift and crowded themselves into the highest part of the
+heading.
+
+How long the imminent threat of death, either by drowning or stifling,
+lasted they could never tell, though minutes can easily figure as
+hours under such terrifying conditions. But one thing they were made
+quickly to realize, and that was that the upward pitch of the tunnel
+was all that was saving them from being drowned, like rats in a trap.
+A sudden, half-suffocating increase in the air pressure, making their
+ears ring and their hearts pound like laboring pumps, told them that
+the water had risen above the mouth of the tunnel in the main cave and
+was compressing the pocketed air. And it was the subsidence of this
+pressure that first gave them assurance that the worst was over――that
+the fury was expending itself.
+
+Dick was the first to speak, and his teeth were chattering.
+
+“They’ve g-got us this time!” he stammered. “Th-this is what they went
+up the mountain for yesterday morning with the picks and shovels. They
+came down into the cave and stopped the creek off behind that fallen
+roof and let the water back up. They knew that when it got head enough
+it would push that loose stuff out and come down here and drown us!”
+
+“I guess you’ve sized it up about right,” Larry agreed, trying to wring
+some of the water out of his dripping clothes. Then: “How about you,
+Purdy? Are you still alive and kicking?”
+
+“As much of me as hasn’t been soaked out and washed away――yes. But
+let’s get out of this wet hole.”
+
+“When we do, it will only be to get into a wetter one,” said Dick,
+shivering in his wet clothes.
+
+Groping their way down the short tunnel in darkness that seemed as
+though it were thick enough to be felt, they reached the main cavern.
+
+“Matches!” said Larry. “Have you any dry ones, Dick――or you, Purdy?
+Mine are all soaked.”
+
+But both Purdick and Dick found that their pocket match safes had
+leaked, also.
+
+“No light, then,” Larry said. “That’s mighty bad. But I guess we can
+feel around and find out what this Noah’s Ark flood has done to us.”
+
+What the flood had done seemed to be an appalling sufficiency. Groping
+about, they were unable to find any trace of their camping outfit. The
+cave corridor was stripped bare of everything, as nearly as they could
+determine: packs, blankets, field-testing outfit, cooking utensils,
+provisions――all were gone. And to make it complete, the burros were
+missing.
+
+“They’d go, of course,” said Dick gloomily, after they had groped over
+every foot of the cave floor and had come together at the entrance.
+“I suppose they’re drowned, but if they weren’t, they’d be killed in
+the fall from here to the gulch. Seems to me we’re about at the end of
+things.”
+
+Little Purdick’s laugh was a mere cackle, but it was no reflection upon
+the amount of nerve he had left.
+
+“I’m glad you saved your rifle, Dick.” In the excitement of the rush
+for the mine tunnel, Dick had held on to his gun simply because it
+hadn’t occurred to him to drop it. “When it’s light enough to see,
+those fellows will probably come climbing up here to take possession.
+If you’ll let me handle the gun, I’ll promise you that not all of them
+will get here with whole skins.”
+
+“I guess I’m with you,” said Dick, with a little shiver. Some way,
+in spite of all that had happened hitherto, the fight with the mine
+jumpers had failed to impress any of them as a thing which might
+suddenly develop into a life-and-death struggle. But now they seemed
+to be face to face with the last extremity. Without food or fire, with
+practically nothing left but the clothes they stood in, and Dick’s
+rifle and belt of cartridges, they were, in effect, at the mercy of
+the three men who had been dogging them all summer. Even if they had
+been free to go unmolested, they knew they couldn’t reach the railroad
+without enduring all the hardships of a long march without food.
+
+While they sat at the cave mouth, waiting for the dawn, it is safe to
+say that all three of them took the long jump which lies between more
+or less carefree boyhood and responsible manhood. It was Larry Donovan
+who said, at the end of a protracted interval of silence:
+
+“I’ve been thinking, fellows. I guess we’ve come to where the road
+forks. We’re in the hole just about as bad as we can be, and I don’t
+believe anybody would blame us if we should turn tail and run for it. I
+guess that’s about what I’d have done a year ago――or maybe a week ago.
+But, somehow, I can’t seem to kick myself around to doing it now.”
+
+“Run away?” Purdick broke in. “Fat chance we’ve got to run――with those
+fellows probably laying for us in the woods down there. I’m thinking we
+wouldn’t get very far. They can’t afford to let us get away alive now.”
+
+“Hold on,” said Larry. “You’re forgetting that the flood has probably
+cleaned the cave out above us――washed away that fallen-roof stuff. I
+suppose we can go out the way we came in. And if we should start right
+now, we’d stand a fair chance of getting off. No doubt those fellows
+are confidently expecting to find our bodies in the flood wreck in the
+gulch when it comes light enough to see; and if they don’t find them,
+they’ll think we’re buried under the wash somewhere.”
+
+“Do you want to go, Larry?” Dick asked.
+
+“No,” came the prompt reply. “As I’ve said, a year ago, or a week ago,
+perhaps, I guess maybe you would have had to tie me with a rope to hold
+me here with things as they are now. And with a break-away perfectly
+easy. But it seems as if I’d got about ten years older in the last hour
+or so.”
+
+“Here, too,” said Dick. “I can’t quite see myself sneaking out by the
+back door.”
+
+“Just the same, it’s only right and fair to weigh all the chances,”
+Larry put in soberly. “Every hour we stay here means just that much
+less strength to make a get-away up through the cave and over the
+mountain to Natrolia. And if we don’t mean to make a get-away――well, in
+a couple of days at the longest――saying we can stand these robbers off
+for that long――we’ll be starving.”
+
+“I know,” Dick admitted. “But I’m going to stay. And when I say that,
+I’m not thinking of the money there may be in this gold vein we’ve
+been digging in, and I don’t believe either of you are. It’s a bigger
+question than that, now, I guess.”
+
+“You’ve got it right, Dick,” said little Purdick. “We’re not fighting
+for our pockets; we’re fighting to keep a bunch of thieves and
+murderers from taking what doesn’t belong to them. I say, No Surrender.”
+
+“That’s the word,” Dick agreed, and as he spoke he passed the rifle and
+cartridge belt over to the best marksman.
+
+While they were talking, the sky had begun to lighten in the east
+with the promise of another cloudless summer day. As the stars were
+extinguished one by one and the growing dawn light crept down into
+the valleys and gulches, they were able to see what the dam-bursting
+flood had done. The broad swath mowed down through the forest by the
+avalanche boulder two days earlier had formed a path for the flood, and
+the cataracting water had swept it clean of everything movable.
+
+Far down the slope from the cliff’s foot they saw one of the burros
+grazing peacefully and quite as if nothing had happened to it. But
+the other was lying on its side in the path of the flood, and the
+field-glass showed them that it had a broken leg and couldn’t get up.
+
+“Poor old Fishbait!” said Dick mournfully. “If we could only get to
+him and put him out of his misery!” Then he refocused the glass and
+searched carefully for some signs of the camp outfit. There was nothing
+to be seen. “I guess it’s all gone on into the gulch creek and been
+washed away,” he said.
+
+Purdick got up and stretched himself. The cold soaking, with no chance
+to dry out, had left him stiff and numb, and he took a turn around
+in the cave to limber up. When he came back to the crevice mouth,
+it was to say: “Just thought I’d take a squint around to see if any
+of the eatables had been overlooked by the flood. They’re all gone;
+everything’s gone: wood-pile, green-grass hay, and even the pile of ore
+we had sorted out.”
+
+Larry took up a hole in his belt. “That’s breakfast,” he said, with
+a sort of grim attempt to make a joke of it. Then: “Let’s get back
+inside――so as to leave them guessing as long as we can.”
+
+They had hardly withdrawn from the lip of the entrance before one of
+the three miscreants came in sight. It was the cripple, and he was
+swinging along toward the lower end of the avalanche path. When he
+reached it he began poking around in the débris with his crutch.
+
+“Humph!” Larry grunted. “Looking for our dead bodies, I suppose.”
+
+Little Purdick’s pale blue eyes were glowing.
+
+“Shall I try for it?” he whispered. “I believe I could get him, even at
+this distance.”
+
+“No, no!” Larry cut in hastily. “They’re cold-blooded murderers, all
+right, but we mustn’t be. When they come after us it will be different.”
+
+While the cripple was poking around with his crutch his two accomplices
+came up. One of them――not the black-whiskered one who had been scared
+off by Purdick’s dynamite bomb, but the other――walked over to where
+the disabled burro was lying, and, after a momentary inspection of the
+poor beast, drew his pistol and shot it. Then he walked out to where
+the other one was grazing, picked up the trailing halter, and led the
+little animal back into the woods.
+
+Shortly afterward, this third man joined the other two who were
+searching the flood wreck. Dick, watching them through the field-glass,
+saw them turn up a pair of blankets, a saucepan, the aluminum camp
+kettle, and one of the lost rifles.
+
+Purdick fingered the lock of his gun. “I hope they won’t keep us
+waiting too long,” he said softly.
+
+“They won’t,” Dick returned, keeping the three in the field of the
+glass. “The big one has quit digging and he’s looking up here. Now he’s
+getting his gun....” Then, suddenly: “Duck――both of you!”
+
+The warning didn’t come an instant too soon. On the heels of it a rifle
+barked in the gulch, and a bullet sang through the crevice opening to
+spatter itself on the roof over their heads.
+
+“That’s a try-out,” said Larry. “They’re puzzled because they can’t
+find our bodies, and they think maybe a shot or two will make us show
+up if we’re still here. Don’t shoot, Purdy”――to the small one who was
+flat on his face and was trying to get a rest over the cliff lip.
+“Let’s wait until we have to.”
+
+The waiting proved to be a weary business for three fellows who were
+both wet and hungry, and had little prospect of relieving either
+discomfort short of defeating the three depredators and possibly
+forcing them to replace, out of their own stores, what they had
+destroyed; a result to which not even Dick, the most imaginative of the
+three, could look forward with any hope of its accomplishment. At the
+best, they could only hope to keep the spoilers at bay for a time; and
+they all knew that the time wouldn’t be very long if they had to go
+without food.
+
+After the trial shot which brought no reply from the high-lying
+crevice, two of the men in the gulch resumed their search in the flood
+wreckage, while the third, the black-bearded one, went off down stream.
+It was a full hour after sunrise――and the sun, shining fairly into
+the eastward-facing crevice, was doing something to relieve the chill
+of the three sodden watchers――when Blackbeard reappeared, leading the
+burro laden with tools and camp dunnage.
+
+“Now we get it,” said Dick. “They’re coming up to take possession. I
+wonder how they’ll work it. They can’t make that burro climb up here.
+It’s too steep.”
+
+But the three men seemed to know what they were about. First they drove
+the laden pack animal as far up the avalanche path as it could go,
+flogging it upward until the poor beast was slipping and falling at
+every other step. This brought them within easy range, and in a hasty
+consultation carried on in whispers, the three defenders of the Golden
+Spider decided that they dare not wait any longer. As matters stood,
+Purdick might have marked them down and either killed or crippled all
+three before they could reach cover, but they wouldn’t take that much
+of an advantage even of men who were no better than midnight assassins.
+
+“Hi!――you fellows down there!” Dick shouted. “Keep your distance or
+we’ll fire on you!”
+
+The reply to this sportsmanlike warning came so quickly that it seemed
+as if it must have been planned beforehand. Instantly the cripple
+dodged behind the trembling burro, and using it for a breastwork and
+its pack for a rest, opened fire with a repeating rifle, sending
+shot after shot hurtling up into the crevice mouth, while his two
+companions, guns in hand, started to climb straight up the slope
+under cover of this bombardment. Owing to the high angle at which the
+crippled robber had to shoot, the defenders of the mine were still safe
+so long as they did not get within the line of fire, and by lying flat
+on the crevice floor they could see without being seen.
+
+Little Purdick’s face was white and drawn, but his hands did not
+tremble when he took careful aim at the leading one of the two
+scrambling climbers. “Don’t kill him if you can help it,” Larry
+cautioned, and as he said it, the small-calibre rifle spoke. For an
+instant it seemed as if Purdick had missed. Then the leading man――it
+was the black-whiskered one――stooped to clasp his right leg just above
+the knee, wavered for a second, and ended by tumbling backward upon his
+follower, with the result that both rolled together to the bottom of
+the slope, knocking the burro and the cripple down as they went.
+
+[Illustration: Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by
+tumbling backward upon his follower.]
+
+Larry clapped the small marksman on the back.
+
+“Good work! Bully good work!” he cried. “If you’d had a cannon you
+couldn’t have done any better!”
+
+Dick had the glass to his eyes again. “They’re overhauling the shot
+one and tying his leg up,” he reported. “Now the cripple――the natural
+one――is shaking his fist at us. I’ll bet that little surprise
+party’ll cool ’em off some!”
+
+It did, so far as any further attempt to take the mine by direct
+assault went. As soon as the wounded man could get upon his feet and
+limp along, the three dodged in among the gulch trees, towing the laden
+burro, and were lost to sight.
+
+After that there was another unnerving wait. Higher and higher rose the
+sun, and still there were no further signs of the enemy. After what
+seemed like an age, Dick said: “Do you suppose they’ve given up?”
+
+“No chance of it,” Larry contended. “They’ve gone too far. They know
+that if they let us get away now there’ll be something worse than a
+charge of mine-jumping to face. They’ve tried to murder us.”
+
+“Gee, gosh!” Dick complained. “I wish they’d hurry up before I get any
+hungrier!”
+
+As the time dragged on, there seemed to be little chance of the wish
+being fulfilled. At last Dick jumped up, declaring that he’d fly all to
+pieces if he didn’t stir around a bit.
+
+“Stir all you want to,” said Purdick. “Larry and I will keep watch.”
+
+Dick tramped back and forth in the cavern for a few minutes until he
+got his stiffened muscles limbered up, and then disappeared in the
+backward reaches of the crevice. When he returned he was breathing hard
+as if he had been running.
+
+“What is it?” Purdick asked.
+
+“A knock-out,” said Dick shortly. “There isn’t any back door.”
+
+“What do you mean?” It was Larry who wanted to know.
+
+“I’ve been back in the cave. I noticed that the warm wind we felt
+sucking through the first morning when we came in was blowing again.
+You don’t feel it much here at the entrance, but farther down it draws
+like a chimney. While I was about it, I thought I would keep on and see
+if we really had a back door open again, as the wind seemed to show. We
+haven’t. Those fellows must have dragged in a whole forest when they
+built that flooding dam yesterday. Most of the tree wreckage was pushed
+on down with the flood to one of the big chambers, and that is so chock
+full of it that a fice-dog couldn’t crawl through, much less a man.”
+
+“But you say the wind blows through,” Purdick put in.
+
+“Oh, yes; it’s open enough for that. But even if we had the axe we
+couldn’t hack our way through in less than half a day.”
+
+“All right,” said Larry, setting his jaw grimly. “That means fight or
+die. I guess we’re.... What’s that noise?”
+
+They all held their breath and listened. There was no mistaking the
+sounds that came floating to them on the indrawing draft of air.
+They were the measured blows of an axe and they seemed to come from
+somewhere up above the crevice entrance.
+
+“They’re up over us somewhere,” Purdick said. “It sounds as if they’re
+cutting a tree down.”
+
+Momentarily expecting another attack, they gathered at the cave mouth
+and waited, little Purdick with his rifle at the “ready.” What shape
+the attack would take they couldn’t remotely guess. The step-like cliff
+into the face of which the crevice burrowed was not very high, and
+on the next step above it there were trees growing; so much they had
+noted on the first morning of their occupancy when they had gone into
+the gulch for the forage and the wood. But there was every reason to
+believe that these trees had all been smashed and carried down into the
+gulch by the dynamited avalanche, as Dick pointed out.
+
+“Not all of them,” Purdick objected. “That chopping is right above us,
+and it can’t be farther away than that upper ledge.”
+
+In a very few minutes all further argument on that score had its answer
+in the crackling sounds made by a tree in its fall. A dark shadow swept
+down diagonally from above, and the next moment the cave’s mouth was
+blocked by a great fir standing top downward and apparently suspended
+upside down from the ledge above by the still unsevered remains of the
+chopped trunk.
+
+“Huh!” said Larry. “Now what does that mean? They can’t use that tree
+for a ladder.”
+
+Whatever it might mean, it was instantly made plain that they were not
+to be given a chance to investigate. Somewhere down in the gulch a
+rifle cracked and a bullet tore its way through the dense foliage of
+the hanging tree. Reckless of his own safety, Purdick tried to part
+the thick branches so that he could see and poke his gun through for a
+reply, but the thick screen was impenetrable.
+
+Courageously persistent, the small one was still trying to force his
+way through the thickset branches when something that seemed to take
+the shape of a huge ball of fire came down from above, and a choking
+gust of resinous smoke drove Purdick back gasping. The man on the
+ledge above had lowered a blazing torch of some kind, and the hanging
+tree was afire.
+
+“We’re done for!” Dick gasped, fighting for breath in the stifling
+smoke cloud that was instantly drawn into the crevice by the chimneying
+draft, and he was starting to feel his way toward the inner depths when
+Larry grabbed him and shoved him forcibly toward the gold vein opening.
+
+“The mine tunnel!” he choked. “There is no draft in there! Hurry, for
+pity’s sake! Where are you, Purdy?”
+
+The great tree was roaring like a fiery furnace before they had
+stumbled blindly to the small tunnel entrance, and tongues of flame
+were licking far into the crevice as if the heat were increasing the
+natural draft a hundred fold. Panting, blinded and choking, they
+crowded into the farther end of the blasted-out pocket which had been
+their refuge from the flood, and though the smoke was there before
+them, the air was still breathable.
+
+As everybody who has ever seen a forest fire knows, the mountain
+conifers burn as rapidly as if their leaves were made of celluloid.
+While the three crowding burrowers were still gasping for breath, the
+flame roar went out, but the dense smoke cloud continued to pour into
+the cavern.
+
+Into the silence that followed the expiring flame blast came a sharp
+staccato of rifle shots, yells of rage or dismay, they couldn’t tell
+which, and then more rifle crashes. After these there was another
+interval of silence, which was shortly broken by a recurrence of the
+chopping axe blows from above. After a few of the dull-sounding axe
+blows the smoking tree-torch let go and rolled down into the gulch;
+the welcome sunlight began to penetrate the smoky interior of the cave,
+and a grateful gush of fresh air came to make life a little better
+worth living.
+
+“I wonder what’s happened,” said Dick hoarsely. And then: “I’m crying
+so hard I can’t see.”
+
+They were all three weeping copiously, for that matter; smoke tears
+they were, but none the less blinding for all that. Rubbing their eyes,
+they stumbled down into the cavern, little Purdick with his gun up and
+ready to fire. At the mouth of the mine tunnel they were met, not by a
+trio of murderers ready to shoot them down, as they fully expected, but
+by an apparition――a tall old man, white-haired and with a snowy beard
+reaching almost to his waist.
+
+“Daddy Longbeard!” Dick cried out, dashing the tears from his eyes.
+“Where, for goodness’ sake, did you come from?”
+
+“Huh!” grunted the old man. “Jes’ now I’ve come from havin’ a li’l’
+round-up with them cusses that was tryin’ to burn ye out. Ain’t
+scorched none, are ye?”
+
+“We’re all alive yet, but that’s about all you can say for us,” Dick
+bubbled. “But what has become of the hold-ups? And how did you happen
+to get here just in the very nick of time?”
+
+It all came out in the old man’s chopped sentences. Three or four days
+earlier, an outgoing prospector had told him that “Twisty” Atkins,
+Tom Dowling and Bart Jennison, three desperate men who had all served
+prison sentences for various crimes, were camping on the trail of three
+young fellows whom the gossiping prospector had called “vacationers.”
+
+“I knowed, right off, what that meant,” the old man went on, “and
+I made Bill Jenkins――he was the feller that was tellin’ me all
+this――carry a telegrapht message over to Nophi for Mr. Billy Starbuck.
+I writ in that telegrapht that his boys was liken to get into trouble
+over here, and that he’d better get him a posse and come on in. Then,
+after I’d waited a day ’r so, and he didn’t come, I got sort o’
+nervous, and lit out myself.”
+
+“But how did you know where to find us?” Larry asked.
+
+The old miner’s grin showed his broken teeth.
+
+“I allowed you’d be somewhere inside o’ that circle I’d marked out on
+the map I gin ye. And this mornin’, as I was cookin’ breakfas’, I heerd
+the shootin’.”
+
+“But what has become of the hold-ups?” Purdick said, repeating Dick’s
+question.
+
+“I’ve got two of ’em――‘Twisty’ and Jennison――down yonder in the gulch,
+laid out so’t they’ll have to be carried mule-back to wherever they’re
+a-goin’. Dowling was up here on the bench overhead, and he took out
+when I opened up on him. But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars that
+he’s carryin’ a li’l’ chunk o’ my lead with him, wherever he’s at.”
+
+All this talk had been carried on at the mouth of the cave, and as yet
+nothing had been said about the Golden Spider. But now Dick told their
+old rescuer that they had found James Brock’s wonderful mine; told him
+also how they had happened to find it, and, briefly, what the hold-ups
+had been doing to them since they had found it.
+
+“You didn’t need to tell me that,” the old man was beginning; but just
+as he got that far, there came a shout and a rifle shot from the gulch,
+and they all looked out to see a bunch of mounted men riding out upon
+the tailings of the flood wash. “There’s yer uncle and his posse,” said
+the grim old prospector whom Dick had made rich by a simple little
+blowpipe test. “They must ’a’ been follerin’ right along behind me. I
+blazed my trail so they wouldn’t have no trouble tellin’ which-a-way to
+come. Reckon we’d better be climbin’ down. You boys’ve gone a long time
+a-waitin’ for yer breakfast.”
+
+An hour later, when the three defenders of the Golden Spider had put
+away a meal big enough to fill up all the crevices opened by their
+missed breakfast, and had told Mr. William Starbuck in detail all
+that had happened to them in their wonderful summer, the shrewd-eyed
+ex-cattleman put his arm over Dick’s shoulder and said:
+
+“Well, you’ve had good times, and some pretty tough times, but I guess
+you’ve all grown a good bit since you left Brewster in June. You all
+look it, anyway. And I want to congratulate the three of you on the
+find you’ve made, and upon the way you held on and defended it after
+you’d got it. Not many fellows of your age and experience would have
+stood up to those three rascals as you did, especially after they gave
+you a chance to duck and run.
+
+“Now about your summer’s work; that is satisfactory, too. Even if only
+one of the rare-metal prospects you have staked out proves to be worth
+working, you will have earned your grub-stake many times over. As for
+this gold mine up yonder in the cliff, you may leave that to us. We’ll
+see to it that it is properly guarded, and recorded in your names as
+discoverers, and your father and I, Dick, will undertake to find the
+capital for working it, the money to be paid back out of the earnings
+of the mine when it gets to be a going proposition. But there is one
+thing about that: don’t get your ideas too high up. Old Uncle Jimmie
+Brock’s Golden Spider may prove to be a bonanza and make all three of
+you rich; and, on the other hand, it may be only a pocket deposit that
+will merely pay back the development capital. Keep that in mind and
+don’t spend your money until you get it.”
+
+“Then you meant what you said――about giving the mine to us?” Dick asked.
+
+“Certainly I did. A bargain is a bargain. And it’s your discovery as
+much as any other lode would be. I only hope it won’t spoil you if it
+turns out to be a bonanza.”
+
+Larry looked at Purdick, and little Purdick handed the look back. And
+it was Purdick who made answer.
+
+“Larry and Dick will tell you, Mr. Starbuck, that I was mighty nearly
+an anarchist when they brought me out here last June,” he said
+steadily. “I used to believe there weren’t any good rich people in the
+world. I’m wondering what will happen to me if it should turn out that
+I’ve got to get over on the other side of the fence.”
+
+“Nothing bad will happen to you, I’m sure,” was the kindly reply.
+“Money isn’t everything; it isn’t anything compared with what’s inside
+of the man who has it――or hasn’t it. If you’ve had hard times, you’ll
+be better able to feel for and to help other fellows who are having
+hard times. You’ll know what it means to them, better than either Dick
+or Larry, here.
+
+“Now about your plans. You have only a few days left before you will
+have to start back to college. You’ve finished your job out here, so
+you may as well start for Natrolia at once. We’ll outfit you for the
+one night’s camp you’ll have to make and you can take the burro you
+have left to carry your provisions. I don’t want to hurry you off, but
+the folks in Brewster will be mighty anxious until they hear from you.
+If you start now, you can make the top of the range by nightfall.”
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The sun was sinking to its setting in a far-distant western wilderness
+when three young fellows who had been tramping steadily all afternoon
+up a steep mountain trail came out upon the summit of the range
+and stopped to look back upon another wilderness, with the buttes
+and gulches, valleys and rugged upheavals of which they had become
+affectionately familiar during the long summer weeks.
+
+“Gee!” said the smallest of the three. “Has it all been real? Or have
+we only been dreaming it? It’s――it’s getting away from me already!”
+
+The other two laughed, and the one of the two whose tongue was always
+the readiest said: “Good land, Purdy! if it’s fading out on you now,
+what will it be two weeks from now, when we’re back at the grind in Old
+Sheddon? It’s real enough to me.”
+
+For a long minute the smallest one stood looking steadfastly into the
+depths from which they had lately ascended; looked so long and steadily
+that his eyes filled and he had to wink them rapidly to be able to see
+at all.
+
+“Say, fellows――I want always to remember that bully old mountain
+wilderness just as we’re seeing it now,” he said in low tones; “it, and
+the good times we’ve had this summer, and the way we got tangled up in
+The Web of the Golden Spider. Don’t you?”
+
+“Here, too,” said Dick Maxwell softly.
+
+And then they turned away reluctantly to tramp down the descending
+trail in the eye of the glowing sunset.
+
+
+ THE END
+
+
+
+
+ Transcriber’s Notes:
+
+ ――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
+
+ ――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
+
+ ――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
+
+ ――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75002 ***
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+
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75002 ***</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter x-ebookmaker-drop" id="cover_sm">
+ <img src="images/cover_sm.jpg" alt="cover" title="cover">
+</figure>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="noi adauthor"><i>THE DICK AND LARRY SERIES</i></p>
+
+<p class="noi adauthor"><i>BY FRANCIS LYNDE</i></p>
+
+<div class="noic">
+<ul>
+<li>THE DONOVAN CHANCE</li>
+<li>DICK AND LARRY, FRESHMEN</li>
+<li>THE GOLDEN SPIDER</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noi adauthor"><i>CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="noi halftitle">THE GOLDEN SPIDER</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i_frontis">
+ <img src="images/i_frontis.jpg" alt="" title="">
+ <figcaption class="caption">
+ <p class="noic"><a href="#Page_32">While they looked, one paused, appeared to dance for an instant,
+and then disappeared.</a></p>
+ </figcaption>
+</figure>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="noic u"><i>THE DICK AND LARRY SERIES</i></p>
+
+<h1 class="nobreak">THE<br>
+GOLDEN SPIDER</h1>
+
+<p class="p2 noic">BY</p>
+
+<p class="noi author">FRANCIS LYNDE</p>
+
+<p class="p4 noic">NEW YORK<br>
+<span class="adauthor">CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</span><br>
+1923</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="noic smcap">Copyright, 1923, by</p>
+
+<p class="noic">CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</p>
+
+<hr class="r10">
+
+<p class="noic">Printed in the United States of America</p>
+
+<hr class="r10">
+
+<p class="noic">Published September, 1923</p>
+
+<div class="pad4">
+<figure class="figcenter" id="logo">
+ <img class="illowe6" src="images/logo.jpg" alt="logo" title="logo">
+</figure>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p class="noi">TO MY GOOD FRIEND AND MINERALOGICAL
+MENTOR, CLARENCE M. CLARK, WITHOUT
+WHOSE KINDLY HELP, AND THE FREE USE
+OF HIS LIBRARY, SPECIMEN CABINETS AND
+LABORATORY, THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN
+SPIDER MIGHT NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN,
+THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table>
+<colgroup>
+ <col style="width: 20%;">
+ <col style="width: 70%;">
+ <col style="width: 10%;">
+</colgroup>
+<tr>
+ <th class="smfontr">CHAPTER</th>
+ <th class="tdl"></th>
+ <th class="smfontr">PAGE</th>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">I</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">In Lost Canyon</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">1</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">II</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">The Frozen Trail</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">17</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">III</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">In Which Dick Drops Out</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">35</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">IV</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Daddy Longbeard</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">52</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">V</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">Footloose and Free</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">71</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">VI</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">Short Rations</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">87</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">VII</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">Tomatoes and Peaches</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">104</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">VIII</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">The Ice Cavern</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">122</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">IX</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">The Spider’s Web</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">137</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">X</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">Notice to Quit</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">156</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">XI</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">Finders Keepers</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">173</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdrt">XII</td>
+ <td class="tdl smcap"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">No Surrender!</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">192</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="ILLUSTRATIONS">ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table>
+<colgroup>
+ <col style="width: 90%;">
+ <col style="width: 10%;">
+</colgroup>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl hang"><a href="#i_frontis">While they looked, one paused, appeared
+to dance for an instant, and then disappeared</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb"><i>Frontispiece</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <th> </th>
+ <th class="smfontr">FACING PAGE</th>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl hang"><a href="#i_fp066">“Did you ever think that this stuff might be
+ore of some kind?”</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">66</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl hang"><a href="#i_fp116">“I wish there were some way of letting those
+scamps know that they are barking up the wrong tree”</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">116</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl hang"><a href="#i_fp200">Then the leading man wavered for a second,
+and ended by tumbling backward upon his follower</a></td>
+ <td class="tdrb">200</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1"></a>[1]</span></p>
+
+<p class="noi title">THE GOLDEN SPIDER</p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I<br>
+<small>IN LOST CANYON</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">There wasn’t much suggestion of a canyon, lost
+or found, in the handsomely furnished office in the
+Brewster National Bank building where three young
+fellows in flannel shirts, belted corduroys and hob-nailed
+lace boots were waiting for the owner of the office to
+make his appearance.</p>
+
+<p>Of the three, only the middle-sized one, a good-looking
+chap whose rough outing clothes fitted him as if they
+were tailor-made, was showing signs of impatience. The
+biggest of the three, a square-shouldered young athlete
+with good gray eyes set wide apart, and a shock of dark-red,
+curly hair, was standing at a window which commanded
+a magnificent view of the high, forested mountain
+range lifting the skyline to the westward, while the other
+member of the trio, an undersized fellow with a thin,
+eager face and pale blue eyes, was examining the mineral
+specimens in a corner cabinet.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee! I wish Uncle Billy would come!” said the impatient<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2"></a>[2]</span>
+one, jumping up to make a restless circuit of the
+room. “We don’t want to miss that train.”</p>
+
+<p>The big fellow turned from his window. “You’re
+sure he got in last night?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes; they came in on the Flyer. Aunt Stella
+called mother over the ’phone after the train got in—just
+to let us know. But I wish he’d come. We don’t want
+to lose another single day of this bully weather.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick Maxwell’s impatience was not altogether unreasonable.
+Ten days earlier Mr. William Starbuck—the
+“Uncle Billy” in question—had made a short stop in
+the Middle-Western college town where Dick and his two
+companions were just winding up their Freshman year,
+and had asked Dick how he was meaning to spend the
+long vacation. One thing had brought on another, and
+the upshot of the talk was an offer on the part of “Uncle
+Billy” to send Dick, and any two of his college-mates he
+might pick out, on a summer prospecting trip in the
+Hophra Mountains, the object in view being the possible
+discovery, not especially of silver or gold, but more particularly
+of new sources of supply of the rare metals,
+tungsten, vanadium, molybdenum, and the like, used in
+the arts and manufactures.</p>
+
+<p>Dick hadn’t wasted a moment in choosing the first of
+his companions for the summer outing. Larry Donovan—the
+big fellow at the office window—son of a
+crippled locomotive engineer on the home railroad, had
+been his chum from their grade-school days in Brewster,
+and the two had spent the preceding summer together
+as “cubs” on the engineering staff of the railroad of
+which Dick’s father was the general manager, so Larry
+was promptly elected as Number Two in the prospecting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span>
+trip. For the third member they had both picked upon
+Charles Purdick—Larry’s roommate in college—for several
+reasons: for one thing, “Little Purdy” was a pretty
+good plain cook; and for another, he needed the wages
+that Mr. William Starbuck was going to pay each member
+of the prospecting party irrespective of the success of
+the trip in the discovery of any new mineral deposits.</p>
+
+<p>But there was a third reason for Purdick’s invitation
+which was still stronger. “Purdy,” who, until he became
+the beneficiary of a certain mysterious scholarship in Old
+Sheddon, had been working his way through college, was
+the orphan son of a steel worker, and had grown up in a
+mill town, under-fed, neglected, kicked about and overworked.
+He had never been West; had never known
+what it was to have a real vacation in the open; and both
+Dick and Larry had decided at once that he was to be
+Number Three, even if they should have to knock him
+down and handcuff him to bring him along. But Purdy
+hadn’t needed any handcuffing.</p>
+
+<p>Larry laughed good-naturedly at Dick’s miserly remark
+about the wasting of the “bully weather.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you worry about the weather, old scout,” he
+said. “We’ll take that as it comes, and you know well
+enough that we’re likely to have a lot more good weather
+than bad, in the summer months.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I guess yes,” was Dick’s rejoinder. “I’m just
+sweating to be off to the tall hills, that’s all.” Then to
+Purdick, who was busily writing in his notebook at the
+mineral cabinet: “What are you finding over there,
+Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s answer was forestalled by the entrance of
+Dick’s uncle by marriage, a bronzed, upstanding man<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span>
+who looked as if he might be a retired cattle king, and
+who really had been a range-rider in his younger days.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well! Here you are!” he said, shaking hands
+with the three. “Ready to go out and hit the high spots,
+are you? All right; sit down and we’ll round up the
+preliminaries—what few there are. Got your dunnage
+kits made up?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick answered for the three.</p>
+
+<p>“The packs are down at the station. Dad told us what
+we’d need—and what we wouldn’t need. I guess he hasn’t
+let us make any tenderfoot mistakes about loading up
+with a lot of the luxuries.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s good. Now for my part of it. I’ve wired
+ahead to Nophi, and Mr. Broadwick, the smelter superintendent,
+is the man you want to see. He’ll have a couple
+of burros for you, with your camping outfit and grub
+packed and ready on the arrival of your train. All you’ll
+have to do when you get there will be to hike out; take
+your foot in your hand and go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right!” said Dick, bubbling over with excitement.
+And then: “In your letter from New York you said
+something about maps, Uncle Billy. Have you got them
+here?”</p>
+
+<p>The “grub-staking” uncle got up and took an envelope
+of folded maps from a pigeonhole in the office safe.</p>
+
+<p>“Here you are—sections of the Geodetic Survey covering
+most of the territory where you are going. From
+Nophi you head up Lost Canyon to Mule-Ear Pass. After
+you cross the first range, the country is all yours. When,
+or if, you find any mineral, stake your claims and jot the
+locations down on the map. Are you carrying a copy of
+Dana’s ‘System’?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Got it in the dunnage,” Dick answered; “it, and a
+blowpipe field-test outfit. We’ve all been boning the
+‘Dana’ for a week, and Mr. Ransom, out at the ‘Little
+Alice,’ has been showing us how to make tests.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good. The ‘Dana’ will help you in making the simple
+tests that can be made in the field, and, of course, when
+you find anything that looks right promising, you’ll bring
+samples of it back with you for a laboratory assay.
+That’s about all, I think. If you have a chance to send
+us word during the summer, do it; but if not, don’t worry,
+and we won’t. I’m betting confidently that you are all
+able to take care of yourselves, and of one another. How
+about arms?”</p>
+
+<p>Again it was Dick Maxwell who answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Dad has made each of us a present of a light Winchester.
+They’re down at the station with the packs.”</p>
+
+<p>“You probably won’t need the artillery. It’s the closed
+season for game, but it won’t hurt to have the guns along.
+If you get tired of carrying them, you can put them in
+the jack packs.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick was nervously looking at his watch. It still
+wanted a full half-hour of train time, but we all know
+how that is when we are about to start out upon a wonderful
+voyage of discovery.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Uncle Billy,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to be
+moving along.” So the handshaking was repeated, and
+they were heading for the door, when the grub-staking
+uncle called them back.</p>
+
+<p>“This is rather a humdrum job you’ve undertaken for
+the summer—looking for the industrial metals,” he said,
+with a twinkle in the shrewd gray eyes. “I’ve a mind to
+throw in a bit of romance, just for good measure. How<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span>
+would you like to keep an eye out for a lost gold mine—a
+real bonanza?”</p>
+
+<p>“A lost gold mine?” Dick queried eagerly. “Who
+lost it?”</p>
+
+<p>The ex-cowboy uncle was smiling quizzically. “It is a
+pretty long story, and if you’ve got to hurry to your
+train——” he began; but Dick cut in quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell us about it, Uncle Billy. We’ll catch the train
+all right.”</p>
+
+<p>“Think you can take time to listen? I’ll make it short.
+Three years ago, James Brock, an old prospector whom
+I knew well, was found at the mouth of Lost Canyon,
+dying of hunger and exposure. I had him brought down
+to Brewster and taken to the hospital. He lived only a
+few days, but during that time he told me his story. He
+said he had discovered a fabulously rich gold lode in the
+Little Hophras, and, staying to work it, the winter had
+caught him. He had been snow-bound for weeks with
+little or nothing to eat, but had finally made his way out
+over Mule-Ear Pass, half starved and with his feet and
+hands frozen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Poor old duffer!” said Dick sympathetically. “But
+go on, Uncle Billy. What became of the mine?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody knows. Brock had no maps, and he couldn’t
+describe the locality well enough to enable any one to
+find it. I don’t know how plentiful the ore is, but it is
+wonderfully rich, as you can see for yourselves,” and
+from a drawer in his desk he took a small piece of disintegrated
+quartz, shot through and held together by a
+wire-like mass of the precious metal.</p>
+
+<p>As one person, the three boys crowded around the desk
+to examine the beautiful specimen, and none of them<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span>
+heard the office door open or knew that there was an
+intruder present until Mr. Starbuck suddenly covered the
+bit of quartz with his hand and said: “Well, my man—what
+can I do for you?”</p>
+
+<p>As one person again, they all three wheeled and saw
+the man who had come in so quietly that none of them had
+heard him. Tramp or beggar, or whatever he was, he
+seemed to be an object of pity, dirty, unshaven, and a
+cripple, walking with a crutch and with one leg drawn up
+in a curiously twisted deformity. And he had a face—as
+Dick afterward phrased it—that would scare the rats out
+of a corn bin.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m lookin’ f’r Mister Bradley, th’ employmint man,”
+was the way the intruder accounted for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Starbuck shook his head. “Mr. Bradley’s office
+is on the floor below,” he replied; and at that, the man
+hobbled out, leaving the door open when he passed into
+the corridor.</p>
+
+<p>Dick Maxwell was again consulting his watch. “We
+have a few minutes more, Uncle Billy,” he said hurriedly.
+“Is that all you can tell us about the lost mine?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not quite all. James Brock told me how he came to
+discover the vein. He had camped one evening at the
+foot of a small cliff with a crevice in it. The cliff faced
+the east, and in the morning he saw that the crevice was
+curtained with a great wheel of a spider-web, and in the
+center of the web was an immense spider with a body
+that looked, with the sun shining on it, as if it were made
+out of pure gold. Brock took it as an omen. He dug in
+the crevice and found his mine, which he called ‘The
+Golden Spider.’ So there is your bit of romance. Find<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span>
+the Golden Spider and maybe you will all come back
+rich.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if we should find it, it wouldn’t be ours,” put in
+little Purdick, speaking for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll make my right and title over to the three of you,”
+said the grub-staking uncle, with the quizzical smile again
+wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. “When old Jimmie
+Brock found he wasn’t going to live, he made me this
+little pencil sketch of the place”—taking a folded paper
+from the drawer which had held the specimen—“and told
+me to go and take his bonanza for my own—made me
+his heir, in fact.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you never found it?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>The quizzical smile turned itself into a quiet laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“No. I spent a good month of the following summer
+looking for it; and after the story got out, others looked
+for it, too. It has never been found, and probably never
+will be unless some prospector just happens to stumble
+upon it accidentally. One mountain is very much like
+another in the Little Hophras, and Brock couldn’t name
+his mountain, or describe it so that it could be recognized.
+You may take his sketch map along with you if you like,
+though it won’t help you any more than it did me. If
+I were going to try again, I shouldn’t bother about maps
+or mountains; I should look for a crack in a cliff, and a
+golden-bodied spider hanging in its web. Now you see
+what an excellent chance you have of finding the lost
+bonanza! But I mustn’t keep you any longer listening
+to these old fairy tales. Good-by, and good luck to you.
+Don’t forget to send word back any time you happen to
+meet anybody coming out of the hills.”</p>
+
+<p>Since the time was now really growing pretty short,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span>
+the three did not stand upon the order of their going.
+As they ran through the corridor toward the elevators,
+they saw the crippled man hobbling along in the same
+direction, and making as good speed with the long crutch-stride
+and hop as they did in a dog-trot. That being the
+case, the cripple caught the same descending elevator
+that they did; but on the sidewalk they lost him quickly;
+were a bit astonished to see him climb nimbly into a waiting
+taxi and get himself whirled away down the avenue.</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said Dick, as they hurried along toward the
+railroad station. “‘If wishes were horses, beggars would
+ride.’ That fellow looks like a beggar, but he rides in a
+taxi, just the same. I wonder where he is going in such
+a tearing hurry?”</p>
+
+<p>There was obviously no answer to this, and the incident
+was presently forgotten in their arrival at the station.
+The westbound train was in, and both the Maxwell
+and Donovan families were on hand to see the prospectors
+off for the summer. Little Purdick, having nobody
+to see him off, got the packs and rifles and put them
+aboard, and when he had finished this job the leave-takings
+were over and the train was pulling out.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Good-by, everybody; good-by, everything!’” Dick
+sang, hanging out of the last-left-open vestibule; and
+when he went in to join his two companions he was brimming
+over with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>“Hey, you old stick-in-the-muds!” he cried. “She’s
+begun at last—the good old summer out-of-doors! We’re
+due in Nophi at one o’clock, and to-night we’ll be sleeping
+out under the stars! Wouldn’t that jar you, Purdy—you
+old factory-town rat!”</p>
+
+<p>But little Purdick did not answer, because, just at that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span>
+moment, he had caught sight of a roughly dressed man
+with a crutch settling himself in a seat at the far end of
+the day-coach in which they were riding, and the singular
+prevalence of cripples in this part of the Far West struck
+him as being so odd that he scarcely heard what Dick
+was saying.</p>
+
+<p>The two-hour train rush down the Timanyoni, through
+Little Butte, and up a wide mountain valley to the little
+smelter town of Nophi, nestling fairly under the shadow
+of the Greater Hophras, was a journey made without
+incident—unless dinner in the dining-car, their last civilized
+meal, as Dick named it, could be called an incident.
+When the boys left the train they found that a telegram
+from Brewster had outrun them, and Uncle Billy’s
+smelter-superintendent friend was at the platform to
+meet them; also, that the two burros, already packed with
+the provisions, tools and camping outfit, were waiting
+under a near-by ore shed.</p>
+
+<p>As they were preparing to start, Mr. Broadwick gave
+them a hint or two.</p>
+
+<p>“The snow is just breaking up on the main range, and
+you’ll find the trail for two or three miles each side of
+Mule-Ear Pass pretty hard to negotiate with the jacks
+unless you can catch it while it is frozen,” he told them.
+“Late as it is in the season, it freezes every night on the
+range, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll push as far
+up toward the pass as you can this afternoon, camp early,
+and turn out in the morning early enough to cross the
+range before the sun gets a melting chance at it. If you
+don’t do that, you’re likely to have a lot of trouble with
+the burros. They’re pretty sure-footed little beasts, but
+they will slip off a thawing trail once in a while.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span></p>
+
+<p>Larry was the only one who was thoughtful enough
+to ask if anybody had been over the trail since the thawing
+began.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said the smelter superintendent, “two men went
+over yesterday with supplies for the Little Eagle mine in
+Dog Gulch. They were experienced packers, and they
+told us they had to wait for the freeze before they could
+make it, coming out.”</p>
+
+<p>They promised to do as the superintendent advised,
+and five minutes later, under a sun that seemed hot
+enough to make all thoughts of frost and snow troubles
+a sheer absurdity, they were trailing out the single street
+of the small smelter settlement and heading for the Lost
+Canyon portal.</p>
+
+<p>Just as they were leaving the last shacks of the town
+behind, Purdick, to whom all this wild western stuff was
+as strange as a glimpse into an entirely different world,
+happened to look back down the street. What he saw
+meant nothing to him at first: there were a few stragglers
+in the street, workmen returning to the smelter after the
+noon hour, some children playing in the dust, and the
+usual number of stray dogs foraging for something eatable
+in the empty tin cans littering the roadway.</p>
+
+<p>But in front of a tar-papered building labeled “Hotel
+Nophi” three horses were hitched, and as Purdick looked
+back, three men came out of the hotel to unhitch and
+mount them. That, in itself, was nothing remarkable, of
+course, and Purdick wouldn’t have given it a second
+thought if he hadn’t happened to see, or think he saw,
+one of the three stick something that looked like a crutch
+under his saddle leather before he climbed to the back of
+his riding animal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he exclaimed, wholly to himself.
+But when Dick said: “What for?” Purdick’s reply
+was perfectly non-committal. “Nothing,” he returned,
+with a laugh. “I guess the altitude’s getting on my eye
+nerves and making me see double—or triple.”</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, the street, which had now dwindled to a
+rocky bridle path, turned sharply to the left and entered
+the narrow mouth of the canyon; whereupon the brawling
+stream thundering through the gorge swallowed up all
+other sounds, even as the cliff-like walls shut out all
+sights save that of the sky overhead. Nevertheless, as
+the patient little pack animals plodded steadily on, their
+tinkling hoofbeats hardly audible above the noise made
+by the stream, Purdick fancied he could hear heavier
+hoofbeats clinking upon the stones far to the rear.</p>
+
+<p>That first afternoon’s hike up a canyon trail, which at
+times scarcely afforded footing for the plodding little
+beasts under the pack-saddles, came as near to “getting”
+Purdick as anything he had ever experienced. Having
+never had time—or the spare energy—to do any athletic
+work in college, the toiling tramp, with a blanket roll and
+a gun to carry, made him realize, as he never had before,
+the handicap of untrained muscles and sinews, and as he
+dragged along at the tail of the little procession he was
+chopping out a vow to make the summer outing a turning
+point for a fellow named Charles Purdick in one respect
+at least: if hard work and grit would do it, the end of
+the summer should find him better fitted for man-sized,
+outdoor work or he’d know the reason why.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding this fine resolution, he heaved a
+mighty sincere sigh of relief when the five-hour trudge up
+the canyon came to an end in one of the park-like widenings<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span>
+of the gorge which had been recurring with increasing
+frequency during the past hour or so, and Dick called
+to Larry: “Well, old sock; how about it? Isn’t this far
+enough up so that we can hit the pass in the frosty dawn?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry, who had been leading the foremost burro,
+stopped and gave the landscape the once over.</p>
+
+<p>“Couldn’t be much better,” he decided. “Plenty of
+wood, good water, and fir boughs for the shake-downs.
+Alabama!”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh?” said Dick. “What’s Alabama got to do with
+it?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry gave a wide-mouthed grin.</p>
+
+<p>“Dig up your U. S. History, sonny. ‘Alabama’ means
+‘Here we rest.’ All hands on deck to make camp.”</p>
+
+<p>They went at it like old-timers—or at least two of
+them did. Though they hadn’t had much to do with the
+actual camp-making in their railroad construction experience
+of the summer before, Larry and Dick had learned
+pretty well how to make themselves at home in the wilderness.
+While the setting sun—long since gone behind
+the towering western ranges—was still filling the upper
+air with a flood of golden radiance, they unpacked the
+jacks and picketed them to graze on the lush grass of
+the little park, built the camp-fire, and chopped enough
+of the fragrant fir tips for the beds.</p>
+
+<p>It was after the fire had burned down to a bed of coals
+that little Purdick began to shine. Out of the hard experience
+of his strugglesome boyhood he had brought a
+pretty good knowledge of plain cooking, and in a little
+time he dished up a supper that made his two camp-mates
+pound him on his tired back and bombard him with
+all sorts of jollying praise.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span></p>
+
+<p>“We sure got a gilt-edged prize when we picked you
+off the limb, Purdy,” said Dick warmly. “Whatever else
+you can’t do, you sure can cook. I see where you’re
+elected for the whole summer—unless you get your back
+up and go on strike and make us two poison ourselves
+with our own skillet messes. Pretty tired after the hike?”</p>
+
+<p>“A little,” Purdick admitted.</p>
+
+<p>“All right; after we get over the Pass, we won’t push
+it so hard. What say, Larry?”</p>
+
+<p>“There won’t be any need of pushing it,” was Larry’s
+rejoinder, mumbled through a mouthful of Purdick’s delicious,
+skillet-baked corn bread. “We’re not out to see
+how many miles we can do in a day.”</p>
+
+<p>With supper eaten and the tin dishes washed in the
+crystal-clear stream, and with the last tints of the sun
+glow gone and the stars coming out in a black bowl of
+the heavens that seemed almost near enough to reach up
+and touch, the three rolled themselves in their blankets
+with their feet to the fire, Dick mumbling something
+about a day well spent earning a night’s repose, and falling
+asleep almost as soon as he had stretched himself
+out.</p>
+
+<p>But little Purdick did not find it quite so simple. For
+one thing, he was too tired to go to sleep at once, and
+for another the unfamiliar surroundings, the black shadows
+of the trees, the hollow drumming of the little river
+among the boulders in its bed, the high-mountain silence
+which was otherwise unbroken, the stately procession of
+the stars in a sky that was like an arch of black velvet—all
+these things conspired to make him wakeful, and after
+a time he got up, dug out the mineralogy book from
+Larry’s pack, stirred the fire to make it give light enough<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>
+to read by, and was presently deep in the mysteries of
+sylvanite and sphalerite and chalcopyrite, B.B. tests, acid
+reactions, and the like.</p>
+
+<p>In a little time he began to realize that even a June
+night at altitude eight or nine thousand feet can be pretty
+chilly, so he wrapped himself in his blankets and put his
+back against a tree. In the new position the firelight
+wasn’t very good for the reading purpose, and before
+long he found his eyes growing heavy and finally the
+“Dana” slipped from his grasp and he was asleep.</p>
+
+<p>This was the last he knew until he awoke with a start
+some time farther along in the night; came broad awake
+with a conviction that a noise, other than that of the
+brawling stream, had broken into the high-mountain
+silence. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked
+around. The fire had died down to a pile of white-ashed
+embers, but the starlight, as strong in the clear atmosphere
+of the heights as modified moonlight, enabled him
+to see the dim outlines of his surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>While he looked and listened, the noise which had
+aroused him came again; a measured tapping alternating
+with the crunch of slow footfalls. Straining his eyes, he
+soon made out a shadowy figure dodging along from tree
+to tree and working its way cautiously toward the dying
+camp-fire.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s first impulse was to call Dick and Larry; his
+next was to half close his eyes and pretend to be still
+asleep. Nearer and nearer came the tap and shuffle, until
+at last he was able to get a fair sight of the midnight
+intruder. It was a man with a crutch, and the watcher
+under the big fir-tree didn’t have to look twice to decide
+that his errand wasn’t neighborly. For now the man was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span>
+down on hands and knees and was crawling up as noiselessly
+as a snake.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking it over afterward, Purdick could never tell
+why he didn’t immediately raise an alarm. A yell would
+have awakened his sleeping camp-mates, and would probably
+have sent the intruder flying. But instead of flinging
+off his blanket and shouting to Larry and Dick, little
+Purdick merely tried to give a better imitation of a sleeping
+sentinel and let the crippled man come on.</p>
+
+<p>What happened after that was wholly unexplainable to
+the watcher under the fir-tree. Creeping silently into the
+diminished circle of firelight, the cripple possessed himself
+first of Larry’s pack and then of Dick’s, going
+through them rapidly but painstakingly, as if in search
+of something. Next, Purdick saw his own pack going
+through the same process. Like a suddenly illuminating
+flash of lightning, the explanation blazed into Purdick’s
+brain. The cripple was the man who had come into
+Mr. Starbuck’s office just as they were about to leave.
+He had overheard the talk of the Golden Spider, the lost
+gold mine, and he was searching for old Jimmie Brock’s
+map!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II<br>
+<small>THE FROZEN TRAIL</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">When Purdick realized that the rummaging cripple
+was not only a camp thief, but most probably a
+desperado of sorts, he saw where he had made a capital
+mistake in not arousing his two companions while it
+could have been done with safety. It was too late now.
+The man was within arm’s reach of the two sleeping
+figures, and he was armed; at least, he was using a vicious-looking
+hunting-knife to cut the pack lashings.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick held his breath. The little pencil sketch made
+by the old prospector had been put into the envelope containing
+the Survey maps; and the envelope, as Purdick
+knew, had been placed between the leaves of the mineralogy
+book for safe-keeping and carriage. The book was
+lying beside him, just where it had slipped out of his hands
+when he had fallen asleep. Would the thief see the book
+and look in it?</p>
+
+<p>It seemed useless to hope that he wouldn’t. With the
+curious perversity with which inanimate things appear to
+be endowed at times, the camp-fire blazed up and a resiny
+twig made a candle of itself, illuminating the camp area
+like a small searchlight. Purdick made sure that the
+crippled scoundrel couldn’t miss seeing the book lying in
+plain sight; the book and the end of the map-holding envelope
+sticking out of it; and again he held his breath.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span></p>
+
+<p>That, in itself, was unnerving enough, but the sight he
+got of the cripple’s face was even more so. He hadn’t
+noticed the man’s face particularly when the cripple had
+hobbled into and out of Mr. Starbuck’s office in Brewster,
+but now he saw that it was a perfect mask of sly and
+ferocious villainy, and he had a swift and terrifying conviction
+that the thief would use his knife murderously if
+any of his victims showed signs of awakening.</p>
+
+<p>With that conviction half paralyzing him, Purdick’s
+heart fairly stopped beating when he saw Dick Maxwell
+stretch his arms over his head and yawn as if he were
+about to wake up. Instantly the man quit rummaging
+and caught up his knife. Little Purdick had never felt
+so helpless in all his life. In propping himself against
+the tree he had wrapped his blankets around him so
+tightly that he couldn’t get out of them without a struggle.
+None the less, he was drawing his feet up to be ready for
+the struggle when Dick rolled over on his side, gave a
+snort, and was apparently fast asleep again. The peril
+was over, for the moment, at least, and Purdick’s stopped
+heart began to thump furiously, hammering so hard that
+he wondered why the thief didn’t hear it and spring
+at him.</p>
+
+<p>In the reaction which was bound to follow a shock like
+that, Purdick closed his eyes, and tried vainly for a few
+moments to fight down the sickening dizziness that was
+threatening to blot him out. When he looked again, the
+man had seemingly given up the search for the map.
+Cautiously, with his knife between his teeth, and one
+arm thrust through his crutch to drag it along, he was
+gathering up the three rifles and making off with them.</p>
+
+<p>Once more little Purdick fought down a frantic impulse<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>
+to yell out to the two sleepers. Without the guns
+they would be helpless. But he knew that the cripple
+wasn’t alone in the canyon; that somewhere, and probably
+near at hand, were the two men who had ridden out of
+Nophi with him. It was only the thought that the other
+two might be near enough to hear his yell and open fire
+on the camp that enabled Purdick to keep still at this
+crisis. But he had to bite his tongue to do it.</p>
+
+<p>While the crippled marauder was crawling away, dragging
+the three guns and his crutch, and making hard
+work of it, Purdick’s resolve was swiftly taken. Noiselessly
+he disentangled himself from the impeding blankets,
+never losing sight for an instant of the crawling
+figure working its way toward the lower narrowing of
+the park-like opening. Never had the little fellow so
+bitterly resented the fate that had made him undersized
+and, in a certain sense, a physical weakling. With Larry’s
+strength, or even Dick’s, he could have landed upon the
+back of the creeping thief and made him drop the rifles.</p>
+
+<p>He had just about made up his mind to try it, anyhow,
+when a diversion came. Seen dimly by the flickering
+light of the blazing twig, the cripple was stopping beside
+a great boulder which had some time fallen from the
+cliffs on the opposite side of the little river and rolled
+across to the intervale level. Little Purdick prayed for
+a better light, and got it—just for an illuminating instant;
+just long enough to let him see that the man was poking
+the three guns under an overhanging lip of the great rock
+to hide them.</p>
+
+<p>This was better; much better; and as the departing
+thief lifted himself upon his one serviceable foot and his
+crutch to continue on his way down the canyon, Purdick<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span>
+darted quickly into the shadow of the firs and prepared
+to follow.</p>
+
+<p>The pursuit did not take him very far. Less than a
+quarter of a mile below the camp site there was another
+opening in the canyon, with a little side gulch leading
+off to the left. In the mouth of this gulch Purdick saw
+the glow of a camp-fire, and he could dimly make out
+the figures of two men sitting beside it. While he looked,
+the cripple hobbled down the trail ahead of him and
+joined the two at the fire. Here, so Purdick determined,
+was his chance to find out what the desperadoes purposed
+doing, so he called up all the Indian-stalking stories he
+had ever read and crept down upon the camp in the
+gulch.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily, he didn’t have to be Indian-silent in making
+his approach. Woodcraft was only a dictionary word to
+him, as yet, and twigs would snap and stones roll under
+his feet, in spite of all he could do. But the brawling
+stream, along the edge of which he was making his way,
+swallowed up all the clumsy noises, and in a few minutes
+he had climbed to a little thicket of low-growing fir saplings
+on the gulch side, from the shelter of which he
+could both see and hear, and could look down at a sharp
+angle into the very heart of the small camp-fire and upon
+the men surrounding it.</p>
+
+<p>As he came within listening range, the crippled spy
+was just finishing his report.</p>
+
+<p>“No, I didn’t find th’ map; I just took a chance at
+that,” he was saying. “One o’ them’s likely got it in his
+pocket. What I wanted was the guns, an’ I got ’em.
+Not that a bunch o’ boys like them would put up a fight;
+but without th’ artillery, they can’t, d’ye see?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Why didn’t yuh bring the guns in with yuh?” growled
+the bigger of the two who hadn’t left the camp-fire.</p>
+
+<p>“Too much trouble. I hid ’em where they’ll never
+find ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said the big man, “do we go on up and scare
+the kids out of a year’s growth? Are you sure they’ve
+got the map? It was talked around in Nophi that they
+was goin’ out hunting f’r tungsten, an’ the like o’ that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Didn’t I see it with my own eyes?” snapped the
+cripple. “An’ didn’t I hear Starbuck tellin’ ’em all about
+th’ Golden Spider? ’Tis a sure thing, I tell you! This
+tungsten business is all a frame-up. Starbuck’s got a
+safe pointer on that gold mine, and he’s sendin’ the boys
+because he figures that nobody’d think a bunch o’ college
+boys’d be out for anything but a good time in th’ big
+hills.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said the smaller of the two fire-keepers, “this
+is your show, Twisty. What do you say?”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s only one thing to say. If we could get over
+Mule-Ear with th’ bronc’s, I’d say, let ’em go on ahead an’
+find th’ mine f’r us. But th’ horses can’t make the trail,
+an’ it thawin’ an’ freezin’ every day, though the jacks
+can. We’ll wait f’r an hour ’r so, till the trail’s froze
+good an’ hard, then we’ll go up an’ get th’ map an’ the
+jacks and their outfit and grub-stake an’ go on.”</p>
+
+<p>“Leavin’ the kids behind, yuh mean?” said the big man.</p>
+
+<p>“Surest thing you know!” barked the cripple. “They’ll
+find their way back to Nophi, an’ that’ll be the end of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if we leave the horses, that’ll give us away,”
+objected the third robber.</p>
+
+<p>“I fixed that before we left Nophi,” said the man with
+a crutch. “Barkey Davis’ll be on his way up the canyon<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span>
+at daybreak, and if he finds the bronc’s left behind, he’ll
+take ’em back. If he don’t find ’em, he’ll know we’ve
+gone on. ’Tis all fixed.”</p>
+
+<p>But the third man was still unsatisfied. “We’re too
+near the town,” he said. “I know Billy Starbuck, and
+so do you. Th’ boys’ll get back to Nophi in a day, and
+that’ll mean a sheriff’s posse, with Starbuck headin’ it.
+It’s too risky.”</p>
+
+<p>“Risky nothing!” was the snapping retort. “’Tis you
+with a yellow streak in you, Tom Dowling! How’s thim
+b’ys goin’ to know who holds ’em up in the dark? An’
+with th’ snow thawin’ every day on the range, who’s
+goin’ to trail us over Mule-Ear?” And the cripple spat
+in the fire to emphasize his disgust.</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick had heard enough, and more than
+enough. In an hour, more or less, their camp would be
+raided, everything they had would be taken away from
+them, and they would be set afoot in the wilderness to
+make their way back to civilization as best they might.
+Stealthily he began to back out of his hiding place under
+the low-growing saplings. Flight, a swift race back to
+Dick and Larry with the tremendous news, was the next
+number on the programme.</p>
+
+<p>Before he could give himself the first backing shove,
+Purdick found that he was shaking with nervousness, and
+he had to wait for a minute or two until he could get
+the trembling fit under control. The little pause came
+near proving hideously disastrous. In moving back he
+had disturbed a round stone the size of a man’s head,
+and before he could grab at it, it had gotten away and
+was rolling down the declivity. When it started, Purdick
+thought it was all over with him; the stone was headed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>
+straight for the fire in the gulch. But in its second turn-over
+it struck one of the small trees, was turned aside
+and went plunging down the other declivity into the
+stream at the right.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick flattened himself to the earth until he had a
+feeling that he was no thicker than a sheet of paper, and
+he hardly dared to breathe. Two of the three men at the
+fire—the two with sound legs—sprang up at the noise of
+the plunge, but the cripple sat still and laughed raucously.</p>
+
+<p>“Youse fellies ain’t got the nerve of a couple o’ jack-rabbits!”
+he sneered. “Did yuh think th’ little sleepin’
+b’ys was comin’ down here to scrag us? ’Twas only a
+rock rollin’ round in the creek.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick had his shaking fit well in hand by this time,
+and once more he started to back away, testing every
+rock as he retreated to the stream level to make sure that
+it was fastened down before he put his weight upon it.
+Once on the trail, and around the first crook in the canyon,
+he began to run at top speed—and kept that up for
+just about twenty yards—which was all the distance it
+took to make him understand that when a fellow has lived
+all his life at an altitude of a few hundred feet above
+sea-level, he can’t run to do any good in the tall hills; at
+least, not until his lungs have grown big enough to take
+in more of the rarefied air at a gulp.</p>
+
+<p>So it was a pretty badly winded scout who presently
+staggered into the upper camp opening and flung himself
+upon his two soundly sleeping comrades. Of the two,
+Larry came broad awake at the first alarm, but Dick had
+to be shaken vigorously before he could be made to sit
+up and listen to the story that Purdick was gasping out.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll be dinged!—you good old sleuth!” was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>
+Dick’s praiseful comment, after Purdick had made them
+understand what had been happening while they slept.
+“Played ’possum and didn’t let him know you were awake?
+But why didn’t you yell out for us?”</p>
+
+<p>“I meant to, at first, of course,” said Purdick. “But
+I waited too long. When he got up right here between
+you two with that butcher knife, I was afraid to. What
+are we going to do? They said they’d wait an hour or
+so, but they’re liable to change their minds and rush us
+any minute.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry Donovan was the one who knew what was to
+be done, and he was already doing part of it. Quickly
+throwing a handful of twigs upon the fire to make a
+better light, he began to roll his blankets and to gather
+up the scattered contents of his pack.</p>
+
+<p>“Get busy, fellows,” he said quietly. “If you’ve got it
+straight, Purdy, we may have all the time we need to get
+out of here—or we may not have.”</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” gasped Dick, falling upon his own preparations
+with a rush; “you mean that we’ve got to tackle the
+Mule-Ear trail in the dark?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s that, or a stand-up fight with these plug-uglies,”
+Larry returned coolly. “Knowing what we do, I suppose
+we’d be justified in ambushing the gang as they come up
+the canyon, but I’m sure none of us want to start this
+summer job of ours by shooting down a bunch of mine-robbers,
+much as they deserve it. The other thing to do
+is to light out before they get to us. And we don’t have
+to do it in the dark either; see there?” and he pointed to
+a thin crescent of a moon in its last quarter which was
+just beginning to show itself above the high eastern<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>
+mountain. Then to Purdick, “Purdy, you go and corral
+those guns, while I make up your pack.”</p>
+
+<p>Going over it afterward, all three of the boys thought
+they were well within the truth in claiming that no camp
+was ever broken with less loss of time, even by trained
+burro-freighters, than theirs was that night. In a very
+few minutes the jack-loads were made up and cinched
+on the pack saddles, each man’s shoulder-pack was slung,
+and they were ready for the trail.</p>
+
+<p>Larry, dropping into place as leader in the flight, gave
+his final directions after Dick had brought a hatful of
+water from the stream with which to extinguish the
+camp-fire.</p>
+
+<p>“I was studying the Survey map as we came up on the
+train, and if I’ve got the right idea of where we are now,
+we have a pretty long, hard pull ahead of us to reach
+the top of the pass. We must make the best time we can
+while the going is good, because we can’t rush much after
+we hit the old snow. We’ll let old Fishbait”—they had
+already named the two burros—“show us the way. He
+can find the trail better than we can. All set? Here we
+go, then.”</p>
+
+<p>Happily, the up-canyon trail was easy at the start. Beyond
+the little park in which their camp had been pitched
+there were a few narrow places where the footing at the
+stream side was somewhat hazardous, with only the thin
+moonlight to show them where it was; but very shortly
+the gorge widened out into a valley with precipitous,
+wooded mountain slopes on either side. Here the trail
+was broad enough to enable them to break the Indian-file
+order of march; and Dick and Larry made Purdick
+repeat his overhearings at the camp of the desperadoes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted; “let’s see if I’m
+getting it straight. Were they meaning to leave the
+horses behind when they came up to raid us?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the way I understood it,” said Purdick.</p>
+
+<p>“Then when they do come up and find us gone, they’ll
+have to go back after the horses before they can follow
+us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Which is lucky for us,” Larry put in. “As long as
+the trail stays as good as it is right along here, they can
+cover three miles to our one. How far did you say it
+was from our camp back to theirs, Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m no good at guessing distances in a crooked canyon
+in the dark,” Purdick admitted. “But it can’t be
+over a short quarter of a mile.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not much comfort in that,” Larry grumbled. “Did
+you see the horses?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; but I couldn’t see much of anything. Their fire
+was built in a little side gulch and it didn’t shine out into
+the main canyon, and the moon wasn’t up, then.”</p>
+
+<p>“Our best hope is that they’re not hurrying about putting
+the raiding job over,” was Dick’s contribution to the
+discussion. “If they’ll only give us time to reach the bad
+going——”</p>
+
+<p>The interruption was the distant crack of a rifle, a
+single shot that repeated itself in a series of battledore
+and shuttlecock echoes from the mountain sides on either
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>“What does that mean?” Dick demanded.</p>
+
+<p>“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Larry. “But if
+you ask me, I’ll say it’s a signal. Just for a try at it,
+suppose two of them have come up to put the raiding
+job over. They’ve found the birds flown, and now<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span>
+they’re telling the third man to come on with the horses.
+Am I right?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe you are as right as rain,” Dick agreed
+quickly. “In which case?——”</p>
+
+<p>“In which case, it’s us for the speedway!” Larry exclaimed,
+and forthwith he urged the little pack animals
+into their nearest approach to a trot.</p>
+
+<p>“If we can’t beat that bunch to the bad going, it’s up
+to us to make a fight or get ready to tramp back to Nophi
+with our tongues hanging out. Get along, Fishbait! If
+you only had sense enough to know what’s behind you,
+you’d make tracks a lot faster than you’re making them
+now!”</p>
+
+<p>That was the beginning of a blind race which was made
+all the more difficult by the fact that the fugitives never
+knew a minute ahead what they were coming to next.
+If they had been familiar with the trail it would have
+been different. But they had to trust wholly to the instinct
+of the leading burro, and at times, when the little beast
+and its pack mate went plunging through dense thickets
+of the young trees, they were reasonably sure they were
+off the track.</p>
+
+<p>Also, in a very short while the pace began to tell, particularly
+upon little Purdick. By the time they reached
+muddy going, the high, upper valley where patches of
+the old snow were showing dimly among the tree trunks,
+with leaky rivulets trickling down from them to make a
+spongy swamp of the footway, Purdick was gasping for
+breath and lagging behind the procession, in spite of all
+his efforts to keep up.</p>
+
+<p>“Getting next to you, old scout?” said Larry, leaving
+Dick to urge the pack beasts on while he dropped back<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span>
+to relieve Purdick of the weight of his gun. “This is a
+pretty hard row of stumps to put you into—the first
+crack out of the box, this way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m—I’m all right,” the small one stammered gamely.
+“If I—if I could only—could only get my second
+wind——”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s it,” said Larry encouragingly. “It’ll come,
+after a bit. But if it’s too hard for you, we’ll let up a
+few notches. Dick and I are more or less used to these
+altitudes, and——”</p>
+
+<p>“L-l-let up, nothing!” stuttered the game laggard.
+“Wh-when I can’t hold up my end you can ch-chuck me
+into the creek and leave me behind!”</p>
+
+<p>It was the trail itself that presently cut the speed down
+to something less breathless. Within the next five hundred
+yards the spongy swamp underfoot had become
+snowy slush, and with another hundred feet or so of
+elevation the slush began to crunch encouragingly under
+their feet to tell them that they were at least reaching
+the zone of nightly frosts.</p>
+
+<p>Here, too, the forests were receding on the approach
+to timber line, with steep, snow-covered slopes to take
+their place, and in consequence, the light was immeasurably
+better; so good, indeed, that they could now see the
+trail quite plainly, part of the time as a deeply trodden
+path between snowbanks, and in other places a hard-frozen
+ridge from which the snow, thawing in the June
+sun, had sunk away.</p>
+
+<p>It was remarkable how the sure-footed little pack animals
+were able to climb steadily, rarely slipping on the
+icy track, and plodding along at a walk so fast that it
+pushed the three boys to keep up with them on the slippery<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span>
+ascent. It was Dick, who had made one winter trip
+into the mountains a couple of years earlier, who cautioned
+his companions about the danger of slipping from
+the trail.</p>
+
+<p>“Look out in these ridgy places,” he warned. “If you
+slip aside, you’re a goner; just as likely as not you’ll drop
+into a drift twenty feet deep. I did that little thing
+once, and——”</p>
+
+<p>Before he could tie anything to the “and,” there was
+a shout from the rear, and the place in the trail which
+had lately been occupied by little Purdick was vacant.</p>
+
+<p>“Hold up, Larry!—Purdy’s taken a dive!” Dick yelled,
+and the procession was halted. On the lower side of the
+trail, at the spot where Purdick had been last seen, there
+was a round hole in the snow crust. It was neither as
+deep as a well nor as wide as a church door, but, like
+Mercutio’s wound, it served. Down in the bottom of it
+a disturbance, much like that in the pit of an ant-lion
+when that active little bug is burrowing with its prey,
+was going on to an accompaniment of smothered cries.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t fight yourself to death!” Dick called out.
+“We’ll get you in a minute.” Then to Larry: “Grab me
+by the feet—I’m going after him”—which he did, head
+foremost, to be dragged back a moment later, bringing
+the buried one with him.</p>
+
+<p>“B-r-r-r!” shivered little Purdick, beating the snow
+out of his clothes; “if anybody had ever told me that I
+was scheduled to take a snow bath in June—whoosh! it’s
+all down inside of me!”</p>
+
+<p>“It’ll melt in a little while,” said Dick consolingly.
+“I’ve been there, too, and I know how it feels. But we’d
+better be humping ourselves. If I’m not mightily mistaken<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>
+I can hear those horses coming up the canyon trail
+right now! Listen!”</p>
+
+<p>They did listen, and there was no reason to doubt
+Dick’s acuteness of hearing. Far back along the way
+they had come they could hear the clink of horseshoes
+upon stone; and the horses were evidently being pushed
+to their best up-hill speed.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s still up to us,” said Larry. “If we can turn that
+high gulch shoulder up ahead before they get out of the
+timber.... I don’t know whether they’d go so far as
+to try to murder us, but as long as we’re out on the bare
+snow slope we make a pretty plain target, in this moonlight.”</p>
+
+<p>That meant more haste, combined with a good bit of
+uncertainty as to the result. The trail had now become a
+winding zigzag up the snow-covered slope, and until it
+turned to head into one of the higher gulches, any object
+upon it as big as three marching figures and two
+loaded pack animals would stick out like a sore thumb
+against the white background from any lower point of
+view at the edge of timber line. So the question of escape
+hung once more upon the matter of speed. If they could
+disappear in the gulch before the pursuers reached the
+foot of the snow slope, the worst would be over.</p>
+
+<p>They made it, finally, though by the narrowest possible
+margin. Just after they had urged the blown burros
+around the projecting rocky shoulder which hid them, the
+three panting climbers turned to look back. Down at the
+edge of the timber, fully five hundred feet below, they
+saw three mounted men push out upon the lower reaches
+of the trail. Larry shifted his rifle from his shoulder to
+the crook of his arm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span></p>
+
+<p>“They’re going to try it, anyway,” he said slowly. “If
+their horses are sharp-shod, they may be able to make it.
+I don’t know but what it’s going to come to a fight, after
+all.”</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to everything Larry had ever known of him,
+Dick Maxwell was the one who counseled patience and a
+renewed effort to escape.</p>
+
+<p>“I’d hate to see it come to gun-play,” he said. “It
+would be a pretty savage way to start our summer. Let’s
+not fight until we have to, anyway, Larry.”</p>
+
+<p>But Larry Donovan was made of somewhat grimmer
+stuff.</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness knows, I don’t want to kill anybody,” he
+protested. “But there’s this much about it, and I’m saying
+it to both of you. These wolves mean business. They
+think they’re on the sure trail of a gold mine, and we
+know what we may expect if they overtake us. If they
+can make the trail on horseback, as they are trying to,
+right now, it is only a question of a little time until they’ll
+chase us into a corner.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” queried Dick. “What have you got up your
+sleeve?”</p>
+
+<p>“This. As long as we’re climbing the hill, we’ve got
+the advantage. We’ll make the pass if we can, and take
+cover, if we can find any. I don’t want to kill a man,
+any more than you do, but if they are still trying to get
+at us, we’ll have to take a crack at the horses, in sheer
+self-defense.”</p>
+
+<p>That was the way it was left when they resumed their
+march along the frozen trail whose windings presently
+led them so far around the mountain that they lost sight
+of the snow slope over which they had climbed to reach<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>
+the high gulch. Before they had headed the gulch to
+come out upon the bare, wind-stripped slope over which
+the trail doubled back toward the pass, the crescent moon
+which had thus far lighted them upon their way began
+to pale in the first flush of the coming dawn. Just ahead
+they could see the comparatively shallow depression in
+the mountain range which marked their goal, and in a
+few minutes more the toiling ascent was accomplished
+and they stood on the bald summit of the pass.</p>
+
+<p>It was this last ascent that gave them the elevated view-point
+from which they could trace the backward windings
+of the trail almost all the way down to the place where it
+emerged from the timber. In the increasing dawn light
+they could make out, far below them, the three horsemen
+like black insects crawling along on the snow sheet. <a href="#i_frontis">While
+they looked, one</a> of the insects <a href="#i_frontis">paused, appeared to dance
+for an instant, and then disappeared</a>, and they knew that
+one of the horses had slipped from the icy trail to plunge
+aside into a snowdrift.</p>
+
+<p>“That ought to settle them,” said little Purdick, making
+a pair of shades out of his curved hands to shut out the
+snow glare, as he watched the struggle going on below.
+“They’ve still got the worst of it ahead of them, if they
+only knew it.”</p>
+
+<p>For a few minutes the three watchers stood motionless,
+looking on at the efforts of the two men who remained
+on the trail to get their submerged comrade out of the
+drift. When the thing was finally accomplished it was
+at the cost of the loss of a horse. Quite plainly they saw
+the freed and plunging animal break its way out of the
+drift and paw its way up to the surface of hard-frozen
+crust, only to lose its footing and go whirling and sliding<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>
+down the steep, mile-long toboggan slide of the slope
+below, growing smaller and smaller until at last it disappeared
+entirely.</p>
+
+<p>Dick Maxwell took off his hat and waved it as the
+three men on the trail, leading the two remaining horses,
+turned and began to creep back down the path of hazard
+which had proved so nearly fatal to at least one of them.</p>
+
+<p>“Good-by, you hold-ups!” he shouted, as if he could
+make himself heard over the half-mile or more of intervening
+height and distance. “Sorry you’ve lost your
+nerve, but we’re mighty glad to see the last of you, just
+the same. Good-by!”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you be too sure about having seen the last of
+them,” Larry put in soberly. “If they really believe we
+can show them the way to the Golden Spider, and so give
+them a chance to ‘jump’ it, they’ll not give up so easily.
+You must remember that the summer is still young.”</p>
+
+<p>“Summer?” said Dick, with a shiver; “it seems as if it
+might be Christmas up here with all this snow.” Then
+to Purdick, who was untying the cooking utensils hanging
+from Fishbait’s pack saddle: “What’s on your mind,
+Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>“Coffee,” said Purdick. “I feel as if I’d been up all
+night. Which pack was the solidified alcohol put in?”</p>
+
+<p>Nobody remembered, so there had to be a search made
+in both jack packs, since there was no fuel of any sort
+on the high, wind-swept barren of the pass. The emergency
+cartridges were found, after a time, and Purdick
+rigged the tripod of the alcohol stove and put a cookerful
+of clean snow on to melt. That done, he began rummaging
+in the packs again, methodically at first, but a
+little later with feverish haste.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Tell us what you’re looking for and maybe we can
+help you find it,” said Larry, coming back from a short
+excursion to the western side of the pass where he had
+been giving the downward trail the once over.</p>
+
+<p>“The book,” Purdick answered gaspingly; “the ‘Dana’
+with the maps in it! Which one of you put it away?”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t seen it since we left Nophi,” was Larry’s
+rejoinder; and Dick also pleaded an <em>alibi</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick sank back on his heels and his face was white.</p>
+
+<p>“Didn’t—didn’t either one of you pick it up last night
+at the canyon camp and put it in one of the packs?” he
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>“Pick it up? From where?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Off the ground. I sat up, reading in it, after you
+fellows had turned in, and when I dropped asleep it fell
+out of my hands. It was lying there beside me while
+that cripple was going through the packs, and I was
+scared stiff for fear he’d see it and see the map envelope
+sticking out of it. After that, I never thought of it once
+until this minute. It’s gone, and it’s all my fault! I told
+you two you were loading yourselves up with a hoodoo in
+bringing me along, and this proves it. We can’t make a
+single test without the ‘Dana,’ or locate anything without
+the Government maps. Worse than all, those hold-ups
+will probably find the book on their way back through
+the canyon, and that’ll end it!”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III<br>
+<small>IN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">Consternation was about the only word that
+fitted when Purdick had told the tale of the lost
+book. What he had said was perfectly true. Though they
+were all three taking engineering courses in college, no
+one of them knew enough about mineralogy as a science
+to do any practical prospecting for metals without a text-book.
+Besides, there were the Government maps; lacking
+them, they could never locate a claim, so as to be able to
+tell where it was situated, even if they should be lucky
+enough to find one.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment, none of them thought much of the loss
+of James Brock’s little sketch map of the Golden Spider.
+Uncle Billy Starbuck’s evident conviction that the lost
+mine would never be found unless it was by pure accident
+had its effect; and, anyway, the real business of the
+summer was to be a search for the baser, though not less
+valuable, metals. And unless they could determine the
+presence of these—as they couldn’t hope to without the
+help of the “Dana,” there was no use in going on.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Dick, drawing a long breath, “that fixes
+us, good and plenty. I guess it’s us for a hike back to
+Nophi, and a wait until we can wire for another copy of
+the book and another set of the Survey maps.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span></p>
+
+<p>“It’s likely to be a good, long wait. That copy of the
+‘Dana’ was the only one to be found in Brewster—so
+the man that sold it to me said; and the maps will probably
+have to come from Washington.”</p>
+
+<p>It was here that little Purdick had his say.</p>
+
+<p>“This crazy break is on me and nobody else,” he cut
+in. “I had no business to forget the book when we were
+packing up last night. If you fellows will wait here for
+me, I’ll go back after it.”</p>
+
+<p>“A lot of good that would do!” said Dick. “Those
+three hold-ups will be on the trail ahead of you, and you
+can bet they won’t miss finding the book in daylight, if
+they did overlook it last night.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know,” Purdick went on, “but it’s up to me to try it,
+just the same. I deserve all that’s coming to me.”</p>
+
+<p>At this, both of the others protested vigorously.
+There was little chance that the returning desperadoes
+wouldn’t find the book as they passed the camp site; and
+Larry and Dick both urged, with a good deal of truth,
+that Purdick was too “soft” to tackle the job; unfit, and
+too unused to roughing it in the open. Purdick let them
+go on until they had talked themselves out, but he wouldn’t
+give up.</p>
+
+<p>“What you say is so true that it hurts,” he came back.
+“All the same, I’m going. I made the break, and it’s my
+job to patch it up, if I can. All I want to know is
+whether you’ll wait for me here, or at the foot of the
+pass on the other side.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick and Larry exchanged glances. One of Purdick’s
+outstanding qualities—the one by which he was best
+known in Old Sheddon—was a certain patient, gamey
+obstinacy that never knew when it was beaten. They<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>
+knew that if he had made up his mind to do penance for
+his neglect by going back, he’d go, no matter what they
+might say.</p>
+
+<p>Larry took the bull, or rather the dilemma, by the
+horns.</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t all on you, Purdy. I sent you down to the big
+rock last night to get the guns, and told you I’d make up
+your pack. So we can split the blame.” Then to Dick:
+“Think you could navigate these mules of ours down the
+western trail alone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I can,” Dick asserted.</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Larry went on; “I’ve got a scheme. As I
+told you, I soaked up good and plenty on those Survey
+maps yesterday, and I believe I can find a shorter way
+back to the canyon than the one the regular trail takes
+around that long loop at the head of the valley. Hustle
+us a quick bite of breakfast, Purdy, and I’ll go along
+with you. There’s just about one chance in a hundred
+that we may be able to beat those hold-ups to it.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick demurred a little to this, still insisting that the
+fault was his and that he ought to pay the penalty alone.
+But he did not let his objections delay things. The water
+was boiling, and with the pot of coffee made, a few
+slices of bacon fried over the alcohol blaze, and a box of
+biscuits opened, they bolted a hasty breakfast. With
+the draining of the coffee pot the plan of action was
+outlined.</p>
+
+<p>Since there was no feed for the burros on the barren
+pass, Larry’s suggestion that Dick go on down the western
+slope with the pack animals had to be accepted, so it was
+arranged that he was to push on, stopping to wait for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>
+Larry and Purdick to catch up when he should reach the
+first good grazing ground for the jacks.</p>
+
+<p>“We ought to be able to overtake you by to-night, or
+early to-morrow morning, at the latest,” Larry said, “but
+if we don’t show up as soon as you think we ought to,
+don’t worry. We’ll do the best we can, and we’re going
+to travel mighty light.” And to prove it he discarded
+shoulder pack, rifle and ammunition, taking only a small
+camp axe for equipment, while Purdick took provisions
+enough for two meals in a light haversack, and nothing
+else.</p>
+
+<p>“There’s only one thing the matter with this lay-out
+of ours,” Dick said, as his companions were preparing to
+leave him. “Suppose you don’t find the book where
+Purdy dropped it—what then?”</p>
+
+<p>That was a sort of an <em>impasse</em> to give them pause, as
+the old writers used to say. If they shouldn’t find the
+book, they would be worse off than ever. But Larry
+Donovan was of the breed of those who cross bridges
+when they come to them—and not before.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve got to take a chance on that;” he said quickly.
+“You can’t keep the jacks here all day with nothing to
+eat; they’ve got to either go on or go back. We’ll be
+with you again by to-morrow morning, book or no book.
+And then, if we haven’t got what we went after, we can
+decide what is best to do. Come on, Purdy. We’re losing
+precious time.”</p>
+
+<p>The start was made without more ado, but instead of
+taking the trail over which they had reached the pass,
+Larry led the way around the sloping shoulder of the
+northern peak, kicking himself footholds in the frozen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>
+snow crust, and thereby taking long chances, as he well
+knew, of breaking through into some bottomless drift.</p>
+
+<p>“Step light and walk in my tracks, and for Pat’s sake
+don’t slip!” he called back to Purdick; but the caution
+was hardly needed. Purdick still had a vivid mental picture
+of the freed horse of the hold-ups whirling and
+slipping and shooting down to oblivion over the skating-rink
+surface of the snow slope, and he was all claws to
+clutch and hang as he followed Larry around the steepest
+part of the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Past the steep shoulder they came out upon what the
+Alpine climbers called an <em>arrêté</em>; a ridge sloping gently
+down and roughly paralleling the main range on their
+left and Lost Canyon on the right and far below. This
+ridge was what Larry had been aiming for. Its rocky
+crest had been blown clear of the winter snows; it was
+taking them in the right direction; there was good footing;
+and the descent was rapid enough to let them take
+a dog-trot without cutting their wind too severely.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t let me wear you out,” Larry cautioned; “but
+here’s where we’ve got to make time, if we’re going to
+beat those plug-uglies back to our camp site in the canyon.
+Are you good for the dog-trot?”</p>
+
+<p>“Plenty good, so long as it’s down-hill,” panted the
+runner-up. “But I don’t see where we’re making anything.
+We can never get down to the canyon off of this
+thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wait,” Larry flung back, “and I’ll show you.”</p>
+
+<p>From the top of the high ridge they could get occasional
+glimpses of the trail winding down the deep valley
+to the canyon head, and one of these glimpses gave them
+a sight of the baffled hold-ups making their way slowly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>
+along the slippery path, two riding and one walking;
+mere black dots they were, visible only because the dazzling
+white surroundings made them so.</p>
+
+<p>“We’re breaking even with ’em!” said Larry, lengthening
+the stride of the dog-trot by imperceptible degrees.
+“They’ve got a good mile of the snow trail to crawl over
+yet, and then another mile of the slush and mud. I believe
+we’re going to make it, after all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but we’re a mile above the canyon, and this
+ridge will never take us down to it!” Purdick gasped
+out.</p>
+
+<p>“Wait, and you’ll see,” was all Larry would say; but
+as he ran he was studying the lay of the land harder than
+he had ever boned Math. in the college year which had
+just ended. Far down the ridge little patches of dark
+green showed where a straggling vanguard of the firs
+had pushed its way a full half-mile above the normal
+timber, and it was toward the scattering and stunted trees
+that he was directing their flight.</p>
+
+<p>“If you can manage to hold out until we get to those
+trees,” he called back to the lagging runner-up. “Think
+you can do it?”</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick didn’t stop to think; he was putting the
+whole battery of mind and will upon the business of keeping
+his legs waggling. Long before the tree patches were
+reached, those legs had become base deserters from the
+animal kingdom and had gone over bodily to the vegetable.
+Pumping for breath like a spent miler on a cinder
+path, Purdick could fancy that his legs were mere blocks
+of wood hung in some mysterious manner to his body by
+hinges that were sadly in need of oiling. But, just the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>
+same, they continued to waggle. That was the main
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, when the race for Larry’s goal was won,
+Purdick was done, finished, <i lang="fr">écrasé</i>, as our French friends
+would put it. Dropping down upon the snow crust, he
+could do nothing but gasp and groan, not so much from
+sheer exhaustion as in bitterness of heart because he had
+such scanty reserves of strength and endurance.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right; take it easy,” said Larry, whipping the
+short-handled axe from his belt. “This next shift is a
+one-man job.” And as he spoke he attacked first one
+and then another of the stunted trees with the axe and
+hacked them down in a few handy blows. “There are
+the toboggans,” he jerked out; “now for the brakes,”
+and in a few minutes more he had two smaller trees down
+and trimmed to bare sticks with stubby branches left at
+the butts and the stubs sharpened to points.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick sat up, rubbing the calves of his legs.</p>
+
+<p>“Great Peter!” he exclaimed; “do you mean that we’re
+going to slide down on those trees?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re one fine little guesser, Purdy; I’ll say that
+much for you. I’ll bet you haven’t had a sled ride since
+you were a little kid, but you’re going to have one now—the
+kind that you’ll talk about after you get old and
+toothless and take your youngest grandchild on your
+knee to tell it what a daring little old rooster you used to
+be in your younger days.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, for mercy’s sake, Larry!—it’s a mile down to
+that timber, and it looks like ten! When we hit those
+big trees——”</p>
+
+<p>“I know; you’ll say there won’t be anything left of us.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>
+But we’ll have to risk something if we want to beat those
+fellows on the trail. It’s our only chance. And I’m betting
+largely upon these brake sticks. You take the stick
+under your arm, so, and lean back hard on it if you find
+yourself going too fast. The sun’s getting a little work
+in on the crust now, and I’m hoping that these stubby
+branches will cut in deep enough to do the braking act.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m still game,” said Purdick, getting up like an old,
+old man and helping Larry to swing the cut-down trees
+into position with the butts pointing down the steep slope.
+And then, as one who knows he has to be slain and wishes
+to have it over with: “Let me go first, and you can come
+along afterwards and gather up the remains.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing like it,” said Larry firmly. “I’ve done this
+thing before, and you haven’t. You watch me go, and
+then do exactly as I do.” And with that, he straddled his
+tree, took the steering stick under his arm and shoved off.</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick had held his breath so many times during
+the past twenty-four hours that he did it now quite
+automatically. To his town-bred notion, Larry was simply
+committing suicide, or so it seemed as the big bunch
+of evergreen, with Larry riding it, hurled itself down the
+first steep declivity, utterly out of control—it appeared;
+and it was not until the tree and its rider were a mere
+flying dot in the lower distance that Purdick could summon
+the nerve to mount his own vehicle and push it off.</p>
+
+<p>Of what happened to him in the next sixty seconds
+or so he never had a very clear picture. There was no
+working up to speed; no interval in which to grow up
+to the crowding sensations of the thing. With a slithering
+hiss the makeshift sled was off, and at the first downward
+dash the brake stick caught in the crust, ripped a furrow<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span>
+apparently a mile long, and was then torn out of his
+grasp. With nothing to lean on, Purdick whirled over
+on his face and took a death grip on the branches of the
+tree, burying his arms to the shoulders in the foliage. In
+the one brief glimpse he had of the backward rushing
+steep he saw great slabs of the snow crust, torn up by
+the hooking brake stick, following him down in a cataracting
+procession; the next thing he knew there was a
+crash as if a blast had gone off under him, and Larry
+was stooping over him, laughing and trying to break
+that grim death-hold of the clamping arms.</p>
+
+<p>“Let go, you old cockleburr!” he chuckled. “You
+can’t take that tree with you where we’re going. Don’t
+you know that?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick sat up and made a valiant effort to get once
+more in touch with things ordinary and commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>“S-say, Larry,” he whispered, “what was it that blew
+up and stopped me?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was laughing again.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess you were the only thing that blew up. But it
+was that big pine you’re looking at that stopped you.
+You hit it as square as if you were steering for it. Shake
+you up much?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; I guess I’m all here yet,” said Purdick, rolling
+off his tree sled. “But believe me, Larry, that was some
+ride!”</p>
+
+<p>“Fifty-eight seconds; I timed you by my wrist watch.
+Did it seem as long as that—or longer?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick shook his head. “You can’t prove anything
+by me. After I lost my stick I just shut my eyes and
+came. Whereabouts are we?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not more than a couple of miles from our camp site<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>
+and a few hundred feet above the trail—if I’ve kept my
+reckoning. But let’s be on our way. We are ahead of
+those rustlers now, and we want to keep ahead. If we
+move right along, we may not have to do any more
+sprinting.”</p>
+
+<p>“Here’s hoping,” said little Purdick, stifling a groan
+as he began once more to swing the vegetable-kingdom
+legs. “That run on top of the ridge just about put me
+to sleep from the waist down.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll harden up, after we’ve been out a few days,”
+Larry predicted; and then he set a course diagonally
+through the forest. In a very short time they came to
+the thawing zone, first slushy snow and then mud, and
+springy morass, bad going that slowed them down in
+spite of all the care they could take in picking their way.
+But this, too, was left behind in the course of time, and
+at last they found themselves skirting the canyon on a
+high bench-like plateau thickly carpeted with the fir
+needles and densely shaded by the primeval trees.</p>
+
+<p>Here, where their hurrying footsteps made no sound,
+they could hear the riffle and splash of the stream in the
+gorge below, and it was Purdick’s quick ear that presently
+detected other noises—namely, the well-remembered clink
+of horseshoes upon stone.</p>
+
+<p>“Glory!” he exclaimed, closing up swiftly upon his file
+leader, “they’re coming! We lost so much time back
+there in the mud that they’ve overtaken us!”</p>
+
+<p>“How about those legs of yours?” said Larry over
+his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“They’ll run—they’ve <em>got</em> to run!” gasped Purdick.
+“Pitch out, and I’ll try to keep you in sight.”</p>
+
+<p>Luckily, this last race was a short one. A scant quarter<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>
+of a mile farther on they came to the park-like opening
+where their camp had been pitched, and in another minute
+they were sliding down to the little flat where they had
+built their fire and spread the beds of fir tips.</p>
+
+<p>The lost book was there, lying on the ground at the
+roots of the big tree, just where it had fallen from Purdick’s
+hands. If the night raiders had had a light of any
+sort, they could hardly have helped seeing it. But they
+had probably meant to make their attack a surprise, for
+which the moon was then giving sufficient light, and,
+finding the fire out and the camp deserted, had doubtless
+begun the pursuit at once.</p>
+
+<p>Larry, being about two jumps ahead of Purdick,
+snatched up the book, and whirling quickly with arms outspread,
+swept his slighter companion back into the shelter
+of the wood.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re coming—they’re right here!” he hissed; and
+they had barely time to fling themselves down under a
+low-growing tree when the three men appeared on the
+trail leading from the upper canyon and halted in the
+little intervale.</p>
+
+<p>From where they lay under the drooping branches of
+the friendly little tree the two boys could see their late
+pursuers quite plainly. The cripple was riding one of
+the horses, with his crutch thrust under the saddle leather.
+The one the cripple had called “Dowling” was riding the
+other horse, and the third, the biggest of the three, was
+afoot.</p>
+
+<p>At the halt the cripple barked a command at the one
+who was walking.</p>
+
+<p>“Take a look at their camp and see if they’ve left anything
+worth swipin’, Bart,” he said; and the big man<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>
+lounged up to the wood edge, kicked at the remains of
+the fire, turned the beds over with an investigative foot,
+and even went so far as to stoop and look around under
+the low-spreading branches of the nearer trees. As he
+did this, it was only Larry’s quick wit that saved them
+from certain discovery. With a swift premonition of
+what the man was going to do, he reached up and pulled
+one of the low-hanging branches of the little tree down
+so that its foliage screened them perfectly. But for that,
+the peering robber must have seen them.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothin’ doin’,” said the man gruffly as he straightened
+up; and a few seconds later the two riders and their foot
+follower had gone on to disappear around a jutting cliff
+in the canyon.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee, Larry, but that was a close one!” sighed little
+Purdick, after the clinking hoofbeats had died away into
+silence. Then: “I guess I’ll have to have something done
+to my old heart. It makes altogether too much noise
+when there’s anything due to happen. Why, if that big
+thief had been listening half as sharply as he was looking,
+he could have heard it as plain as a trap-drum! What
+do we do next?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was still only the
+middle of the forenoon.</p>
+
+<p>“I was just thinking,” he said. “We’ll have to go back
+to the pass by the trail, and the middle of the day is going
+to be the worst time to hit the snow. The wet pack will
+be as slippery as grease, and we’ll be pretty sure to get
+snow-blind with the noon glare. Suppose we go back
+in the woods a piece and bed down and catch up on a
+little of the sleep that we lost last night. How does that
+strike you?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span></p>
+
+<p>“It strikes me right where I live,” said Purdick, yawning
+in the mere anticipation of a rest halt. “I suppose
+there is no danger of those rascals coming back?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not the least in the world. What they’ll do if they
+really mean business—as I’m much afraid they do—will
+be to go down to Nophi and outfit the same as we have
+for a trip over the range. It’s perfectly plain that they
+believe they have a sure pointer on the whereabouts of
+the Golden Spider through us, and, as I told Dick, I
+don’t believe we’ve seen the last of them. But that’s a
+future. Let’s hunt us a hole and turn in.”</p>
+
+<p>The hole-hunting was a short process. A few hundred
+yards above their former camping place they found a
+little dell under the trees where the fallen needles of
+many seasons lay a foot deep. There is no better wilderness
+bed when the fir needles are dry, and within a very
+few minutes after they had stretched out on the fragrant,
+springy carpet, each with his locked hands under
+his head for a pillow, they were asleep.</p>
+
+<p>During his year in college, Larry had often said that
+he had an alarm clock in his head, proving the assertion
+by his ability to wake up at any given hour in the night
+merely by fixing that hour in his mind before going to
+sleep. Upon this day-nap occasion in the Lost Canyon
+wood he set the alarm for three o’clock, and, true to his
+boast, it lacked but a few minutes of three when he sat
+up and rubbed his eyes and looked around sleepily to try
+to make out where he was and how he came to be there.</p>
+
+<p>It all came back in a moment, and he reached over to
+shake Purdick, who was still sleeping like a log.</p>
+
+<p>“Wake up, Purdy,” he said. “Time to eat a bite o’
+pie.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span></p>
+
+<p>Purdick came up with a snap. “Gee!” he yawned; “I
+sure did cork it orf in me ’ammick that time! How long
+have we been at it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Six hours solid. And I’m as hungry as a wolf. Let’s
+see what you’ve got in that haversack.”</p>
+
+<p>The eatables were produced and they fell to like famished
+savages. Purdick had provided pretty liberally, but
+what with the early breakfast, the hard travelling that
+had followed it, and the lapse of time, they didn’t leave
+much of what Purdick had thought would suffice for at
+least two meals.</p>
+
+<p>“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Larry, meaning
+the gorging which left only a couple of bacon sandwiches
+for that possible second meal. “We’ll catch up with our
+supplies by late supper-time, at the very worst, and I
+know you’d rather carry your share of the grub under
+your belt than in the haversack.”</p>
+
+<p>“I sure would,” Purdick admitted. He had never before
+known what it was to have such a gorgeous appetite
+as the mountain air was already giving him. “I see
+where we’re never going to be able to stay out all summer
+without back-tracking to civilization for more eats
+every few minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry laughed and sprang afoot.</p>
+
+<p>“Just now we’re going to back-track to Mule-Ear Pass.
+Feel up to it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I feel up to anything. As the fellow says in that old
+English stuff that the English Prof. made us take for
+side-reading last winter: ‘Fate can not harm me—I have
+dined.’ Let’s get a move and have it over with.”</p>
+
+<p>That was a simple way of stating it: “Let’s get a move
+and have it over with,” like swallowing a dose of medicine.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span>
+But there were a good many wearisome moves to
+be made before they won up to the final ascending loop
+in the snow trail, and they saw now—had been seeing
+ever since they struck the snow path—how impossible it
+would have been to get the burros up the mountain in
+the thawing daytime.</p>
+
+<p>They had been talking about this, and their good luck
+in being warned beforehand by Mr. Broadwick in Nophi,
+when Larry said:</p>
+
+<p>“I hope Dick didn’t have any trouble going down on
+the other side. I’ll bet it’s no one-man job to get a
+packed burro out of a drift if it breaks through where
+there’s any depth.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should say not,” Purdick agreed. “But I guess Dick
+made it all right. What I’m wondering is how far he had
+to go before he could pull up and wait for us.”</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t be long, now, before we’ll find out how far
+he had to go,” said Larry, and they went on toiling up
+the last of the slippery grades.</p>
+
+<p>By the time they had topped the pass and had their
+first good look over into the mountain wilderness beyond,
+the sun had gone behind the high-lifted crests of the
+Little Hophras. What they saw between the two ranges
+was a roughly tumbled intervale which could hardly be
+called a park because it was so cut up by spurs from the
+surrounding mountains. It was rather a series of parks,
+some wooded and some bare, with a scattering of the
+great rounded hills known from Montana to Arizona as
+buttes.</p>
+
+<p>To their great comfort they saw that the snow did not
+extend nearly as far down the western slope of their
+range as it did on the eastern; as a matter of fact, they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>
+had gone scarcely a mile down the descending trail before
+they were out of the snow belt altogether, and with only
+a narrow zone of the stiffening slush and mud to cross
+before they came to good going again.</p>
+
+<p>With the snow trail left behind, and no signs on it to
+indicate that Dick had had any trouble negotiating it
+with the burros, they were expecting to overtake him at
+every turn in the descending path. But the expectation
+seemed to be in no hurry to get itself fulfilled. Turn
+after turn was made, and still there was nothing to show
+that Dick had passed that way.</p>
+
+<p>By this time sunset was fully come, and though there
+was a fine afterglow on the peaks, the dusk was falling
+rapidly in the canyons and valleys.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t like this,” said Larry, halting at last in a little
+grassy glade. “Dick had no reason to try to make distance
+on us. And he wouldn’t go far enough from the
+trail so that he couldn’t watch for us. I wish we had
+one of the guns so we could signal to him.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick had crossed to the farther side of the glade
+and was stirring something on the ground with the toe
+of his boot.</p>
+
+<p>“Somebody’s been here,” he said. “Here are the ashes
+of a fire.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry joined him quickly and stooped to lay his hand
+on the ashes.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re cold,” he announced. “But somebody has had
+a fire here within a few hours. If it was Dick, why
+didn’t he stay here? And if it was somebody else——”
+The sentence was broken because he was down on his
+hands and knees looking for tracks in the short-grass
+turf. It didn’t take him long, poor as the fading light<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>
+was, to find tiny hoofprints in the soft soil. “It was
+Dick’s fire,” he said definitely. “He has been here, and
+he built the fire—and when he went away he didn’t put
+it out.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” queried Purdick, “what does that mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“It means just one of two things, Purdy: either Dick
+had some reason for leaving in a hurry, or else he was
+made to leave.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. That fire
+went out of itself—burned out; you can see that by the
+ashes. And Dick is too good a woodsman to go off and
+leave his camp-fire burning unless he had a mighty good
+reason for it.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick was feeling in the haversack, which contained
+only the mineralogy book and two biscuit sandwiches.
+What he said showed that he was still too much of a
+townsman to suspect that anything serious had happened
+to Dick Maxwell.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” he exclaimed. “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much
+over yonder in the canyon. Dick has vanished with the
+grub, and it’s getting dark, and we’ve got just two sandwiches
+to chew on. I call that pathetic.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wake up!” said Larry sharply. “We’ve got to find
+Dick, and do it <em>now</em>—not because we haven’t enough grub
+for supper, but because it looks as if Dick is in trouble of
+some sort! Get down here and help me to find out which
+way these burro tracks are pointing. Get busy, quick,
+before the light is entirely gone!”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br>
+<small>DADDY LONGBEARD</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">When Dick Maxwell was left alone on the summit
+of Mule-Ear Pass, he watched his two companions
+running along the spur ridge as long as he could see them.
+But after they were fairly out of sight he began to get
+ready for the descent of the western trail.</p>
+
+<p>When he attacked it, he found the downward trail on
+the western slope much less difficult than that over which
+they had gained the pass from the east. So, by the time
+the daily thaw was setting in, Dick had his two-jack train
+well down into the timber and was casting about for a
+good place in which to camp and wait for Larry and
+Purdick.</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, as he thought, the good places were
+slow in revealing themselves. Upon leaving the snow
+slopes and entering the timber, the little-used trail, after
+crossing and recrossing the little torrent in the gulch a
+number of times, seemed to fade out gradually. Being
+only a sort of apprentice pathfinder, Dick didn’t notice
+the fading at first. What he was looking for was a bit
+of grass for the burros in a place where Larry and Purdick
+would have no trouble in finding it, and him, when
+they should come over the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>It was getting pretty well along toward noon when
+Dick began to wonder if something wasn’t wrong. For<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>
+one thing, the trail seemed to have disappeared entirely,
+and for another, he suddenly realized that the noise of
+the stream, which he had been holding in the back of his
+mind as a guide, had been gradually growing fainter and
+fainter until now he couldn’t hear it at all.</p>
+
+<p>Plainly, it was time to call a halt and do a little thinking.
+Though he had been taking it easy, and letting the
+jacks do the same, he knew he must have covered considerable
+distance in the course of the forenoon. And
+every added mile he was traveling was making it just
+that much harder for Larry and Purdick to overtake and
+find him. Moreover, the little pack beasts couldn’t go on
+forever without feeding. He must find grass, and find it
+soon, or the burros would suffer.</p>
+
+<p>Having reached that sensible conclusion, he hitched the
+patient little animals to a tree, and made a wide circuit in
+search of a patch of grass. Luckily, he soon found one
+in a little open glade, and to this he drove the burros,
+relieved them of the packs, and turned them loose to
+graze.</p>
+
+<p>Munching his own midday meal while the jacks were
+feeding, Dick did some more thinking. Little by little
+the conviction that he had lost his way grew upon him,
+and the consequences began to loom up. Since he himself
+had packed their haversack, he knew that Larry and
+Purdick had barely enough for two meals. If he and the
+provisions were lost so that the two who had been left
+behind couldn’t find them, they’d go hungry.</p>
+
+<p>Confronted by this nettlesome fact, Dick ate his own
+dinner hurriedly. The only thing to do was to turn back
+and find out where he had left the trail. But when he
+came to consider this matter of back-tracking, confusion<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span>
+set in. In which direction had he wandered? Was the
+stream he had been following to the left or to the right?</p>
+
+<p>He was swallowing the last mouthful of biscuit and
+cold bacon when the confusion of ideas climaxed in the
+admission that he didn’t know which side of the stream
+he had crossed to last. There had been a number of the
+crossings, and he hadn’t taken any notice of the particular
+direction he was going. It was a bemuddling state of
+affairs, but the need for action was none the less pressing.
+Larry and Purdick mustn’t be left to wander all over the
+lot, famine-stricken, just because their provision freighter
+hadn’t had sense enough to stay where he could be found.</p>
+
+<p>Dick got the packs ready and waited impatiently for
+the burros to fill up. They were doing their hungry
+best; anybody could see that. Still, it was taking time.</p>
+
+<p>“Chew—chew fast, you little beggars!” he grumbled
+at them, stretching himself out on a bed of fir needles
+and watching them as they cropped. “We’ve got to be
+making tracks out of this, if you did but know it.”</p>
+
+<p>Now, when one has lost half a night’s sleep, and, on
+the heels of the loss, has tramped up one side of a mountain
+and down the other, a bed of dry conifer needles is
+likely to prove a pretty subtle temptation—not to go to
+sleep, of course, with the urgencies making it perfectly
+plain that one really mustn’t do that, but just to close
+one’s eyes and doze for a minute or two. Dick locked
+his hands under his head and lay gazing at the industrious
+burros. He had to look down his nose to see them, and
+that, too, is dangerous, if one doesn’t mean to go to sleep.
+Two or three times he found his eyes closing automatically;
+and at last, with the thought that he might just as<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>
+well doze off for the half-hour that it would take the
+jacks to fill themselves up, he was gone.</p>
+
+<p>That was that. But, unlike Larry, Dick had no alarm
+clock in the back part of his head that he could set to go
+off promptly at the end of half an hour. Quietly in the
+silence of the little glade, which was broken only by the
+industrious grazing of the little pack beasts, the half-hour
+slipped by, and then another and yet another.</p>
+
+<p>The burros had finished the filling-up process and were
+beginning to sniff the air for water. Inch by inch the
+tree shadows lengthened as the good old earth turned
+over in its daily wallop, and still Dick slept on. When
+he was finally awakened by one of the jacks nosing him
+over to find out if he were anything that a donkey could
+top off with by way of dessert, he leaped up with a yell
+and looked at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. He
+had lost over four hours of the day!</p>
+
+<p>Reproaching himself remorsefully for having been so
+heedless as to go to sleep on his job, Dick hustled the
+pack saddles into place, loaded them, and was ready to
+hike. Since all directions looked alike to him, he set
+off, with the westering sun at his back, thinking that that
+course must at least take him, sooner or later, to the
+upper edge of the timber where at the worst he could get
+a wider look at things than could be had in the forest.</p>
+
+<p>But he had scarcely got the small procession in motion
+before he began to have trouble with the jacks.
+Though they had hitherto gone on amiably enough in
+any direction they happened to be headed, they now
+seemed determined to edge away to the left. Again and
+again Dick pushed and dragged them back into the uphill
+path, but before he could take his place at the tail of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>
+procession they would be crabbing aside and circling—always
+in the same direction.</p>
+
+<p>“Aye—Fishbait; what’s the matter with you?” he
+shouted at the leading burro; and then, all at once, he
+knew. The jacks had had a feed, but no water. And
+now they were smelling water somewhere to the left and
+wanted to go to it.</p>
+
+<p>“All right, little donks!” he said, laughing at his own
+dullness; “I guess you know what’s what better than I
+do. Find the creek and get your drink, and then we’ll
+follow it back to where the trail begins to show up for
+us again.”</p>
+
+<p>As it turned out, it was only a short distance, as wilderness
+distances go, to the water the burros had been so
+anxious to reach; but, by the same token, the sun was
+now sinking pretty fast, and Dick saw that he would
+have to hurry if he wanted to get anywhere before the
+early forest dusk should overtake him. Accordingly, as
+soon as the burros had had their drink, he headed them
+up the stream, congratulating himself that the way out
+of the lost tangle had been found so easily.</p>
+
+<p>Again that was that. But before he had gone very far
+in the new direction that old saying about not laughing
+until you are out of the wood began to suggest itself.
+He tried to tell himself that it was all right; that he had
+found the creek, and if he should follow it up far enough
+it was bound to take him back to the trail. Just the same,
+there was nothing at all familiar in the surroundings,
+and the creek itself looked different.</p>
+
+<p>Still, there was nothing to do but to push on, and he
+was doing it industriously a full hour later when the daylight
+quit on him and he saw that it was no use trying<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>
+to go much farther. Camping for the night seemed the
+only thing left for him to do, but when he thought of
+stopping he was a good bit worried. There were still no
+signs of the lost trail, and nothing in the least rememberable
+in what he could see of the landscape.</p>
+
+<p>This was the condition of affairs when, rounding a
+sharp turn in the creek ravine, he saw a light up ahead.
+In the distance it looked as if it might be a fireplace fire
+shining out through the open door of a cabin. A fire and
+a cabin meant at least two mighty welcome things, just
+then: human companionship, and a chance to find out
+where he had wandered to.</p>
+
+<p>Being Western born and bred, Dick thought he was
+pretty well prepared for anything that might jump up in
+the woods, however strange it might appear at first sight.
+But the man who came to the cabin door at his shouted:
+“Hello, the house!” presented a picture that was almost
+startling. Tall, stoop-shouldered, with a shock of hair
+as white as snow, and a great white beard that reached
+fully to his waist, Dick could think of nothing to compare
+him to except a picture in the “Arabian Nights”—the
+Old Man of the Sea. But the resemblance to that horrific
+personage vanished instantly when a voice, as gentle
+as a woman’s, said:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, hello, stranger! ’Light and come in. Ye’re
+welcome as sunshine. I hain’t seed a livin’ human sence
+the good Lord knows when!”</p>
+
+<p>Dick didn’t know what he was to alight from, being
+already on his feet, but he did know the customary
+Southern salutation which usually applies to a person on
+horseback.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not any gladder than I am,” he laughed. “I<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>
+guess I’m lost good and plenty. Wait until I can take
+the packs off the burros, and——”</p>
+
+<p>“Shore enough!” said the gentle old voice. “Didn’t
+see that ye had a couple o’ jacks. Reckon my old eyes
+ain’t so good as they used to be.” And he hobbled out
+and helped Dick to get the packs off.</p>
+
+<p>Once in the cabin and seated before the open fire, Dick
+unburdened himself—partly. He told how he and his
+companions had come over the pass together and that
+Larry and Purdick had gone back after a book that had
+been overlooked when they broke camp in Lost Canyon.
+But he didn’t say anything about the race with the would-be
+hold-ups.</p>
+
+<p>The old man was chuckling gravely when the tale was
+finished.</p>
+
+<p>“So ye rambled round in the woods and got lost, did
+ye? Well, now—ye shore did it right and proper!
+You’re a good ten mile from the Mule-Ear trail, right
+this minute. Been travelin’ away from it ever sence ye
+got down the mount’in, I reckon.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick jumped as if he had been shot.</p>
+
+<p>“Good goodness!” he ejaculated. And then: “I’ve got
+to get back to it some way, to-night! Those fellows will
+have a fit if they don’t find me! Besides, they took only
+a snack with them and they won’t have anything to eat.
+I’ve got all the camp duffle and grub! I thought, all the
+time, I was working back toward the trail as I came up
+the creek.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ye would’ve been, if ye’d hit the right creek,” said
+the patriarch mildly. “This ain’t Silver Creek—that
+comes down from the pass gulch; it’s a branch that runs
+into Silver about twelve mile west. Reckon ye must’ve<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>
+crossed over from one to t’other when ye was ramblin’.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure!” said Dick, astonished and provoked to think
+that he hadn’t had any better sense of direction. “But
+you see how it is? I’ve got to get back, dark or no dark,
+and if you’ll just let me cook a pot of coffee over your
+fire——”</p>
+
+<p>“Sho, now!” said the old man; “you lemme talk a
+spell. I could p’int ye right, but ye never <em>would</em> find
+your way over to Silver in the dark; ain’t right shore I
+could do it myself. You listen to ol’ Daddy Longbeard:
+you jest camp down with me for the night, and right
+early in the mornin’ I’ll set ye on your way. Them boys
+ye tell about’ll make out to take care o’ theirselves for one
+night, I reckon.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick hesitated. Now that he had found somebody
+who could direct him, at least in a general way, it seemed
+all the more needful that he should eat and run. But on
+the other hand, the burros had had a long day, counting
+from the start out of Lost Canyon, and they needed the
+night halt—to say nothing of himself. Again, there was
+something almost pathetic in the way the old man pressed
+his invitation. Dick tried to imagine how it would seem
+to him if he hadn’t seen a living human since the good
+Lord knew when.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess maybe you’re right,” he said at length. “It’s
+more than likely that I’d get lost again in the dark. If
+you’re sure it won’t be any trouble to you to have me
+stay——”</p>
+
+<p>“Trouble? None such! I’ll shore take it mighty handsome
+if ye’ll stay and lemme see if I’ve forgot how to
+talk to folks. But I reckon ye’re hongry. Set down and
+I’ll give ye what I’ve got, and right welcome.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Nothing like that!” said Dick. “We’ll open the packs
+and the supper will be on me. We’re grub-staked for a
+good long time.”</p>
+
+<p>That was the beginning of a real, old-time, sociable
+evening. Over the supper which was presently cooked,
+Dick told his old entertainer all about the plans for the
+summer outing, what the three were going to look for—and
+hoped they might be able to find.</p>
+
+<p>“Jest listen!” said the patriarch musingly, after Dick
+had rattled off the names of half a dozen of the rare
+metals, tungsten, molybdenum, vanadium, chromium and
+so on. “All them there minerals that I never even heerd
+the names of. Us old back numbers don’t know nothin’
+but gold and silver, and maybe copper and lead. The
+world shore do move. How are ye aimin’ to tell these
+here what-you-may-call-’em minerals when you find ’em?”</p>
+
+<p>At this, Dick gave a little class-room lecture on field
+tests; how one examined a specimen by its lustre, hardness,
+color, streak and weight, and how a few simple
+blowpipe tests could also be made with no more apparatus
+than any prospector might easily carry with him.</p>
+
+<p>To all of this the old man listened with a sort of wistful
+curiosity. Though he had said little about himself,
+Dick knew, of course, that he must be either a miner or a
+prospector; there could be no other reason for his living
+a hermit life in the mountains. From his earliest childhood
+Dick had been hearing stories of men who buried
+themselves in the wilds, digging year after year in some
+prospect shaft or tunnel, and coming out to the towns
+only when the “grub-stake” was exhausted and money
+had to be earned to buy more. The interior of the little
+log cabin had every appearance of age and long occupancy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>
+The rafters were smoke-begrimed and the fireplace
+showed the wear and tear of many fires.</p>
+
+<p>“Ye shore are tellin’ me a heap o’ things I never
+knowed, son,” said the old man, when Dick paused, “and
+I jest been a-wonderin’. Are ye too nigh wore out to
+take a li’l’ climb up the hill?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” said Dick; then, with his own good-natured
+grin: “Want to show me your mine?”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said the patriarch; “how’d ye know I got a
+mine?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s easy,” Dick laughed. “You wouldn’t be living
+out here alone if you hadn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>Without another word the old man took down an old-fashioned
+lantern from its peg on the wall and lighted it.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m allowin’ maybe you might help me some,” he
+said, in the same half-wistful tone. “You’re a sort of a
+minin’ ingineer, ain’t ye?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing like it,” Dick denied, with another laugh.
+“I’ve just finished my first year in college, and I’m not
+taking ‘Mining,’ at that. But my father owns a half-interest
+in a gold mine in the Timanyoni, so I’m not exactly
+a tenderfoot. If I can help you, I’ll be glad to.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lemme show ye,” said his host, and together they
+left the cabin and, turning aside from the bed of the
+little stream, climbed a rocky steep beside a huge dump
+which looked, even in the starlight, like an enormous
+gray beard hanging from the mountain side.</p>
+
+<p>At the top of the dump the old man led the way into
+a tunnel, a sizable hole driven, as the lantern light showed,
+into the solid granite. Once they were fairly inside, the
+old man lighted a miner’s candle and put the lantern
+aside. With the better illumination they pushed on into<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span>
+the heart of the mountain. As they went deeper and
+deeper, Dick marveled at the proof of tireless industry
+the tunnel exhibited. It was roomy enough to admit of
+the old man’s walking upright in it, tall as he was, and
+Dick could see that the rock through which it was driven
+was of the hardest. Some two hundred feet back from
+the entrance the drift widened out into an irregular-shaped
+cavern, and the old man stopped and waved his
+candle to show the size of the opening.</p>
+
+<p>“Right here’s where I lost the vein—pinched out on
+me slick and clean,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been
+plum’ shore she was a true fissure, I reckon I might’ve
+quit short off. But I kep’ on till she showed up again,
+away over here,” and he led Dick to a corner of the
+cavern where the tunnel began again, this time pitching
+down as well as on into the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>Another two hundred feet was covered down the steepish
+incline before they came to the end of things, and
+Dick wondered how the old man ever stood it to wheelbarrow
+the broken-rock “spoil” up the long grade and
+out to the dump. But nothing is too hard for one who
+has been bitten by the precious-metal bug, and that the
+old hermit had been so bitten was shown by the eager
+enthusiasm with which he passed the candle flame over
+the face of the rock wall in which the tunnel ended,
+making the light follow the crooked course of a thin,
+dark-colored seam that extended diagonally up and
+down it.</p>
+
+<p>“There she is,” he said excitedly. “That’s what I’ve
+been follerin’ for four solid years—takin’ out the winters
+that I’ve had to work in the smelter to get money for to
+buy the grub-stakes.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span></p>
+
+<p>Dick wasn’t particularly soft-hearted, but the thing
+almost moved him to tears. Here was a man, evidently
+nearing the end of a long life, digging and burrowing in
+the heart of a great mountain year after year, working
+tremendously, as one must to make any headway in solid
+rock, and with only this thin, knife-blade seam of a vein
+to lead him on.</p>
+
+<p>“Good goodness!” he exclaimed, catching his breath;
+then, forgetting his grammar completely: “Is that all
+the thicker it is?”</p>
+
+<p>“Right now it is,” said the old man. “But it’s been a
+heap thicker’n that sometimes; been as much as a half-inch
+in two-three places.”</p>
+
+<p>“But see here!” Dick exploded; “a half-inch of ore
+isn’t anything! Why, good gracious—it would have to
+be all pure gold or silver to pay with that thickness!”</p>
+
+<p>“Shore; I know,” said the patriarch serenely. “But
+I’m hopin’ she’s a true fissure. I allowed maybe, with
+your book-learnin’, ye could tell me for certain shore if
+she <em>is</em> a true fissure.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t,” said Dick; “but what difference does it make
+whether it is or isn’t a true fissure?”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said the old man patiently. “Hain’t yer
+schoolin’ teached ye that? Don’t ye know that a true
+fissure <em>allus</em> widens out if ye go down deep enough on it?”</p>
+
+<p>True enough, Dick did know; not, indeed, the fact as
+the old miner stated it, but the other fact that a great
+many of the older prospectors firmly believed it. But
+he hadn’t the heart to say that modern mining studies
+had proved that the “widening” didn’t always follow as
+a necessity.</p>
+
+<p>“Black sulphuret of silver—argentite—isn’t it?” he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span>
+said, digging a bit of the vein matter from the seam
+with the point of his pocket knife.</p>
+
+<p>“You named her right, son. And she’s all-fired rich,
+what there is of her. Some o’ these days, maybe, one o’
+the holes I’m drillin’ ’ll bring her down a foot wide, and
+then——”</p>
+
+<p>Dick, born and brought up in a region where mines and
+mining were as the daily bread, knew well the picture of
+ease and comfort and luxury the “and then” was bringing
+up in the old man’s mind. Taking the candle, he passed
+it up and down the face of the heading. At no point
+was the vein of argentite much thicker than the back of
+his knife blade.</p>
+
+<p>“Here’s hoping good and hard that it will widen out
+for you one of these fine mornings,” Dick said; and then
+the old man took the candle and led the way back up
+the incline.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the cavern-like place where the vein had been
+lost that Dick asked his guide to wait a minute and let
+him look around. The break in the continuity of the
+vein of argentite was evidently caused by what is technically
+known as a “fault,” a crack in the earth’s crust
+made by some volcanic upheaval. In many such cracks
+one side or the other has slipped up or down or sidewise,
+and there had apparently been some such a slip here.</p>
+
+<p>“You had lots of courage to go on digging when you
+struck this ‘fault,’” said Dick. “We struck one in our
+mine in the Timanyoni, and it was forty feet thick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Uh-huh,” said the old man; “a lime-horse. That’s
+what this was.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick stooped down and picked up a bit of the broken
+rock stuff with which the crack had been filled in some<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>
+later convulsion than that which had opened the gash in
+the earth’s crust.</p>
+
+<p>“Doesn’t look quite like a lime-horse,” he commented,
+examining the fragment by the light of the candle.
+“Seems too heavy for any of the calcareous rocks. Ever
+have it assayed?”</p>
+
+<p>The old man shook his head. “Naw; it ain’t nothin’
+but rock—fault-fillin’.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick put the bit of stuff in his pocket, meaning to look
+at it again by the better light of the cabin lamp. And
+with that the matter rested, for the time being.</p>
+
+<p>When they were back in the cabin the patriarch lighted
+his corn-cob pipe and wanted to hear more about the
+“queer” metals the three young prospectors were going
+to look for. Dick did his best by way of explaining, telling
+of the uses of some of the metals—tungsten in electric
+lamps, vanadium as an alloy for steel, carnotite as the
+source of the wonder-working radium.</p>
+
+<p>The old man chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>“Reckon ye wouldn’t bother to locate a gold mine ’r
+a silver mine if ye was to find one, would ye?” he said in
+gentle raillery.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, we would,” said Dick, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, if ye do, don’t go and do like pore old Jim
+Brock did—get yourselves holed in for the winter
+a-workin’ it and starve t’ death.”</p>
+
+<p>At this mention of Brock, the discoverer—and loser—of
+the Golden Spider, Dick pricked up his ears.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you know James Brock?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Shore I did. Him and me was pardners for a couple
+o’ summers.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you know about the Golden Spider?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span></p>
+
+<p>“I know that’s what Jim called his gold strike that he
+made over in the Little Hophras,” was the reply which
+seemed to be made guardedly.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a lost mine,” said Dick. “Nobody’s ever been
+able to find it. Did you know that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I heerd it, last winter, down at Nophi. I reckon
+nobody hain’t looked in the right place.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where is ‘the right place’?”</p>
+
+<p>Daddy Longbeard shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m too old to go skyhootin’ round the mount’ins
+lookin’ for somebody else’s mine, when I got one o’ my
+own,” he said evasively.</p>
+
+<p>“But could you find the Golden Spider, if you should
+look?” Dick queried eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe,” was the short reply, and there wasn’t another
+word added to it.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you know that my uncle, Mr. William Starbuck,
+took care of James Brock for the little while he lived,
+and that Brock gave him the mine?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yep; I heerd that, too.”</p>
+
+<p>Without knowing at all why it should be so, Dick felt
+that he was treading upon forbidden ground in questioning
+his host about James Brock’s mine, so he stopped
+short, and, just for a diversion, began to examine, by
+the better light of the cabin lamp, the piece of rock picked
+up in the “fault.” In appearance it was a little like a
+fragment of steel-gray limestone, yet it seemed heavier
+than any non-metallic rock.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i_fp066">“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of
+some kind?”</a> he asked.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i_fp066">
+ <img src="images/i_fp066.jpg" alt="" title="">
+ <figcaption class="caption">
+ <p class="noic"><a href="#Page_66">“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?”</a></p>
+ </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The old miner wagged his beard in denial.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span></p>
+
+<p>“There ain’t nothin’ in it,” he replied. “It’s just crack-fillin’.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick went over to where the packs had been placed,
+opened one of them and got out the box containing the
+blowpipe set.</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said the old prospector. “Tote your assayin’
+outfit right along with ye, do ye?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no,” Dick qualified; “only a few things to help
+us make field tests. I can’t tell you anything about quantities—values—because
+it takes a real assay to do that,
+but we can at least find out whether or not there is any
+metal in this stuff, which seems too heavy to be just
+common rock.”</p>
+
+<p>Getting out the blowpipe, its alcohol-turpentine lamp,
+the small porcelain mortar and pestle, and the little hammer,
+he proceeded to break a few chips from the specimen
+and grind them in the mortar, with the old prospector
+looking on curiously while he worked. Adding a
+little borax for a flux, Dick put the tiny sample on the
+block of prepared charcoal, lighted the lamp and began
+to blow.</p>
+
+<p>In a short time the sample fused to a dark-gray globule
+and the charcoal around it was covered with a white
+coating. Carefully withdrawing the tip of the blowpipe
+so as to make the blast produce the reducing flame, Dick
+saw the white coating disappear, giving a bluish color to
+the flame. Filling his cheeks again, he kept on blowing,
+and, after quite a prolonged heating, the dark-gray
+globule turned to a tiny yellow metallic button, and at
+this Dick put the blowpipe down and blew out the lamp
+flame.</p>
+
+<p>“What did you do with the stuff that you took out of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span>
+that ‘fault’ while you were hunting for the lost argentite
+vein?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Wheelbarrered it out and threw it on the dump,” was
+the old man’s answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Dick definitely, “it’s kind of lucky there
+is plenty more of it left in the ‘fault.’ See this little button
+that’s left on the charcoal?”</p>
+
+<p>The old man squinted his eyes and tried to see, but
+the button was no larger than a very small pinhead.</p>
+
+<p>“Take the glass,” said Dick, handing him the pocket
+magnifier.</p>
+
+<p>“Shore! I see it now. What-all is it?” asked the
+squinter.</p>
+
+<p>“Silver and gold,” said Dick calmly. “That ‘lime-horse’
+of yours isn’t a lime-horse at all; it’s a vein of
+sylvanite, according to the blowpipe test. Didn’t you see
+that white stuff on the charcoal go off in a blue flame
+when I heated it? That was the tellurium in the ore.
+You’ve struck a telluride mine without knowing it, and
+you’ve probably thrown a small fortune away in the stuff
+that you wheelbarrowed out and threw on the dump.
+But, as I say, there seems to be plenty more of it. Gee!
+You’re a rich man, and you never suspected it!”</p>
+
+<p>“But—but, how can you tell?” stammered the old prospector.
+“That li’l’ speck o’ metal ain’t no bigger than a
+gnat’s ear!”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it isn’t,” said Dick. “But when you remember
+that it came out of a sample that you could hold on
+your thumbnail ... why, good goodness! the stuff’s
+simply got to be rich in either silver or gold, or both!”</p>
+
+<p>The old man turned in his home-made chair and sat
+perfectly still for quite a little while, staring intently into<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>
+the heart of the fire on the rude stone hearth. When he
+spoke again it was to say: “I ain’t heerd ye say nothin’
+about me goin’ havers with you, son.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, no!” said Dick. “Why should I say anything
+like that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Most fellers would. They’d go into court and swear
+that <em>they</em> made the discovery. You did make it, ye know.
+I might ’a’ gone on diggin’ in that mount’in till kingdom
+come, without ever payin’ any attention to anything but
+that streak o’ sulphurets.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s all right,” Dick hastened to say. “I’m mighty
+glad I happened to think of testing the stuff, and you
+don’t owe me anything at all. Why, good land—I’m
+your <em>guest</em>!”</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the old man heaved himself out of his chair,
+and, crossing the room, he began to arrange Dick’s bed
+in the single built-in bunk. Dick protested at once, saying
+that he could roll himself in his blankets before the
+fire. But the newly made bonanza king wouldn’t have it
+that way.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he said; “the best I’ve got ain’t none too good
+for you, son. Besides, I reckon I don’t want to go to
+bed, nohow. I reckon I got to set up and think a spell
+afore I can ever go to sleep again.”</p>
+
+<p>Seeing that it would be a real charity to give the old
+man a chance to “set up and think,” Dick made ready to
+turn in. It was not until he was sitting on the edge of
+the bunk to take his lace boots off that the old man fished
+in a grimy cigar-box and brought out a printed map so
+old and worn that it was falling apart in the creases.
+Spreading the map out on Dick’s knees, he pointed to a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span>
+pencilled circle enclosing a certain area that looked as if
+it were all mountain and canyon.</p>
+
+<p>“I let on to you that Jim Brock and me had been pardners
+once, son, and so we was. I don’t know where
+Jim’s mine is, but I do know some’eres near where he
+was prospectin’ when he found it. That circle’s maybe
+five mile acrosst it, and I reckon if you was to look close
+enough inside of it, maybe you’d find the Golden Spider.
+Put the map in your pocket. It’s your’n.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V<br>
+<small>FOOTLOOSE AND FREE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">When Larry and Purdick thought they had found
+the place where Dick had stopped and made a fire,
+and had then had some mysterious thing happen to him,
+they soon realized that they couldn’t hope to trail the
+burro hoofprints very far in the growing dusk. But they
+did manage to follow them to the nearest crossing of the
+little stream, and here, where a patch of wash sand made
+the record as plain as a book page, Larry heaved a sigh
+of relief.</p>
+
+<p>“If we didn’t have such good forgetteries—both of
+us—we needn’t have been scared up so badly, Purdy,” he
+said. “Don’t you remember what Mr. Broadwick told
+us yesterday—about two men coming over here ahead of
+us with supplies for the Little Eagle in Dog Gulch?
+They are the fellows who made the fire and didn’t put
+it out—not Dick.”</p>
+
+<p>“How can you tell?” asked the town-bred one.</p>
+
+<p>“You can see for yourself,” Larry returned, pointing
+down at the bed of damp sand. “There were at least four
+burros making those tracks, and Dick has only two. See
+how the hoofprints overlap, again and again?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick looked and saw.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s better; that means that Dick is still somewhere
+on ahead of us.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and we won’t catch up with him before morning.
+We can’t follow this trail in the dark. We’ll just have
+to camp for the night and make the best of it.”</p>
+
+<p>Since this seemed to be the only sensible thing to do,
+they picked out a place with a big cliff-like boulder for a
+background. Here, after they had lopped some tree
+branches for a bed and built a fire which, reflected from
+the big rock at their backs, promised to supply the warmth
+of the blankets they didn’t have, they ate the two remaining
+bacon sandwiches.</p>
+
+<p>“Not much of a supper,” Larry commented, munching
+his share of the short ration; “not after the tramp we’ve
+had. But it’s a lot better than none.”</p>
+
+<p>“If it didn’t sound like trying to be funny, I’d say you
+said a mouthful—both ways from the middle,” said little
+Purdick with a grin. “I was just thinking what a beautiful
+fix we’ll be in if we don’t happen to find Dick and
+the eats in the morning.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Larry. “We brag a good deal about our
+civilization, and how much we’ve gained on the old cavemen;
+but I’ve often wondered what would happen to one
+of us up-to-date folks if he were dropped down in the
+middle of a wilderness like—well, like this, for instance,
+with no tools or weapons and nothing to eat. Would we
+have to go hungry to-morrow if we shouldn’t find Dick?”</p>
+
+<p>“Golly!” said Purdick, “I’m sure <em>I</em> should. Why, we
+haven’t seen a single eatable thing since we started out
+yesterday noon!”</p>
+
+<p>“Game, you mean? I suppose that’s because we weren’t
+looking for it. But there is plenty of game in these
+mountains, just the same; big game, at that. What I’ve<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>
+wondered is if the up-to-date man, bare-handed, could
+manage to catch any of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not this one,” laughed Purdick.</p>
+
+<p>“Fish, then?” Larry suggested. “These clear mountain
+streams are full of trout, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yea!” Purdick chuckled. “Imagine a fellow catching
+trout with his hands!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll bet it could be done—if the fellow were hungry
+enough,” Larry maintained. “But I’m not going to sit
+up and argue with you. I’m all set to turn in and sop
+up a little more sleep.” And with that he burrowed in
+the tree-branch bed and turned his back to the fire.</p>
+
+<p>It was deep in the night that Larry, sleeping the sleep
+of the seven sleepers, felt himself shaken by the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“Wake up!” Purdick was saying, and his teeth were
+chattering. “L-l-look over there—across the creek!”</p>
+
+<p>Larry raised his head and looked. The camp-fire,
+backed up by a good-sized windfall log they had dragged
+down to it, was burning quite brightly, but its circle of
+light did not reach much beyond the little stream brawling
+and splashing a few feet away. On the opposite
+side of the stream a thicket of young cedars came down
+close to the water’s edge, and in the heart of the thicket
+two balls of green fire appeared, steady and unflickering.</p>
+
+<p>“Speaking of game,” Larry whispered; and then:
+“Keep perfectly still until we see what it is.” And, as a
+measure of safety, he reached cautiously for the short-handled
+axe.</p>
+
+<p>They did not have to wait long. In a moment there
+was a little stir in the thicket and the balls of fire began
+to move slowly. Larry, more wood-wise than his bedmate,
+knew that what they were seeing were the eyes of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>
+some animal that had been attracted by the light of the
+camp-fire, but he couldn’t tell what it was. If it should
+happen to be a bear, lean and famished from its winter
+hibernation—as Larry well knew, there were still grizzlies
+to be found in the Hophras.... But at this point he
+pulled himself together and let good old common sense
+get in its word. The eyes were too high up from the
+ground to be those of a bear, unless the animal were
+standing upon its hind legs, and, besides, they were too
+large to figure as the little pig-like eyes of any kind of a
+bear, even a grizzly.</p>
+
+<p>While they kept perfectly still and looked, the animal to
+which the eyes belonged came out of the thicket and
+advanced cautiously to the water’s edge. It proved to be
+a mule-deer, a full-grown buck, easily recognizable by
+its large ears, brown-and-white face, and short, black-tipped
+tail. After staring fixedly at the camp-fire for a
+few moments, it drank at the stream and then moved
+away, vanishing as silently as it had come.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” said Purdick, as the deer disappeared, “are they
+as tame as all that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Tame enough, when they don’t get the human scent,”
+Larry replied. “The wind was wrong for him. Dick
+and I saw them often last summer in the Tourmaline.
+How about the fire? Are you sleeping warm enough?”</p>
+
+<p>“Toasty,” Purdick asserted, and with that they burrowed
+again.</p>
+
+<p>The dawn was breaking golden in the upper air when
+they turned out the next morning and Larry regretfully
+dipped water with his hat to extinguish the splendid bed
+of coals that should have figured as their breakfast fire.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span></p>
+
+<p>“It’s a rotten shame to spoil a fire as good as this,” he
+said, “but we haven’t anything to cook on it.”</p>
+
+<p>“How many miles to breakfast?” Purdick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“You tell, if you can,” Larry laughed, and they started
+out to follow the trail.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for the empty stomachs, they didn’t have
+to go very far before they saw Dick and the burros coming
+over a wooded hill to the right. At the “reunion,”
+as Dick called it, they quickly built a fire; and while the
+coffee water was heating and the bacon sizzling in the
+pan, Dick told how he had lost his way and found a
+hermit.</p>
+
+<p>“We were up before day, and Daddy Longbeard—I
+don’t know any other name for him—came along with
+me far enough to make sure that I wouldn’t get off the
+track again,” he wound up. “When he left me, two or
+three miles back yonder in the woods, he was still acting
+like a man half stunned—over what I told him last night
+about his mine.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure you didn’t make any mistake about that ore, are
+you?” Larry inquired.</p>
+
+<p>“Not a chance! It’s a telluride, all right enough, and
+plenty rich, I should say, from the size of the button I
+got out of one small test sample.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I guess you paid for your night’s lodging, anyway,”
+Purdick put in; but Dick Maxwell laughed and
+shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“No; it was the other way round; the old man paid
+me for telling him about his bonanza. See here what he
+gave me.” And he showed them the worn map with
+the magic circle on it.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, this revival of the romantic possibilities<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span>
+wrapped up in the summer’s outing stirred up some excitement,
+and the coffee boiled over and threatened to
+put the fire out while they were studying the old map.
+It was Larry who reached up and took hold of things and
+brought them down to the every-day level again.</p>
+
+<p>“The Golden Spider is all right, fellows, if we should
+happen to run across it, but we all know that there isn’t
+one chance in a million, not even with the help of Daddy
+Longbeard’s circle—which, after all, is only a guess, as
+he said it was. We don’t want to get bitten by the gold
+prospector’s bug and go crazy like so many of ’em do.
+We’re out for good old practical business, and we mustn’t
+forget that Mr. Starbuck is paying the bills. Let’s eat
+breakfast and then hit the grit for the summer work
+field.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right you are, Larry, old scout!” said Purdick, getting
+back on his job of frying the breakfast flapjacks.
+“I can begin to see now how easy it is for people to go
+nutty on this gold proposition. Turn to and eat these
+pancakes while they’re hot—they’ll stay with you longer
+that way.”</p>
+
+<p>By and large, it was Larry’s summing-up of their job
+that morning that set the pace for the next three weeks.
+During that interval they crossed the inter-mountain
+region by easy stages, prospecting in the hills as they
+went, and learning, by actual contact with it, something
+of the wonderful geological structure of the country
+they were traversing. In no part of the United States
+does the earth’s crust exhibit more marvelous wrinklings
+and upheavals and apparent contradictions than in the
+mountain regions of western Colorado and eastern Utah,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>
+and each day brought new discoveries and fresh problems
+to attack.</p>
+
+<p>“How in the world anybody with no schooling could
+hope to find anything valuable in these rocks and clays is
+beyond me,” said little Purdick, one evening when, by the
+light of the camp-fire, they had been poring over the
+“System of Mineralogy,” and trying by blowpipe and acid
+tests to identify what seemed to be a specimen of wolframite,
+the base which furnishes the metal tungsten.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s easy,” Dick returned. “The average prospector
+is like old Daddy Longbeard. He is looking for gold or
+silver, and he is able to identify a few of the commoner
+ores by sight. But a good many of his discoveries have
+been by sheer accident, like that of the lead carbonates at
+Leadville.”</p>
+
+<p>“How was that?” Purdick wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>“The way I’ve heard it was that the man who made
+the discovery was looking for gold-bearing quartz. One
+way to find a ‘mother’ vein is to take a stream that shows
+gold ‘colors’ when you pan out the sand in it, following
+this trail of ‘colors’ up-stream until you come to a place
+where the ‘colors’ don’t show any more, and then you
+prospect in the hills roundabout.</p>
+
+<p>“This prospector was working up one of the streams
+east of Mount Massive, and he noticed that when he
+washed for gold ‘colors’ there were leavings in his pan;
+a black sand that was too heavy to wash over with the
+common sand when he shook the pan. Just out of curiosity,
+he saved some of this sand and threw it into his
+specimen sack along with some quartz samples he had;
+did that and then forgot it. Afterward, when he took
+his samples to an assayer to have them tested, he dumped<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>
+the sack on the bench in the laboratory, black sand and
+all, and the assayer was thorough enough to test the sand
+as well as the quartz. And that’s what made the city
+of Leadville.”</p>
+
+<p>“But good land!” said Purdick, “there are more gold-and-silver-bearing
+‘ites’ in this book than anybody could
+ever learn to know by sight unless he crammed for
+them!”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Dick replied. “There was old Daddy Longbeard,
+digging for goodness only knows how long in rich
+gold ore without ever so much as suspecting it.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry Donovan grinned. “All of which is interesting,
+but unimportant,” he put in. “The fact remains that
+we’ve been out three weeks and haven’t yet found anything
+worth staking a claim on.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick stretched his arms over his head and yawned
+luxuriously.</p>
+
+<p>“But the other fact remains that we’re having one bully
+good time. Purdy, you old rat, you’re actually putting
+some flesh on your bones. And I’ll bet a hen worth
+fifteen cents that not an ounce of it is fat—nothing but
+good old hard, stringy muscle.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick drew a long breath. “It’s the greatest thing
+that ever happened to me,” he said. “The hardest thing
+I’m going to have to learn when we go back to the towns
+is how to sleep under a roof again. But speaking of
+finding things: I picked up a queer-looking piece of stuff
+down there by the creek where I went to get a drink this
+afternoon. I forgot to show it to you,” and he took the
+specimen from his pocket and passed it around.</p>
+
+<p>Looked at through the magnifier, or even without the
+glass, the specimen was a very beautiful thing. It looked<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>
+like a sliver of limestone, one side of which was covered
+with a thick incrustation of fine little red crystals, six-sided
+prisms glowing with a peculiar lustre that was
+neither garnet nor ruby, but a shade between. Since
+they were out to test every unfamiliar substance they
+came across, the blowpipe was put into service once more,
+and Dick blew until his cheeks ached.</p>
+
+<p>Heated in the original mass there was nothing doing,
+so they powdered a few of the crystals in the porcelain
+mortar, mixed the powder with borax and salt of phosphorus,
+and tried it again. In the oxidizing flame—the
+hottest flame that can be produced with the blowpipe—a
+clear glass bead, dark yellow in the heat, was quickly
+formed, and this bead, when cooled, turned to a light
+yellow color.</p>
+
+<p>Larry was turning the leaves of the mineralogy book
+and running a finger over the subject heads.</p>
+
+<p>“I was reading about something that did that way,
+just the other day,” he said, “but I can’t remember what
+it was. By jing!—what the dickens was it? Something
+that’s dark yellow, hot, and light yellow when it cools.
+Shucks! If I didn’t have such a good forgettery——”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick had been watching the experiment narrowly.
+“Try it in the reducing flame, Dick,” he suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Dick did it. With the tip of the blowpipe withdrawn
+just outside of the candle flame he held the yellow glass
+bead inside of the tip of the inner cone of combustion
+that is intensified by this manner of blowing. Almost at
+once the bead turned a brownish color, and Dick carefully
+withdrew it to see what the cooling reaction would be.
+The change which took place was marvelous and very<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span>
+beautiful. As it lost its heat the little bead turned to a
+brilliant chrome green.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve got it!” snapped Purdick. “Larry, look in the
+index for vanadinite!”</p>
+
+<p>Larry searched, found, turned to the proper page.</p>
+
+<p>“It says that vanadates, in the absence of other colored
+metallic compounds, may be detected by their reaction
+with borax and salt of phosphorus before the blowpipe—and
+goes on to describe just what we’ve been looking at.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hooray!” Dick applauded, “a vanadium mine! This
+begins to look like business. Think you could find the
+place again, Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sure I can,” was the ready answer. “It’s about
+a mile back over our trail of to-day. You remember
+when we were coming along on that little mesa bench
+above the creek, and I scrambled down the slope to get
+a drink and joined you again about a quarter of a mile
+farther along? Well, that was the place—right along
+the creek.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll go back there to-morrow morning, shan’t we,
+Larry?” Dick asked. “If this stuff is there in any workable
+quantity we ought at least to stake off a claim.
+What’s vanadium worth as an alloy for tool steel and
+such?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry took a well-thumbed little note-book from the
+pocket of his shirt and consulted it.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t know what it’s worth now; but a while back,
+ferrovanadium, carrying thirty-five to fifty per cent. of
+vanadium, ran from two dollars and a half to five and a
+half a pound—some valuable little metal, I’ll say!”</p>
+
+<p>“It sure is!” exclaimed Purdick, with his eyes widening.
+“If we can only find enough of it to make it worth<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>
+while.... I wish I’d had sense enough to look around
+a little when I found that bit. But I didn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind; there’s another day coming,” said
+Larry, “or if there isn’t, all the vanadium in the world
+won’t make any difference to us or to anybody,” and he
+began to fix the fire for the night and to unroll the blankets,
+while Dick put the testing apparatus away in its
+leather carrying case.</p>
+
+<p>Their camping place for that night was in a small
+pocket gulch rimming in a little flat watered by a trickling
+rill that dripped over a low cliff at the back of the pocket.
+The flat afforded good grazing for the pack animals,
+there was wood on the rocky slopes for the fire, and red-fir
+tips for the beds.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, while Purdick was getting breakfast,
+Larry and Dick prepared the notices to post on the vanadium
+claim, leaving blanks in which to write in the boundaries
+and landmarks when they should determine what
+they were. As Larry was sharpening the stakes to be
+driven to mark the claim, Dick called attention to the
+narrow entrance to the pocket gulch, and said, “Say,
+Larry; what’s the matter with cutting one of those lodge-pole
+pines out of that clump up there and letting it fall
+across this doorway? That’ll make a corral out of the
+gulch, and we can leave the burros and the camp dunnage
+when we go back to stake off the claim. Everything will
+be perfectly safe here.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry looked up from his stake trimming. What Dick
+said was quite true. With a tree felled across the gulch
+entrance for a barrier, the burros wouldn’t stray, though
+of that there was little danger anyway, so long as there
+were grass and water in the pocket. As to the safety of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>
+the camp dunnage there was even less question. With
+the exception of a few abandoned prospect holes, the
+inter-mountain wilderness in which they had been tramping
+and camping for three weeks had yielded no signs of
+human occupancy, past or present. Still, Larry hesitated.
+The first of the unwritten laws of the camper in any
+region is never to separate himself very far from his
+supplies and his means of transportation.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know about that, Dick. Maybe I’m a lot too
+cautious, but——”</p>
+
+<p>“Pshaw!” Dick broke in, “everything will be as safe
+as a clock! We haven’t seen a sign of a human being
+for three weeks, and I’ll bet there isn’t one within forty
+miles of us this very minute. If we fix it so the jacks
+can’t stray off, there isn’t a thing that can happen. Besides,
+we may want to stay down there at that place of
+Purdy’s projecting around for a good part of the day,
+and if we do, we’ll have our camp ready to come back to
+without having to make it again.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re just too lazy to draw your breath, Dickie;
+that’s all that is the matter with you,” he said; but he
+didn’t offer any more objections to Dick’s plan, and
+after breakfast the tree was cut down to block the gulch
+entrance, and the three of them started back for the
+vanadium prospect, leaving the camp just as it was, save
+that they were woodsmen enough to put out the camp-fire,
+and thoughtful enough to wrap up the rifles and
+the dunnage and put the packs oh top of a flat boulder
+where the jacks wouldn’t trample on them in their grazing
+ramblings. For the day’s work they carried only a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>
+pick, a shovel, the geologist’s hammer and the short-handled
+axe.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding Purdick’s confident assertion, it proved
+to be a good bit more than a mile back to the mesa foot
+where he had picked up the bit of vanadinite. Worse
+than that, after they reached the approximate place he
+found that he couldn’t identify the spot where he had
+found the specimen. It was a limestone outcrop, and
+there was a stretch of a quarter of a mile or so along the
+creek edge where one place looked very much like another.</p>
+
+<p>So, when the time came for them to sit down and eat
+the noon snack they had brought with them, they were
+still looking for the deposit of which the specimen was
+a fragment and were beginning to wonder why it was
+so hard to find.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re a hoodoo, Purdy,” said Dick, joshing the
+town-bred one. “Are you right sure it was yesterday,
+and not the day before, when you picked up that piece of
+stuff?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I am!” was the indignant reply. “And it
+was right along here, too. If I’d had any idea it was
+ore——” He stopped short and made a dive for something
+lying at his feet. “There!” he broke out triumphantly,
+“here’s another piece of it, right now!”</p>
+
+<p>There was no mistaking the fact. There are few crystals
+in the world more beautiful than those of the lead
+vanadates, and once seen, they are not easily forgotten.
+The newly found fragment was evidently a chip off the
+same block, as Dick put it, and, hurriedly finishing the
+snack, they renewed their search for the “mother vein.”</p>
+
+<p>After all, the vein or deposit was not so hard to locate,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>
+now that they knew where to look for it. Of course,
+they had no means of ascertaining the extent of the
+deposit or its commercial value, if it had any, in a place
+so remote from civilization. None the less, they staked
+it off accurately, located it as well as they could on the
+Geodetic Survey map upon which they were carefully
+tracing their wandering course from day to day, and
+posted the notice, protecting it as well as they could by
+digging a niche in the shaley cliff and pegging the notice
+at the back of it where it would be at least a little sheltered
+from the weather.</p>
+
+<p>All this business of stepping off and measuring, and
+finding landmarks, and making a sketch of the mesa and
+creek bottom, and searching carefully over the surrounding
+area for other possible deposits of the mineral, took
+most of the afternoon. And after all was done, Larry
+was pessimistic enough to say that it was probably a day
+wasted.</p>
+
+<p>“I did a good bit of reading-up on these rare metals
+last week while we were waiting for Mr. Starbuck,” he
+said, “and from what I could learn, the reduction processes—getting
+the metal out of the ore—is the long end
+of the pole with all of them; vanadium and all the rest.
+So, unless your mine is big enough to warrant the building
+of a reduction plant on the spot—and not many of
+them are—you’re up against the proposition of transporting
+a ton of the stuff to some chemical works, and
+out of the ton they’ll get maybe a pound or so of the
+metal.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Dick, “what of that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Use your old bean,” Larry invited. “Suppose your
+vanadium is worth five dollars and a half a pound—which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>
+is the highest price I found quoted. We’re at least
+forty miles from the nearest railroad, which means forty
+miles of jack-freighting for the ore. How far would
+five dollars and a half, or twice or three times that much,
+go toward paying the cost of jack-freighting a ton of
+stuff over forty miles of no-trail-at-all?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, gosh!” said Dick. “When it comes to throwing
+cold water, you can beat a hydraulic mining outfit! Let’s
+go back to camp and cook us a real supper. I’m hungry
+enough to eat a piece of boiled dog. We can come back
+to-morrow with the tools and dig the ten-foot deep ‘discovery’
+hole that we’ll have to make before we can record
+the claim.”</p>
+
+<p>The return mile-and-considerable-more seemed even
+longer now than it had in the morning. In the search
+for the vanadium deposit they had done a good deal of
+scrambling and climbing, and the mild excitement of the
+search had kept them from realizing how much ground
+they were covering.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll bet you couldn’t wake me with a dynamite blast
+after I turn in to-night,” Dick was saying as they approached
+the entrance to the pocket gulch, “and I wouldn’t
+lug this pick another mile if it was the only one in the
+world. But see here! What’s been happening?”</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the pine-tree which had been felled
+to block the entrance to the pocket gulch, and it looked
+as if somebody had driven an army truck over it. Its
+branches were broken down and twisted off, and the
+trunk itself was scarred and barked as if the suppositious
+truck wheels had been shod with spurs.</p>
+
+<p>Thoroughly alarmed at the evidence of so much violence,
+they forgot their weariness and hurried on into<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span>
+the gulch. What they found when they reached the
+camp site was as appalling as it was bewildering. The
+packs had been dragged from the top of the big flat rock
+where they had left them in the morning and were literally
+torn to pieces, with their contents scattered all over
+the place; that is, what wasn’t gone was scattered.</p>
+
+<p>For when they came to look, they found that many
+things were missing. The entire stock of bacon was
+gone, the flour and meal sacks had been torn open and
+their holdings spilled and trampled into the ground, the
+few boxes of hard biscuits they had been saving against
+a bread emergency had been broken open and rifled, the
+salt lay in the ashes of the camp-fire, the sugar was gone,
+and the cotton sack in which it had been carried looked
+as if it had been ground through a sausage mill; in short,
+all the food supplies they had, excepting only those that
+were in tight tin cans, had been either stolen or destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>“Well!—of all the blithering earthquakes!” Dick
+gasped. “Who or what under the sun would do a thing
+like this to us?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry did not speak. His eyes were blazing, and he
+seemed to be holding his breath. Deep down inside of
+him the Donovan temper, a wild, Berserk rage that had
+given him no end of trouble in his boyhood, was struggling
+to get the upper hand. But little Purdick was still
+able to talk.</p>
+
+<p>“And even this isn’t the worst of it!” he said. “The
+burros are gone!”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI<br>
+<small>SHORT RATIONS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">After the first burst of wrathful astoundment at
+finding their camp wrecked and looted, the three
+victims of whatever fury it was that had visited the
+gorge in their absence began to count up their losses.</p>
+
+<p>It was the food losses, of course, that were the most
+serious. Purdick, in his capacity of camp cook, knelt to
+gather up what he could of the scattered flour and corn
+meal, but there wasn’t very much of either that could be
+salvaged. While Purdick was trying to save some of
+the eatables, Larry and Dick reassembled the scattered
+dunnage and camp equipment, endeavoring to make some
+estimate of the length and breadth of the disaster.</p>
+
+<p>“Just see here!” said Dick, picking up the mineralogy
+book which was lying open and face down at some distance
+from the general wreck, with a lot of the leaves
+partly torn out. “What would anybody but a maniac
+want to treat a book like that for?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was overhauling the blankets and pack wrappings.</p>
+
+<p>“You can search me,” he gritted. “I can’t tell you
+that—any more than I can tell you why these blankets
+are all cut and slashed in holes. It must have been either
+a maniac or a devil!”</p>
+
+<p>“A mighty hungry devil,” Purdick put in. “There<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>
+isn’t a smell of the bacon left, and we’re shy on everything
+but the canned stuff.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t imagine a man, or any bunch of men, mean
+enough to treat us this way!” Dick raged. “Why, it’s
+simply savage!”</p>
+
+<p>By this time Larry had got the Berserk Donovan temper
+measurably in hand again.</p>
+
+<p>“Gather up, fellows, and let’s see where we land,” he
+said shortly. “The milk’s spilt and there’s no use crying
+over it. How about the eats, Purdy; what have we got
+left?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick checked the commissary remains off on his
+fingers.</p>
+
+<p>“A few cans of tomatoes and peaches and pressed
+potato chips, the can of coffee, enough of the flour and
+meal to make us two or three eatings of pan-bread, and
+one can of corned beef. That’s about all: and there’s
+no salt and no sugar.”</p>
+
+<p>“Suffering cats!” Dick exclaimed. “And we’re at
+least forty miles from anywhere! Good land, Larry;
+don’t you suppose we could trail these robbers when it
+comes daylight again and fight it out with them?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was examining the leather carrying case in
+which the simple testing apparatus, the blowpipe, charcoal,
+and the few chemicals were packed. The case had
+not been broken open, but the stout leather was scratched
+and gashed as if some one had tried to cut into it with a
+dull knife.</p>
+
+<p>“You say ‘robbers,’ Dick,” he said thoughtfully. “I
+guess there was only one robber. Look at these cuts on
+this case. What kind of a knife do you suppose it was
+that made them?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span></p>
+
+<p>He passed the leather case over to his two companions.
+The deep scars were roughly parallel and five in
+number. Dick was the first to understand. “A bear!” he
+gasped, “and a whopper, at that!”</p>
+
+<p>Larry nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I never heard of a grizzly being this far south. I’ve
+always understood that there were only a few of them
+left in the United States, and that those were away up
+around Yellowstone Park. But I’ll bet the robber was
+a grizzly, just the same. Look at the width of that paw!”</p>
+
+<p>“And look at the eats that are gone—only you can’t
+look at them,” Purdick chimed in. “He must have been
+empty clear down to his toes to get away with all that
+stuff. Do they eat everything they can chew?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mighty nearly everything—if it was a grizzly,” Dick
+offered.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s eyes widened. “I’m wondering now if he’s
+eaten our burros,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Not quite that bad, I guess,” Larry qualified. “He
+was probably too busy with our stuff here to pay any
+attention to the jacks. It’s most likely they got scared
+and bolted. They could get out, easily enough, over that
+broken pine.”</p>
+
+<p>“In that case, our first job is to go and round ’em up,
+while there’s daylight enough to track ’em,” Dick suggested.
+“Let’s take the guns, this time. It’s gnawing at
+my bones that we might just happen to run across Old
+Ephraim, and I wouldn’t mind trying to even things up
+a bit with the old scoundrel.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure, we’ll take the guns,” Larry agreed. “Whereabouts
+are they?”</p>
+
+<p>That was a question which apparently didn’t mean to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>
+get itself answered—not in any hurry, at least. The
+guns had been wrapped in the packs; they were all three
+sure of that. But now they were nowhere to be found;
+and since one discovery leads to others of a like nature,
+they were not long in finding out that the cartridge belts
+had disappeared with the rifles.</p>
+
+<p>“That looks pretty bad,” said Larry, after they had
+searched all around the flat boulder upon which the packs
+had been left in the morning. “A bear wouldn’t steal
+three Winchesters and all the ammunition we had.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the answer?” Dick demanded anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Sort it out for yourself,” said Larry. “The bear
+couldn’t have taken them—that’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if some man or men were here, why wasn’t something
+else taken?”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps the man—or men—didn’t think there was
+anything else left worth carrying off,” Larry said; and
+then he repeated: “It looks pretty bad, fellows; looks as
+if somebody wanted to disarm us.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s jaw dropped.</p>
+
+<p>“There’s only one bunch that might want to make sure
+we couldn’t fight back—those three hold-ups,” he thrust
+in. “Do you suppose they’ve followed us away in here?”</p>
+
+<p>“We can suppose anything we like,” Larry answered.
+“There’s sure room enough. But let’s see if we can find
+those jacks. That’s the first thing to do. I only hope the
+gun-stealers haven’t run them off—stolen them, too.”</p>
+
+<p>In the absence of any real weapons the three armed
+themselves as they could, Larry taking the axe, Purdick
+the geologist’s hammer, and Dick, knocking the pick from
+its handle, took the handle for a club. Just beyond the
+felled pine they picked up the burros’ tracks, and were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>
+somewhat relieved when they found, from the distance
+between the hoofprints showing the length of the stride,
+that the little animals had left the gulch on a “dead”
+run.</p>
+
+<p>“It was a bear-scared runaway, and not a man-steal,”
+Larry announced confidently, when they had measured
+the length of the strides, “and if that guess is right, we’ll
+find them before long. They wouldn’t run very far.
+That’s one good thing about a jack; he isn’t a panicky
+beast, whatever else he may be.”</p>
+
+<p>This comforting conclusion had its fulfilment before
+they had followed the burro tracks very far up the valley
+of which their camp gulch was an offshoot. The two
+burros were found quietly grazing in a little patch of
+short-grass, and when they were herded, it was no trouble
+to drive them back, though they did exhibit some signs
+of alarm when they were urged over the broken tree and
+into the small gulch.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess the bear scent is still here—for them,” Dick
+suggested. “I shouldn’t wonder if we had to hobble them
+to keep them in here overnight.”</p>
+
+<p>Back at the scene of the wreck, they made a fire, and
+little Purdick prepared to do what he could toward getting
+a supper out of the remnants. It turned out to be
+a Barmecidal feast—if that means that it lacked the chief
+essential of a camp meal—which is quantity. Though
+they were all as hungry as they had a right to be after
+the day of hard tramping and searching, they ate sparingly,
+knowing that they were likely to be hungrier still
+before they could hope to reach any base of supplies.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pretty silent meal, taking it all around. In a
+single day their plans for the remainder of the summer<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>
+had been knocked into a cocked hat, so to speak. As
+they had prefigured things, they had meant to work around
+to the small mining-camp of Shotgun in the southern
+Hophras by the latter third of July; to renew their supplies
+there; and to spend the remainder of the vacation in
+exploring the eastern hogbacks and slopes of the Little
+Hophras. But that was impossible now.</p>
+
+<p>“Shotgun’s at least sixty miles from here,” Larry said,
+measuring the distance on the Government map which
+he had spread out on one of the slashed blankets, “and we
+can hardly hope to make any such hike as that on what
+little grub we have left.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Dick assented promptly. “But what else can
+we do?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was tracing a line straight to the west from their
+assumed position on the map.</p>
+
+<p>“It is less than thirty-five miles from here to Natrolia
+on the railroad—in a direct line,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but Natrolia—and the railroad—are on the
+other side of the range!” Dick protested.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Larry offered; “it’s six of one and a half-dozen
+of the other; sixty-odd miles over and among
+these little mountains—with no trail to follow, or half
+that distance over one big mountain—also with no trail
+that we know anything about.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m as green as grass, now that you’ve got me away
+from the streets and sidewalks,” Purdick put in, “but I
+should say it’s a question of the time either hike will take.
+How about that? We’ve grub enough, such as it is, for
+a couple of days, or maybe three, if we go on short commons.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a guess, either way,” Larry admitted. “We’ve<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span>
+been dawdling along so that we don’t really know what
+we could make on a sure-enough forced march.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is the best day’s distance we have covered, this
+far?” It was Purdick who wanted to know, and Dick
+answered him.</p>
+
+<p>“Not over seventeen or eighteen miles, at the most, I
+should say.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick nodded. “Say we can make twenty, by pushing
+the jacks a bit, and keep it up for three days. That
+would take us to this Shotgun place, or within a few
+hours’ march of it. Let me look over these canned remnants
+again,” and he suited the action to the word.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” queried Larry, when Purdick had made his
+estimate.</p>
+
+<p>“Bad medicine,” was the verdict. “There’s enough of
+the stuff to go round if we spread it thin, but we can’t
+march very hard on tomatoes and peaches and dried potato
+chips. There’s one little can of corned beef, but
+that will give us only a taste apiece for one meal. And
+as to the flour and corn-meal, you can see where we stand
+when I tell you that I used half of what I could scrape
+up for our suppers to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was shaking his head again. “I’m afraid it’s
+the short cut over the mountain for ours. It’s just as
+you say, Purdy; we can’t march very far on half-rations.
+Let’s see what we can get out of this Survey map for
+information about routes and altitudes.”</p>
+
+<p>For some little time they pored studiously over the
+excellent map. There were no trails marked in the direction
+in which they would be forced to go to reach Natrolia,
+and no passes in the range named as such. All they
+could do was to go by the altitude contour lines, and the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span>
+lowest marking they could find that was anywhere near
+in the direct line was something over 9,000 feet. Since
+the altitude of their camp was about 6,000 feet, that
+meant a climb of more than 3,000 feet straight up through
+a trackless wilderness, and a descent of the same or a
+greater distance on the other side of the range.</p>
+
+<p>“Looks pretty tough, fellows,” said Dick, after they
+had made the map tell them all it could, “but I guess we’re
+in for it. I vote for Natrolia.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess I do, too,” Larry agreed, though not with any
+great amount of enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick grinned. “I’m in the hands of my
+friends,” he said. “If you two say we’ve got to climb
+the ladder, I’m with you as long as I last.” And then,
+as they were preparing to turn in early so as to get an
+early start: “Any danger of that grizzly coming back in
+the night, do you reckon?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry laughed. “I guess not; not if he’s eaten all you
+say he has. If he comes, we’ll do like the darkey did
+with the mule—twis’ his tail. You can roll in between
+Dick and me, Purdy. That’ll give him something to
+chew on before he gets to you.”</p>
+
+<p>It was after they had made up the fire for the night,
+and were burrowing in the torn blankets, that Purdick
+said: “Seems to me we’re dismissing this business of
+the hold-ups a lot too easily. If those fellows are going
+to follow us around all summer, we’ll never know what
+minute is going to be the next. Now that they’ve got
+our war stuff, what’s to prevent them from dropping
+down on us any old time and taking the maps away from
+us?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just one little thing,” Larry answered. “If they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>
+think we know where the Golden Spider is—and if you
+heard their talk straight that night in Lost Canyon,
+that’s what they do think—they’ll wait and let us find it
+for them. They’ve taken the guns to make sure that we
+can’t put up a fight when the time comes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said Dick; “if they’ve been following us for
+three weeks and haven’t yet found out that we’re not
+looking for any Golden Spider, they haven’t much sense;
+I’ll say that much for them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you suppose they came here before the bear had
+torn us up, or afterward?” Purdick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“That is something we’ll probably never know. Better
+forget it and go by-by. If we haven’t a hard day ahead
+of us to-morrow, I’ll miss my guess. Good-night.” This
+from Larry, and he set the good example by turning
+over and going to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>When they roused up at daybreak the next morning
+they found that the weather, which during the three
+weeks of tramping and camping had been as perfect as
+mountain summer weather can be, had changed remarkably
+during the night. The sky was overcast, and among
+the higher peaks of the Little Hophras a storm was
+raging.</p>
+
+<p>“More bad medicine,” said Larry, struggling out of
+his blankets to liven up the camp-fire. “If that storm
+moves a little farther south, we’re likely to run square
+into it as we climb. Hustle us a bite to eat, Purdy, and
+Dick and I will saddle the jacks. We can’t get too sudden
+a start.”</p>
+
+<p>The breakfast, what little there was of it, was eaten
+hurriedly; and with the faint echoes of the distant thunder
+coming down to them like the almost inaudible beating<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>
+of a great drum, they made their way out of the
+camp gulch, setting a course due west by Dick’s pocket
+compass, and beginning the forced march.</p>
+
+<p>For an hour or so it was not so difficult. Though they
+had thought that the scattered buttes among which they
+had been prospecting for the past few days were the foot-hills
+of the Little Hophras, they soon found that they
+were not, and the forenoon was half gone before they
+reached the true foot-hills and began the actual ascent
+of the range.</p>
+
+<p>During this interval the storm, or a series of storms,
+had continued to rage among the higher steeps, and they
+knew, in reason, that much water must be falling on
+those lofty slopes. Of this they soon began to have dismaying
+proof in the rapid rising of the streams they had
+to cross from time to time; and one creek in particular—the
+one through whose canyon-like gorge they hoped to
+find a path to the upper heights—was running like a mill-race.
+At the mouth of the canyon, Larry called a halt.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know about tackling this thing with all the
+water that is coming down through that slit, fellows,”
+he said doubtfully. “If it rises much higher it’ll fill the
+canyon from wall to wall.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, we can make it, all right,” said Dick, always the
+venturesome one of the three. “It’ll be a cold day if we
+can’t find room for our feet and two toy-sized jacks.
+Heave ahead.”</p>
+
+<p>Now a canyon, as everybody knows, is at first a sheer
+chasm worn down through the rock by the stream for
+which it is the outlet. But in most canyons age-long
+erosion and the action of frost have thrown down more
+or less detritus from the walls to form a sort of dump<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>
+or talus on one or both sides of the waterway, so, when
+the stream is low enough, the canyon becomes navigable,
+so to speak, for a man afoot or for a sure-footed pack
+animal.</p>
+
+<p>The small canyon which the three were now entering
+was no exception to the rule. At the entrance the talus
+on the right-hand bank of the stream was broad enough
+to have afforded room for a wagon road, and it so continued
+as far up the gorge as they could see from the
+portal. The danger, if there were any, could only come
+through a tumble into the stream which, though not as
+yet so very deep, roared and thundered among the boulders
+in its bed in a muddy torrent that would have made
+short work of man or beast if either were unlucky enough
+to fall into its clutches.</p>
+
+<p>For a half-mile or so they stumbled on in single file
+over the sloping talus, which still stayed on their own
+side of the torrent, and still afforded a footway, precarious
+enough, in all conscience, but nevertheless practicable.
+It was at the third turn in the crooked pathway
+that Larry, who had been studiously watching the stream
+as they went along, stuck in another word of caution,
+shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the
+flood.</p>
+
+<p>“The water’s rising every minute!” he exclaimed. “It
+must be raining cats and dogs up there on the higher
+levels. If a little cloudburst should happen along right
+now, we’d be trapped like so many gophers in a hole.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sure does begin to look that way,” Dick called back.
+“Let’s push on faster and see if we can’t find a place to
+hang up until the creek begins to fall a bit. It can’t rain
+up yonder forever.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span></p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, they tried the pushing expedient, and kept
+it up until they came within a hair’s breadth of losing one
+of the jacks. The little animal—it happened to be the
+rearmost one of the two—stepped on a loose stone, slipped,
+scrambled frantically to regain its footing, and ended by
+falling heavily on its side with its feet fairly in the rising
+torrent. Dick, who was next in the Indian-file procession,
+“motivated” instantly, as a psychologist would say.
+With a quick leap he sprang upon the fallen burro’s head
+and got a death grip on its hackamore leading halter.
+Larry and Purdick closed in quickly, and a three-man
+lift got the laden animal upon its feet again. But it
+was a close call.</p>
+
+<p>“That settles it,” Larry commented, after the little adventure
+had been made to end without disaster. “We
+can’t hurry the jacks in such going as this. If we do
+we’ll lose both of ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess you’re right,” Dick conceded; “as right as
+the rain that’s bringing this creek up so fast.” And
+thereupon they began to feel their way more circumspectly.</p>
+
+<p>But care isn’t the only thing that is necessary in taking
+a hazard; a little foresight is sometimes a lot more needful.
+It was unquestionable now that the torrent was
+mounting fast; getting bigger by leaps and bounds. And
+as it rose, the talus pathway grew narrower and narrower,
+until at last the Indian-file procession was squeezing
+itself flat against the right-hand rock wall to keep
+out of the water. When this came about, even Dick
+began to lose his nerve.</p>
+
+<p>“We’d better turn back and get out of this!” he called
+over his shoulder to Larry, who was bringing up the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>
+rear. “We’ll never get past that next shoulder—never in
+this world!”</p>
+
+<p>It did look dubious—more than dubious. Just ahead
+of them the canyon made a sharp elbow turn around a
+jutting cliff, and the stream, forced almost to reverse
+itself in the acute angle, was tearing the talus away in
+huge mouthfuls as it surged back from its plunge against
+the opposite cliff. As they stopped to look ahead, it
+became evident that in a very few minutes there wouldn’t
+be any talus left. But when they looked the other way,
+down the perilous path over which they had just come,
+they saw at once that their retreat was wholly cut off. In
+one place behind them the shelving slope had been entirely
+washed away and there was no footing left.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve got to make that turn ahead!” Larry yelled,
+and, squeezing himself past Dick, Purdick and the trembling
+jacks, he took the lead, dragging manfully at Fishbait’s
+halter, and shouting at the others to come on.</p>
+
+<p>It was touch and go. As they approached the elbow
+turn the loose-piled, rocky débris under foot seemed to
+be dissolving into soft mush, and little Purdick, who was
+now at the tail end of things, went in almost to the tops
+of his lace boots. To make matters worse, the air was
+suddenly filled with a hoarse, murmuring roar that was
+deeper and more terrifying than the thunder of the augmented
+torrent. Purdick didn’t know what it was, but
+the other two did. Dick dropped back and pushed Purdick
+into the second place.</p>
+
+<p>“Keep going!” he panted. “There’s a cloud-burst flood
+coming down the canyon, and if we can’t turn that corner
+and find standing room beyond it, we’re goners!”</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately—how fortunately they were soon to realize—the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>
+corner was turned successfully, and on the upper
+side of the jutting cliff there was not only safer footing:
+there was a small side gulch coming down steeply into
+the main canyon. Up this gulch to higher ground they
+urged the stumbling burros, and even as they did it, the
+murmuring roar grew louder and the solid earth seemed
+to be trembling under their feet.</p>
+
+<p>Shouting, pulling, hauling and working like maniacs,
+they pushed and dragged the two pack animals up to the
+very head of the little side gulch, and they barely had
+done it when a wall of water, mountain high, it seemed
+to them, and black with débris and forest wreckage, came
+sweeping down the main gorge, rolling great boulders,
+hogshead size, before it as if they were pebbles. And
+with the terrifying flood, as if borne on its crest, came a
+dank wind that sucked up into the small side gulch as it
+passed, chilling the three who were bracing themselves to
+hold the burros—and their own footing—like the breath
+from an ice cavern.</p>
+
+<p>Like a good many of nature’s cataclysms, a cloud-burst
+flood does not last forever. While they were still shivering
+from the effect of the passing blast, the deafening
+roar withdrew into the down-canyon distances, and in a
+few minutes the waters began to subside.</p>
+
+<p>“A little of that goes a long way, especially when a
+fellow hasn’t had much breakfast to start out with,” said
+Larry with grim humor. Then: “I hope we’re all of us
+as thankful as we ought to be. If that flood had caught
+us anywhere between here and the mouth of the canyon,
+we wouldn’t have known what hit us—at least, not one
+half-second after it did hit us.”</p>
+
+<p>“But Great Cats!” gasped little Purdick, whose teeth<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>
+were still chattering, “we’ll never get out of here, as it
+is! You know, well enough, that that flood hasn’t left us
+anything to walk on, either up-stream or down!”</p>
+
+<p>“Wait,” Larry said; and even as he spoke the water
+began to sink away as if by magic. In an incredibly short
+time the torrent had subsided, not only to its former
+level, but much below it—so much below it that, lacking
+a trail-path bank, the stream bed itself offered a practicable
+trail.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all to the good, I guess,” said Purdick, “only I’m
+not just used to seeing things happen this way. Back in
+my native land the rivers don’t scare you to death one
+minute and skip out of sight the next. Let’s go.”</p>
+
+<p>It was high noon and past when they won out into the
+upper region of thunder storms and cloud-bursts, and by
+that time the skies had cleared and there was nothing but
+a trickling rill here and there to tell of the late deluge.
+As nearly as they could judge, they had about fifteen
+hundred feet more of elevation to make before they could
+cross the range, and after a cold lunch of canned tomatoes
+and the remains of the pan-bread that Purdick had
+baked at breakfast-time, they attacked the final ascent.</p>
+
+<p>On this part of the climb they were obliged to become
+pathfinders in grim earnest. There was no sign of a
+trail, and again and again they found themselves in a
+<i lang="fr">cul de sac</i>; up against cliffy heights that no mountain
+goat could climb, much less a loaded pack animal. Luckily
+they had no snow of any consequence to contend with.
+The three added weeks of summer sunshine had taken it
+all save the deep drifts in the gulches, and these were
+melting rapidly. But the zig-zagging and exploring, the
+tramping up and down and back and forth in the effort<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span>
+to find a practicable trail to the summit, tried them to
+the utmost.</p>
+
+<p>It was after nightfall when they finally topped the
+range, and they could see nothing of what lay before
+them for the next day. But as to that they were too
+tired to care. Purdick made coffee over an alcohol candle,
+and they opened two of the four cans of peaches, agreeing
+to save the potato chips and the corned beef for a greater
+emergency. Eating in silence because they were too weary
+and exhausted to talk, they nearly fell asleep over the
+meagre meal; and as soon as it was swallowed, they
+rolled themselves in their blankets under the lee of the
+only big rock they could find on the bleak mountain top,
+and were asleep in much less time than it takes to tell it.</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps just as well for their peace of mind
+that all three of them were much too tired to dream
+dreams or see visions. Or to travel in their astral bodies,
+as the old necromancers used to say a dreamer did. Because,
+in that case, they might have seen, at no great
+distance to the north of where they had made their
+hazardous and heart-breaking ascent of the mountain, a
+perfectly good trail leading up and over and down to the
+railroad town of Natrolia on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>Also, they might have seen, camping in an outpost
+grove of the timber beside this good trail, and only a
+little way from the summit of the pass over which it led,
+three men, one of whom was poking up the coals of the
+camp-fire with the end of a crutch, to the better cooking
+of a panful of bacon slices, saying, as he poked: “It’s all
+right, I tell yuh! They’ll make f’r the Shotgun camp
+after more grub, and we can stock up at Natrolia and
+beat ’em back to the Buttes by two good days, at least.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>
+Yuh can’t lose me in this neck o’ woods, Tom Dowling.
+If yuh wasn’t solid bone from the neck up, yuh’d have
+found that out long ago. Artill’ry? Nix, they won’t
+load up with no more shootin’-irons at Shotgun. ’At’s
+one thing old man Shanklin at the Shotgun Mine don’t
+let nobody sell on his reservation.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII<br>
+<small>TOMATOES AND PEACHES</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">Pretty stiff from their forced march and the chill
+of the night spent on the cold mountain top without
+fire, the three castaways—for so they were now calling
+themselves—were up with the dawn. Now that they
+had daylight to show them their surroundings, they saw
+that by going a little farther along the mountain to the
+left they might have camped in timber and had wood for
+a fire.</p>
+
+<p>“More spilt milk,” Dick lamented when he saw how
+they had missed what little comfort they might have had.
+“I guess we are more or less tenderfoots yet.” And then
+he went over to the clump of dwarfed trees and gathered
+some wood for the coffee fire, coffee being the only thing
+they had to cook.</p>
+
+<p>Inasmuch as they were by this time pretty well starved
+out on a diet of tomatoes and peaches, they agreed to
+call this breakfast on the mountain top the emergency
+they had been economizing for; so Purdick opened the
+can of corned beef and served it with potato chips. Fortified
+by a breakfast which was at least stimulating in
+quality, even if it did lack something in quantity, they
+prepared for the descent of the western slope.</p>
+
+<p>From the western brow of the mountain they had a
+magnificent view of the world at large, as Dick phrased<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>
+it: mountains and plains, and then more mountains and
+plains, stretching away almost to infinity and backgrounded
+in the dim distance by the serrated range of
+the San Miguels. But it was the immediate foreground
+that interested them most. At the foot of the peak upon
+which they were standing there was a range of hogback
+hills, looking, from their height, no larger than a plow-turned
+furrow in the landscape; and just beyond the
+hogback, on the edge of a bare plain that was exactly the
+color of well-tanned buckskin, lay the little cattle-shipping
+station of Natrolia, a collection of odd-shaped dots, with
+one round dot larger than the rest which they took to
+be the railroad water tank.</p>
+
+<p>“There she is,” said Dick. “If we only had an aeroplane,
+or even a bunch of gliders, it wouldn’t take us
+very long to coast down there. It looks as if a good
+gun ought to be able to drop a bullet on that water tank
+from here.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a lot farther than it looks,” Larry put in.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you know it!” said Purdick; and then: “Say,
+isn’t that a railroad train just coming into the town?”</p>
+
+<p>What he was pointing at looked like a tiny worm barely
+moving along a dimly defined line on the borders of the
+buckskin plain, and trailing off from the head of the
+worm there was a thin black smudge—the smoke from
+the engine’s stack.</p>
+
+<p>“Our east-bound Flyer,” Dick said, naming the train.
+Then: “It doesn’t seem believable that that crawling
+worm of a thing will be in Brewster by dinner-time this
+evening, does it? But we can’t stay here all morning
+admiring the scenery, grand as it is,” he went on. “Which
+way do we aim for the go-down, Larry—north or south?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span></p>
+
+<p>The question was asked because it was perfectly apparent
+that they had to aim either one way or the other in
+order to find a place where the descent could be made.
+In the straight-ahead line there was nothing doing. As
+far as they could see in either direction—which wasn’t
+very far because the mountain summit was as crooked
+as a snake—the western slope was as near to being an
+abrupt precipice as it could be and still figure as a slope.</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head, and it surely was a tricksy fate
+that led him to say: “There doesn’t seem to be much
+choice; perhaps we’d better go south.” This when, all
+unknown to them, less than half a mile distant to the
+north lay that excellent trail by which they could have
+reached Natrolia early in the afternoon—and by so doing
+would have changed the entire complexion of any number
+of things.</p>
+
+<p>But of the trail and its possibilities they knew nothing,
+so they turned—fatefully, as we say—to the southward,
+skirting the brow of the mountain, without gaining a
+single foot of descent, for two long hours before they
+came to a slope which seemed at all practicable for the
+burros. Even then their progress was exasperatingly
+slow. Time and again one of the jacks would slip and
+roll down into some gulch from which it took no end of
+time and labor to rescue it; and when that didn’t happen,
+they would be heading canyons too steep to be crossed,
+or going a mile or so out of their way to find a gulch
+through which they could chimney down from one bench
+of the great mountain to another.</p>
+
+<p>Struggling manfully with all these difficulties, and even
+cutting out the noon halt to save time, night overtook
+them long before they were low enough down to get<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>
+another sight of the Natrolia hogback, and they had to
+camp.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank goodness, we’re down in the grass altitudes
+again, anyway,” said Dick as he pulled the packs from
+the burros’ backs and turned the little beasts loose to
+graze. “I don’t know how long a jack can go without
+feeding, but we’ve certainly given Fishbait and Lop-ear
+a tough siege of it since yesterday noon.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry grinned. “‘A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous
+kind,’ doesn’t it?” he quoted. “Nothing like an empty
+tummy to make you sympathize with other things that
+can’t get enough to eat. How about it, Purdy? Where
+do we land for supper?”</p>
+
+<p>“Tomatoes and peaches. I’ll cook the tomatoes, if
+you’d rather have ’em hot.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my suffering ancestors!” Dick groaned. “I’ll
+never be able to look a peach-tree or a tomato-vine in the
+face after this! I’m as hollow as the biggest bass drum
+that was ever built, and you tell me you’ll pass me a plate
+of sloppy peaches with tomatoes on the side! Let’s have
+a barbecue and roast old Fishbait.”</p>
+
+<p>They joked one another about it over the camp-fire, as
+good sportsmen should, but the hard work and slender
+fare were really beginning to take hold. And the worst
+of it was, the battle wasn’t won yet; a fact upon which
+Larry enlarged to Dick after the camp-fire had been back-logged
+for the night, and Purdick, once more wearied to
+the point of collapse, was asleep in his blankets.</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t want to load Purdy up any heavier than he
+is loaded already,” was the way Larry began on the disturbing
+fact, “but I have a horrible suspicion that we
+are a good way from Natrolia and a fresh supply of eats<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span>
+yet. I’ve been kind of keeping tab on our side-steppings
+all day, and we’ve made a pretty stiff lot of southing.
+Don’t you think so?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know it,” Dick replied gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re still up to it, aren’t you?” Larry asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Up to another day of it, I guess, though I’ll have to
+confess that I don’t feel much thicker than a sheet of
+paper through the middle.”</p>
+
+<p>“My fix, too,” said Larry. “But that’s all right; we’re
+tough and we can stand it. Purdy’s the lad I’m worrying
+about. Did you notice that he was eating almost
+nothing at supper?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick nodded. “You’d say a fellow couldn’t possibly
+starve past the getting-hungry point on two days of short
+rations; but Purdy isn’t normal yet—not outdoor normal.
+We’ll have to watch him to-morrow, and if we see he’s
+breaking, we’ll just dump one of the burro loads and
+make him ride.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head. “You don’t know Purdy as
+well as I do. That little rat is the clearest kind of grit,
+all the way through. He’ll drop dead in his tracks before
+he’ll ever let us help him over the bumps.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said Dick, spreading his blankets for the night.
+“When the time comes, we won’t ask his royal permission.
+We’ll just hog-tie him on old Fishbait’s back, if
+we have to. Good-night. I’m going to dream of all the
+good things there are to eat in this world.”</p>
+
+<p>The morning of the third day of enforced abstinence
+dawned as beautifully as nearly all of their mornings
+had, thus far, and for breakfast they finished the canned
+things and—figuratively speaking at least—licked the
+cans. Purdick seemed all right again after his night’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>
+rest, but neither Dick nor Larry guessed what an effort
+he had to make to swallow his small share of the peaches
+and tomatoes.</p>
+
+<p>“Feeling equal to a few more miles this morning,
+Purdy?” Larry asked, as they were putting the pack
+saddles on the burros.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m still staying with you,” returned the small one
+gamely. Then: “You mustn’t worry about me, Larry.
+There have been times in the past when I had to go short
+on the eats for a good deal more than two days hand-running,
+and I never thought anything of it. I’ll get
+my second wind, after a little.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not worrying,” said Larry; but that was not
+strictly true.</p>
+
+<p>With a start fairly made, Dick took careful compass
+bearings, utilizing every open space they came to as a
+lookout from which to determine, if possible, the amount
+of southing they had made during the previous day. As
+the day wore on without bringing anything that looked
+like a familiar landmark into view, the case began to
+look rather desperate.</p>
+
+<p>By the middle of the afternoon they were down in a
+region of foot-hills, and the going was much easier; but
+though they still kept working persistently north and
+west, no gap in the hills opened to show them the buckskin-colored
+plain they had seen from the mountain top.
+By this time, Dick and Larry both were growing more
+than anxious about Purdick. Twice Dick had made that
+suggestion about unloading one of the jacks and turning
+it into a riding animal, but Purdick had stoutly fought
+the idea, saying that he was getting along all right. But
+both of his hardier companions could see plainly that he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>
+was putting one foot before the other by a sheer effort of
+will.</p>
+
+<p>At four o’clock Larry called a halt, ostensibly to let the
+burros feed upon a patch of luxuriant grass in the ravine
+they were at that time traversing, but really to give Purdick
+a chance to throw himself down and rest—which
+he promptly did. When it came time to go on again, the
+small one said his say briefly.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m all in, fellows,” he said. “You leave me a couple
+of the blankets and go on without me. When you find
+the town—if you ever do find it—you can come back
+after me. As things stand now, I’m only a drag on the
+wheels.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I think I see us leaving you!” Dick scoffed.
+“You’re going to get up and climb on old Fishbait’s back.
+We can’t be far from Natrolia now, and he’ll carry you
+all right.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick sat up and his pale cheeks flushed suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you take me for?” he snapped, but there
+was something suspiciously like a sob at the end of the
+snap. “I told you both before we came west that I was
+no good, and now I’m proving it. It—it just <em>kills</em> me to
+think that I can’t stand up and take things like other
+fellows—like you two do!” And with that, he whirled
+over and buried his face in the grass.</p>
+
+<p>Larry drew Dick aside and spoke in low tones.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s up to us,” he said. “He won’t ride, and I doubt
+if he could stick on the burro’s back if he tried. Stay
+here with him while I scout up to the top of that knob
+over there and see if I can find out where we are.”</p>
+
+<p>Left alone with Purdick, Dick sat down and waited.
+For a long five minutes Purdick lay on his face and made<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>
+no sign, but at last he turned over and raised himself on
+an elbow.</p>
+
+<p>“Where’s Larry?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Dick pointed. “There he is—climbing to the top of
+that hill for a look-see. Feeling any better?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick sat up and locked his fingers around his knees.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so mad I can’t see straight, Dick. It’s fierce to
+be tied down to a no-account body like mine. I’m not
+worth the powder it would take to blow me up!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, hold on!” Dick protested. “This has been a
+pretty stiff tug for all of us. I’m not feeling so very
+much of a much, myself, just now, and neither is Larry.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you’re not beefing about it, either of you,” Purdick
+put in.</p>
+
+<p>“Neither are you,” Dick asserted. “When it comes
+down to pure sand, you’ve got more than either of us.
+You’ve been tramping on sheer nerve, all day long. I
+know it, and Larry knows it.”</p>
+
+<p>By this time, Larry was coming back down the hill,
+and he didn’t look as if he had seen anything encouraging
+from the top of it.</p>
+
+<p>“What luck?” Dick asked; and Larry shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing but more hills and hollows. No sign of any
+plain, any town, or any railroad.”</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick heaved himself to his feet, getting up
+like a camel—one pair of joints at a time.</p>
+
+<p>“Come on,” he said. “There are only a few more
+hours of daylight left, and I’ll make myself last that
+long if it kills me.”</p>
+
+<p>When he said this, neither of the others tried to argue
+with him. They knew it wouldn’t do any good. So the
+line of march was taken up again, upon a course as nearly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>
+due north as the nature of the region would permit. By
+holding this direction they knew absolutely that they must
+come to the railroad, sooner or later; and once in touch
+with that, they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be very far from
+the town.</p>
+
+<p>Much to Dick’s surprise, though not so much to
+Larry’s—for Larry knew him best—Purdick held out
+bravely; and when it was finally decided that they must
+camp for the night, which they did just before dark,
+Purdick helped gather wood, and himself made the fire
+for the boiling of the coffee water: a final brewing of
+coffee being the only thing they had left in the stripped
+commissary.</p>
+
+<p>After the warm drink had been served out, and the
+jacks picketed for the night, there was nothing more to
+do, and they all turned in to let a long night’s sleep do
+what it would toward relieving the hunger ache and
+fitting them for another surge on the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>It was maybe a couple of hours later that Purdick,
+always a light sleeper, and now particularly so when even
+the slightest doze-off made him dream of banquets, found
+himself sitting bolt upright and listening to a noise that
+was not unlike the never-to-be-forgotten earth-shaking
+thunder of the cloud-burst in the canyon. While he was
+trying in a bewildered half daze to determine what it was,
+a bright glare of light flashed among the trees, the noise
+deepened to a crashing clamor that brought the two
+others out of their blankets with a bound, and all three
+of them saw, at a distance of not over two hundred yards
+at the farthest, a long passenger-train shooting past the
+mouth of the little ravine in which they were camped.</p>
+
+<p>“E-e-yow!” Dick yawned, as the noise scuttled away in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>
+the western distance. “Wouldn’t that pinch your ear
+good and hard? Here we stopped two short steps and a
+jig dance from the railroad track and never knew it!
+Listen!”</p>
+
+<p>What they heard this time was the mellow shout of a
+locomotive whistle blown in a station signal.</p>
+
+<p>“Natrolia,” said Larry. “And it can’t be more than a
+couple of miles away, at that! What time is it, Dick?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick, being nearest the firelight, looked at his wrist
+watch.</p>
+
+<p>“Five minutes of nine,” he announced.</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook himself out of his blankets and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m the biggest of the bunch—and the toughest, I
+guess. You two fellows lie down and take another cat-nap
+while I saunter into town and buy a few morsels of
+grub. If our whistle guess is right, I ought to be back
+inside of an hour.”</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there was a generous protest to this, urged
+immediately by both of the others, but Larry argued
+them down. There was no need of all going when one
+could easily bring out provisions for a single meal, and
+if they should all go, they’d have to take the jacks, making
+the tired beasts stumble along for whatever distance it
+might be over the ties and ballast of a railroad track in
+the dark. So Larry had his way and went alone, taking
+the haversack.</p>
+
+<p>Left to themselves, Purdick and Dick didn’t go to sleep
+again; they groped around and got more wood and built
+up a good fire so as to have a bed of cooking coals if
+Larry should happen to bring something that needed
+cooking. That done, they sat around and waited, and
+about the time they were thinking that Larry might possibly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span>
+have reached Natrolia, he came tramping back into
+the circle of firelight, with the haversack loaded to bursting
+dimensions, and with an armful of packages besides.</p>
+
+<p>“Already?” Dick shouted, jumping up to relieve the
+burden-bearer.</p>
+
+<p>“You said it. It’s less than a mile—just around the
+shoulder of this butte behind us. The store was shut,
+but I found the proprietor over at the hotel, and he opened
+up for me. Get out your pots and pans, Purdy. I’ve got
+some stuff here that’ll warm the cockles of your cookee
+heart.”</p>
+
+<p>Charles Purdick, Lawrence Donovan and Richard Maxwell,
+junior, may live to sit down to many banquets—at
+least we hope they may—but it is safe to say that that
+late supper, cooked and eaten under the stars in the little
+valley back of Natrolia, will always figure for them as
+the most gorgeous meal of a lifetime. Larry had not
+stinted his buying. There were potatoes to fry, and a
+thick, juicy beefsteak to be cut into squares and broiled
+on forked twigs, hunter fashion, before the fire, and more
+coffee to brew, with sugar to sweeten it and the unheard-of
+luxury of a can of condensed milk for cream, and
+bread—two loaves of good, home-made bread that the
+storekeeper’s wife had made Larry take when she heard
+his story of their starving time. And to top off with,
+Purdick fried flapjacks made out of the carton of prepared
+pancake flour that Larry had thoughtfully added
+to the haversack load.</p>
+
+<p>By all the rules of the eating game they should have
+made themselves beautifully sick, stuffing this way at the
+end of three days of short rations and no rations. But
+youth, Mother Nature, and a healthy, vigorous, outdoor<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>
+life—taking them all together—can sometimes defy all
+rules; and the only result of the big feed was to make
+the feeders sleep like logs; and even Purdick, the lightest
+sleeper of the three, didn’t awaken until a long freight
+train, clattering past on the near-by track a little after
+sunrise, aroused him.</p>
+
+<p>Being so near to Natrolia, they decided not to wait to
+cook a camp breakfast, and, loading the jacks, they trailed
+into the little cattle-shipping town, gave the burros a feed
+in the shipping corral, and then made an assault upon the
+so-called “hotel,” taking it by storm and putting away a
+breakfast of ham and eggs and potatoes and coffee and
+cakes with near-maple syrup quite as heartily as if the
+gorgeous banquet of the night before had already vanished
+into a limbo of dim but precious memories.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast came the re-stocking of provisions for
+a return to the field on the other side of the mountains,
+and from the genial, “old-timer” storekeeper who supplied
+them they learned that they had gone a long way around
+to miss a perfectly good and practicable trail over the
+Little Hophras; one which would take them back—as it
+would have brought them over—in something less than
+a day’s tramping.</p>
+
+<p>Dick laughed when the good-natured, bearded man
+behind the counter told them this. “I guess we ought to
+be bored for the hollow-horn, all of us, Mr. Wilkins,”
+he said, “for not looking around a little before we struck
+out. But the Government maps don’t show any such
+trail.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” replied the storekeeper; “there wasn’t any when
+the maps were made.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re sure it’s passable?” Larry asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Plum’ sure. Three men came in over it two days
+ago, did just what you boys are doin’—stocked up—and
+went back. They’re prospectin’, like yourselves, I take
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>All three of the boys exchanged glances at this mention
+of three men.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you know any of those men, Mr. Wilkins?”
+Larry inquired.</p>
+
+<p>“No; kind of a rough-lookin’ bunch, and one of ’em
+was a cripple, though he got around on one leg and a
+crutch sprier than either of the other two.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry took Dick aside while Purdick was checking the
+list of supplies with the storekeeper.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re our three,” Larry said in low tones. And
+then, impatiently: “<a href="#i_fp116">I wish there were some way of letting
+those scamps know that they are barking up the wrong
+tree</a>; that we don’t know any more about the Golden
+Spider than they do!”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i_fp116">
+ <img src="images/i_fp116.jpg" alt="" title="">
+ <figcaption class="caption">
+ <p class="noic"><a href="#Page_116">“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that
+they are barking up the wrong tree.”</a></p>
+ </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“There doesn’t seem to be any way,” Dick countered.
+“But I can tell you one thing, Larry: I’m not going
+back into the mountains where they are without something
+to defend myself with, if it’s nothing more than a
+potato popgun.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m with you on that,” said Larry. “Let’s look over
+Mr. Wilkins’s gun showcase and see if we can find anything
+that we can afford to buy.”</p>
+
+<p>They moved up to the front of the store, where there
+was a wall-case of guns and pistols. Almost at once they
+saw three Winchesters standing side by side in the rack, all
+alike, and all looking as if they were second-hand. Larry
+went closer and examined the stock of one of the guns
+carefully.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span></p>
+
+<p>“That’s my rifle, Dick,” he whispered. “There’s that
+bruise on the stock that it got that day last week when
+old Fishbait rolled down among the rocks with it in
+the pack. And the other two are yours and Purdy’s!”</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” said Dick, his eyes widening. “Those rascals
+stole them and sold them to Mr. Wilkins! Shall we tell
+him?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry’s answer was the kind he usually made when the
+emergency demanded action. Going back to the counter
+where the storekeeper was still figuring with Purdick, he
+said:</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Wilkins, we didn’t tell you all that happened to
+us at that camp of ours over in the back country. The
+bear that tore us up was a pretty sly old Silver-tip. Besides
+eating up most of our grub, he took our guns and
+all of our ammunition.”</p>
+
+<p>The bearded storekeeper laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s this you’re givin’ me now?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Straight goods,” said Larry soberly. “We had three
+Winchesters of the latest model, chambered for high-powered
+ammunition, and a good supply of cartridges
+for them.”</p>
+
+<p>For a minute or so the big storekeeper didn’t say anything.
+Then:</p>
+
+<p>“You ain’t stuffin’ me with that bear story, are ye?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; there was a bear, all right, and it was the bear
+that ate our grub and tore things up for us.”</p>
+
+<p>“But after that, some other kind of a bear come along
+and swiped your guns and ca’tridges?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is the way it looks to us,” Larry said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what you goin’ to do about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“We are going to buy those three second-hand Winchesters<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span>
+you have up in that case at the front,” Larry
+answered, looking the big man squarely in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The good-natured storekeeper laughed rather grimly.</p>
+
+<p>“I reckon you’ve got me dead to rights,” he said; “and
+I ought to ’a’ knowed better. I bought them guns from
+the three scalawags I was tellin’ you about; the three that
+was here day before yesterday. They allowed they didn’t
+need ’em and was tired o’ luggin’ ’em around.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll buy them back from you,” said Dick, going into
+his shirt after his money belt.</p>
+
+<p>But at this the big man shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Nope, I reckon I can’t let you do that. I ain’t tried
+to live honest for fifty years to begin bein’ a ‘fence’ for
+crooks at my time o’ life. If them guns are yours, you
+take ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>There was some little haggling over this part of it,
+Dick saying that the storekeeper wasn’t to blame, and all
+that. But the big man was immovable; he had bought
+stolen goods, and it was up to him to pay the penalty.
+So he made them take the guns without money and without
+price, and threw in the cartridge belts and the ammunition,
+which, it seemed, had been sold with the rifles.</p>
+
+<p>What with all this chaffering and buying and talking,
+and the time it took Larry and Dick to write letters to
+their folks in Brewster (which letters, as may be imagined,
+didn’t say anything about the hardships of the
+past three days), it was the middle of the forenoon before
+they got a start up the perfectly good trail, considerably
+past noon when they stopped to eat on top of
+the range, and quite late at night before they left the
+trail and made camp in a wooded ravine not very far
+from the place where they had located the vanadium<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>
+deposit, though much higher up the mountain. And on
+all that long faring they had neither seen nor heard any
+signs of the three hold-ups who, according to the Natrolia
+storekeeper’s account, had preceded them over the
+same trail not more than twenty-four hours earlier.</p>
+
+<p>Around the camp-fire that night they canvassed the
+situation as it had been revealed to them by the events
+of the past few days, and determined upon their course
+of action.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all tom-foolishness of the worst kind,” was the
+way Larry the practical summed it up. “These crooks
+are going upon the supposition that we know something
+that we don’t know. If they could be convinced that we
+don’t know anything more about this mythical gold mine
+than the man in the moon, and that we haven’t the slightest
+intention of trying to find it, they’d drop us like a hot
+cake.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is all true enough,” Dick cut in. “But how are
+we going to convince them?”</p>
+
+<p>“We can’t, unless they’ll show up and give us a chance
+to talk to them. As long as they’re not convinced, I
+suppose they’ll go on dogging us around. I hate to have
+to turn in every night with the feeling that we may wake
+up in the morning to find that we’ve been robbed again,
+but I guess there is no help for it.”</p>
+
+<p>It was little Purdick who suggested the helpful plan.</p>
+
+<p>“We mustn’t take any chances,” he said; “and, since
+there are three of us, we needn’t. You two bunk down
+and I’ll take the first night watch. At midnight I’ll
+wake you, Dick, and at three o’clock you can call Larry.
+It runs in my mind that we’ve been sleeping too much,
+anyway.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span></p>
+
+<p>Both Larry and Dick grumbled a little at this sort of
+war-like messing-up of their vacation when, as a matter
+of fact, it was, or ought to be, utterly needless. But
+they agreed to Purdick’s plan in the end as being the
+really sensible thing to do, and shortly afterward they
+turned in and left the small one sitting with his back to
+a tree and his rifle across his knees, determined to stay
+awake if the thing were humanly possible.</p>
+
+<p>For an hour or more he found it entirely possible.
+Apart from the deep breathing of his two sleeping companions
+and the nibbling noises made by the grazing
+burros, there were no sounds to disturb the solemn silence
+of the immensities. Having to study pretty hard for
+what he was getting in college, Purdick had a pretty safe
+recipe for keeping awake. It took the form of memory
+exercises; the recalling, word for word, of certain formulas
+like this: “If the point of suspension of a pendulum
+have an imposed simple vibration of <i>y</i> equals <i>a</i> cosine <i>st</i>
+in a horizontal line, the equation of small motion of the
+bob is <i>mx</i> equals minus <i>mg</i> times <i>x</i> minus <i>y</i>; over <i>l</i>”—things
+like that.</p>
+
+<p>Just now, being intensely interested in the science of
+mineralogy, he was repeating the names of all the “ites”
+he could remember by their different groups, with the
+chemical composition of each; and he had just got as far
+as, “Pyrargyrite: silver three atoms, antimony one atom,
+sulphur six atoms,” when he sat up and rubbed his eyes
+and began to wonder if, after all, he had gone to sleep
+and was dreaming.</p>
+
+<p>For while he stared and stared again, the camp-fire,
+with its back-log and bed of glowing coals, began to sink
+slowly into the ground, the unburnt ends of the back-log<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>
+uprearing as the fire sank away. Before he had time to
+gasp twice, there was a gurgle and a hiss, and the fire
+disappeared as if by magic, leaving the tree-shadowed
+ravine in total darkness.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII<br>
+<small>THE ICE CAVERN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">For a second or so after he had seen the camp-fire
+disappear as if a conjuror had waved his wand over
+it, Purdick was too greatly astounded even to yell. Twice
+he opened his mouth to shout at his two sleeping companions,
+but no sound came. With his teeth rattling in
+something that was a good bit like panic, he felt his way
+over to where Dick and Larry were lying rolled in their
+blankets and shook them awake.</p>
+
+<p>“Wake up! S-s-something’s happened!” he stuttered.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it?” said Dick sleepily, getting up on an
+elbow. Then: “Hello! What made you let the fire go
+out?”</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t!” Purdick protested. “S-s-something sus-swallowed
+it!”</p>
+
+<p>Larry sat up, fumbled in the knapsack that he had
+stuffed under his head for a pillow, and found matches
+and a candle-end. When he struck a light, the mystery
+was explained—partly. In the place where the fire had
+been there was a round hole possibly three feet in diameter,
+and out of it a faint wreath of smoke and steam was
+issuing.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll be dogged!” Dick exclaimed. “Wouldn’t
+that jar you? Did it go all at once, Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>“Right while I was looking at it. First I saw the bed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span>
+of coals sinking, and then the back-log broke in two in
+the middle and the ends began to rear up. I thought I
+must be dreaming.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good, substantial old dream, all right,” said Dick.
+“Let’s see where that hole goes to, and what made it.”</p>
+
+<p>The “what made it” was evident enough when they
+crept, rather cautiously, to the edge of the well hole and
+examined it by the light of the candle. Under the thick
+bed of leaf mould carpeting the bottom of the small ravine
+in which they had pitched their night camp there was a
+layer of ice, the remains of a miniature glacier formed,
+possibly, many winters before. By the merest chance,
+their fire had been built over this ice layer and the heat
+had gradually melted a hole.</p>
+
+<p>“How far down does it go?” Purdick asked, leaning
+over the brink of the well and trying to look down.</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer to that question. The light of
+the candle wouldn’t penetrate very far, but as far as it
+reached it showed the hole still going on down. Larry
+went to where the jacks were grazing and got one of the
+picket ropes. Tying a piece of wood to the end of the
+rope, he lowered it into the hole. As nearly as they could
+measure, the chasm was about fifteen feet deep. And the
+stick and the rope came up wet.</p>
+
+<p>“Water in the bottom,” said Larry. “An underground
+stream; you can hear it splashing. That’s what makes
+this ravine so dry. Anybody want to go down and get
+a drink?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick yawned. “I’m too sleepy to go cave-exploring.
+Let’s make another fire and pigeonhole this thing till
+morning. It’ll keep, I guess.”</p>
+
+<p>Acting upon this eminently sensible suggestion, they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span>
+built a fire in another place, gathered enough wood to
+keep it going through the remainder of the night, and
+after they had talked a little while, Dick and Larry turned
+in and Purdick resumed his watch. According to their
+agreement, Purdick roused Dick at midnight and took
+his own turn at the blankets, and at three o’clock Dick
+called Larry.</p>
+
+<p>At daybreak the two who had slept through the last
+of the night watches turned out to find Larry already
+cooking breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>“Haven’t been down in the hole to take a bath, have
+you?” asked Dick, rubbing his eyes open.</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet,” Larry grinned. “Thought I’d let one of
+you fellows try it first. I lowered the bucket and got
+the coffee water out of it, though. Help yourselves, if
+you want to wash up.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick let the bucket down and brought it up brimming.
+“Pour for me, Purdy, and then I’ll return the compliment,”
+he said; and as Purdick took the bucket and gave
+him the first slosh: “Gee-whizzikins-whillikins! Talk
+about your liquid ice! Whoop-ee! but that’s cold!”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure it’s cold,” said Larry with another grin. “Didn’t
+expect it to be hot, did you—out of an ice well?”</p>
+
+<p>While they were at breakfast they speculated a good
+bit on the peculiarity of an ice cavern being there in the
+bed of the little ravine in the heart of summer, and Dick
+was all for exploring it. So, after the meal, a boatswain’s
+chair was rigged at the end of the picket rope, and Larry
+and Purdick lowered the curious one into the well, taking
+a turn around a convenient tree for a snubbing hitch.
+When Dick was hauled out he had a fairy tale to tell.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the most wonderful thing you ever saw!” he declared.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span>
+“There’s a cave down there big enough to drive
+a truck through, and it goes right on down the mountain
+somewhere. As far as you can see, it’s lined with ice in
+the most beautiful crystal formations, dazzling, blinding
+white, just from the little light it gets from up here. We
+ought to take a day or so off and explore it.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a side-issue,” he said firmly, “and we mustn’t
+forget that we are under pay. There are those two
+tungsten prospects and the vanadium claim, on all of
+which we’ve got to do the discovery work required by
+law before we can record and hold them. After we’ve
+done that we can come back here, if you want to, and
+take a look at your ice cave. But business comes first.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I guess you’re right—you most always are,” Dick
+admitted, making a wry face. “But I’m going to hold
+you to that coming-back promise before we leave this
+part of the country. I want to see where this cave
+goes to.”</p>
+
+<p>Having settled it that way, they packed and struck out
+for one of the tungsten prospects they had found some
+ten days earlier, reaching it in good time to pitch a sort
+of semi-permanent camp near-by.</p>
+
+<p>Wolframite, scheelite, ferberite and huebnerite, all
+mineral combinations from which the metal tungsten is
+obtained, occur in a number of curiously different formations,
+sometimes in the limestone, sometimes in the red
+sandstones and shales, sometimes in veins whose walls
+are granite or gneiss. What the three young prospectors
+had found, or believed they had found, in this first location
+was a vein of scheelite—which is the tungstate of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span>
+calcium—lying along a “fault” contact between vein walls
+of granite and gneiss.</p>
+
+<p>It was a good-sized vein, big enough to be pretty valuable
+if it were really scheelite, and they ran another test
+on it to make sure, before they should waste any labor
+on the “discovery” work required by law—namely, the
+sinking of a shaft or the driving of a tunnel for at least
+ten feet on the vein.</p>
+
+<p>The test, in which Larry handled the blowpipe and
+Dick and Purdick made the notes, seemed entirely successful.
+The creamy yellowish ore fused with considerable
+difficulty in the blowpipe flame, as the book said it
+should; powdered, it dissolved freely in hydrochloric acid,
+leaving a greenish-yellow residue, and this residue, rubbed
+with a knife-blade on a bit of paper, changed at once to a
+bluish-green color.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the stuff,” said Dick. “Now try it with the
+phosphoric acid.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry poured a little of the dissolved ore into a glass
+tube with a closed end, added phosphoric acid, and held
+the tube in the flame of the alcohol heating lamp. When
+the mixture began to give off the fumes of volatilization,
+he took the tube from the flame and let it cool. In a
+minute or two the test sample turned a beautiful blue.</p>
+
+<p>“Right, again,” said Dick. “That’s what it ought to
+do. Now dissolve it in water and see if the color will
+disappear.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry added the water, and immediately the blue color
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p>“Check once more,” Purdick said, with his finger on
+the place in the mineralogy book where the various steps<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>
+in the test were set forth, with their results. “Now a
+pinch of the iron powder.”</p>
+
+<p>“There you are,” Larry summed up, when, with the
+addition of the iron, the blue color came back. “I guess
+we’re pretty safe to begin digging to-morrow morning.”</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, the first thing the next morning they got
+out the hammer and drills, dynamite, caps and fuse, and
+became stone quarriers, setting themselves the task of
+driving a “discovery” tunnel on the vein, because it was
+easier to tunnel than to sink a shaft. Being new to the
+quarrying trade, they made slow work of it, blistering
+their hands plentifully the first day or two, and learning
+only by laborious experience in drilling the hard rock
+how to place their blasts where they would do the most
+good.</p>
+
+<p>Taking one thing with another, they spent nine of the
+long summer days on this job before Larry’s pocket tapeline
+told them they had the necessary ten feet of depth;
+after which it took part of another day to lay off the
+claim and stake it and post it with the proper notice. In
+honor of the leading burro, they named the lode the
+“Blue Fishbait.”</p>
+
+<p>Shifting that afternoon to the location of the other
+tungsten deposit they had discovered, they went through
+the same process here. In this place, however, the mineral,
+which was wolframite or ferberite, was in a softer
+formation; which was lucky because it was so situated
+that they couldn’t uncover it by tunnelling, and had to sink
+a shaft ten feet down on the vein. Larry took half a
+day to hack out a rude windlass with the hand-axe, and
+again they set to work drilling and blasting.</p>
+
+<p>A week sufficed for this second “discovery” development,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span>
+and once more they moved on, this time to the
+vanadium deposit they had uncovered and located on the
+day of the bear’s visitation. By this time they had
+acquired a good bit more skill in handling the hammer
+and drills and dynamite, and were able to make the rock
+fly in fairly adequate quantities at each shot. It was
+Dick, the impatient one, who was continually urging
+speed and still more speed. This workaday rock digging,
+merely for the purpose of earning the right to record a
+claim, didn’t appeal to him, and he was eager to have it
+over with, and to get back to the really interesting part
+of the prospecting—ranging the mountains back and forth
+and looking for new lodes.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee, fellows!” he said, as they sat around their camp-fire
+one night at the vanadium claim, “do you realize that
+this is the second week in August, and that we’ve got to
+be back at Old Sheddon the first week in September?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m realizing it mighty hard,” Purdick asserted. “I
+want what Old Sheddon is trying to give me in the way
+of an engineering course, but I haven’t had enough of
+this bully old wild life here in the mountains yet, not by
+a jugful.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry’s broad smile was good-naturedly joshing.</p>
+
+<p>“What you’ve been needing all your life was a quarryman’s
+job outdoors, Purdy,” he commented. “It’s sure
+making a man of you. You don’t look much like the
+little white-faced hospital rat you were when you came
+in with us in June.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick pulled up a shirt sleeve, made a fist and slowly
+curved his arm upward. “Look at that muscle!” he
+bragged. “Essence of striking-hammer did that. Talk
+about your hour a day in the gym. Make it ten hours a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>
+day with the hammer and drills in the woods and you’ll
+get somewhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just listen at the feather-weight, will you?” laughed
+Dick; adding: “But Larry’s right, Purdy; you look twice
+the chap you did a month ago. And it does me good
+to see the way you eat. The old grizzly that cleaned us
+out a while back had nothing on you.”</p>
+
+<p>“M’m,” said Larry thoughtfully. “Speaking of grizzlies,
+and such things: I wonder what has become of the
+three hold-ups? We’ve been so busy with all the rock
+drilling and blasting that I’d just about forgotten them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Got discouraged and dropped us, I guess,” Dick put
+in. “If they hadn’t, we would have heard from ’em
+before this time. And that brings on more talk. Have
+we definitely decided not to have a try at looking for old
+Jimmie Brock’s lost gold mine?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick’s question reopened a subject which had been
+pretty well ignored thus far during the busy summer.
+Of the three, Dick was the only one who had ever taken
+the matter of the lost gold mine at all seriously, and at
+times when Larry or Purdick pinned him down, he joked
+about it, as they did. But now he confessed that he was
+just romantic enough, or foolish enough, to want to spend
+at least a little of the time remaining to them in a search
+for the Golden Spider.</p>
+
+<p>His argument was fair enough. He said, and it was
+true, that the three rare-metal discoveries they had made
+amply justified them in using the remaining two weeks
+as they pleased; that his uncle would be more than satisfied
+with their summer’s work as it stood; and that that
+same uncle, in telling them about the Golden Spider and
+giving them James Brock’s pencil sketch, had fully expected<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>
+that they would do as he himself had done—make
+a search for the lost mine.</p>
+
+<p>In the end it came to a compromise, as most questions
+with two perfectly good and debatable sides usually do.
+For one of the two remaining weeks of their stay they
+would go on prospecting for the industrial metals, working
+their way back toward that part of the Little Hophras
+included in the penciled circle drawn by Daddy Longbeard
+on the worn map he had given Dick. And when
+they got within the circle the search for the Golden Spider
+should take precedence for the final week.</p>
+
+<p>“Not that anything will come of it,” Larry maintained.
+“These mountains are full of fairy tales just like that,
+and you know it as well as I do, Dick. But if you want
+to put in a few days looking for a pot of rainbow gold,
+it’s all right with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“And with me,” little Purdick agreed; and so it was
+settled.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the completion of the discovery work on the vanadium
+claim the compromise agreed upon in this camp-fire
+talk was made the order of the day. For a week they
+combed the foot-hills and hogbacks of the western range
+faithfully, working slowly up to the region included in
+Daddy Longbeard’s magic circle, and finding nothing in
+the way of rare metals save in one place where, in a mass
+of finely brecciated granite and porphyry they discovered
+a lot of thin quartz veinlets carrying a little molybdenite
+from which the metal molybdenum, an alloy for tool steel,
+is extracted.</p>
+
+<p>They marked this place on their map, but did not stop
+to locate the claim, the quantity of molybdenite in the
+tiny veins being so small that they decided it would not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>
+pay for the working. One day’s prospecting beyond this
+brought them fairly within the Daddy Longbeard circle,
+and, somewhat to their surprise, they found themselves
+camping within a short distance of the trail over which
+they had come from Natrolia, and no very great distance
+from the high-lying ravine of the ice cavern.</p>
+
+<p>“I told you we’d have to come back to that ice cave,”
+said Dick, in the after-supper talk around the camp-fire.
+“I move you that we go up to-morrow and explore it.
+Do I hear a second to that motion?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, if you can’t be happy until you do—of course,”
+said Larry. “You’re just about as likely to find the Golden
+Spider there as anywhere else. You’re crazy on this
+golden insect proposition, Dick.”</p>
+
+<p>“The world owes lots of its progress to crazy people,
+you old stick-in-the-mud—or to people that other folks
+called crazy. Don’t you know that?” Dick retorted.
+“Besides, a spider isn’t an insect. It’s an arthropod, and
+has eight legs, while the insects have only six. I’m astonished
+that you know so little.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll bet you ninety-nine people out of a hundred call
+’em insects, anyway,” Larry maintained.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m the hundredth man,” Dick boasted. “I believe in
+spiders, golden or otherwise. What are we going to do
+with our bonanza, when we find it? Have you fellows
+decided upon that yet?”</p>
+
+<p>“<em>When</em> we find it!” Larry snorted. “Better say ‘if,’
+and say it in capital letters, at that.”</p>
+
+<p>“It wouldn’t be ours, if we should find it,” Purdick
+objected.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it would,” Dick asserted. “Didn’t you
+hear what Uncle Billy said? James Brock gave it to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span>
+him, and he gave it to us. But, as far as that goes, it
+isn’t anybody’s mine, the way it stands now. Or rather,
+it belongs to anybody who may come along and relocate
+it. The law says that a certain amount of work must
+be done every year to hold a claim, and it is three years
+since poor old Jimmie Brock died.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then those three hold-ups would have as good a legal
+right to it as anybody, if they should find it?” Purdick
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure they would, if they happen to beat us to it; or if
+they could jump it and take it away from us before we
+could get it recorded in our names. That’s probably
+what they meant to do: run us off, and two of them
+hold it while the other could light out for the nearest
+land office and get it recorded.”</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick laughed and took a small shot at himself,
+as his habit was.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not very brave. I guess I’m rather glad those
+fellows have dropped us,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Umph!” Larry grunted, stretching himself luxuriously
+on his blanket. “Who was it that followed the
+crutch cripple that night in Lost Canyon, I’d like to know?
+But of course <em>that</em> didn’t take any nerve.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s all right; sleuthing a cripple is one thing, and
+a stand-up fight is another,” Purdick qualified. “I guess
+I wouldn’t be much good in a real, for-sure scrap.”</p>
+
+<p>They went on talking for a little while, Dick getting
+back to his cocksureness that the Golden Spider would be
+found, and Larry throwing cold water in bucketsful, as
+he usually did when the lost mine was under discussion.
+As once before, it was little Purdick who broke in to turn
+the talk current into another channel.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Talking about minerals—and we’ve been eating and
+drinking and sleeping them all summer—I’d like to know
+what this is,” he said, taking a piece of brownish stone
+from his pocket. “I picked it up when we were scouting
+along this afternoon and dropped it into my pocket and
+forgot it.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry and Dick both examined the specimen and could
+make nothing of it. “Brown stone” was the only name
+that fitted it, and it had no lustre, and no metallic “streak”
+when it was scratched. The only hint it gave of being
+other than it seemed to be—a bit of soft brown stone—was
+in its weight. Dick looked at his wrist watch.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s early yet,” he said. “Get out the blowpipe and
+chemicals, Purdy, and we’ll run a test on it.”</p>
+
+<p>Since the specimen crumbled quite easily, it was only
+a matter of a few minutes to grind a small part of it to
+powder in the porcelain mortar. To the powder was
+added a little borax to serve as a flux for any metal there
+might be in the sample, the mixture was heaped upon the
+cake of prepared charcoal, and the blowpipe flame was
+turned upon it, Dick furnishing the breath for the blast.</p>
+
+<p>In due time the tiny heap began to fuse and disappear,
+but not all of it. In the small burned cavity in the charcoal
+cake lay a bright pinhead button of metal: light
+yellow while hot, but cooling to a deeper yellow when
+the blowing stopped.</p>
+
+<p>During the long summer of prospecting the three apprentice
+mineralogists had had experience enough in ore
+testing to know at once that only one metal in the entire
+list—and only one form of it, at that—could be thus
+smelted pure from the vein matter in a simple blowpipe
+flame. Dick was the first to find speech.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Free gold!” he gasped. And then: “That stuff is
+disintegrated quartz! Pity’s sake! I ought to have
+known it at sight. Goodness knows, I’ve seen enough of
+it in the mineral cabinets at home to know what it looks
+like.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was dropping a few drops of strong nitric acid
+into a test tube while Purdick lighted the alcohol heating
+lamp. Carefully depositing the tiny globule of metal in
+the acid, Larry heated the closed end of the tube in the
+alcohol flame. This was to determine the pureness of
+the gold. If it were alloyed with silver, the hot acid
+would immediately dissolve the silver. But there was no
+chemical reaction visible, and the tiny globule remained
+apparently undiminished in size; which meant that it was
+practically all gold.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the pure quill,” Larry declared, speaking for the
+first time since the testing began. “Now then, Purdy,
+where did you find it? That’s the next thing.”</p>
+
+<p>But now Purdick was in despair.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t tell—can’t remember, to save me. I’m not even
+sure that I should know the place if I should see it again.
+I just picked up that bit of stuff as I’ve been picking up
+hundreds of other bits of rock in the last few weeks, and
+I don’t know what made me keep it, unless it was the
+queer, rusty-iron color. I do remember now that I
+thought it was a bit of iron ore and wondered what it
+was doing up here among the granites.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Dick with a grim little smile, “you’ve discovered
+a gold mine and you’re in the same fix that we
+all are with the Golden Spider. You had it, and you’ve
+lost it.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Could you go back over the route you took this afternoon?”
+Larry asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I couldn’t do even that much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Was it higher up the mountain than this—or lower
+down?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick put his face in his hands and tried to think,
+and the harder he tried the more confusing the recollections—or
+no recollections—became.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” he said at length. “You know we all
+separated in the afternoon, agreeing to meet here. I
+remember climbing two or three gulches, and working
+around one place where there was a steep slope and a
+pile of broken rock. At the top of the slope, as I recall
+it, there was a cliff. I remember that, because I had
+half a mind to climb up to the cliff to find out what kind
+of rock it was. But the slope was pretty steep and I
+didn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“And was that where you picked up this piece of
+quartz?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick made helpless motions with his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t ask me,” he protested. “The more I try to
+remember, the worse off I get.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Larry put in, with a copying of Dick’s grim
+smile, “you’ll always have it to tell that you once discovered
+a gold mine—a real bonanza, at that. Let’s
+turn in and hope that you may dream out the place. I
+guess that’s about the only hope there is left.”</p>
+
+<p>A few minutes later they had made their simple preparations
+for the night. Though they had long since concluded
+that the three would-be mine jumpers had given
+up the chase, they still kept up the habit they had formed
+of dividing the night into three watches, more because<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>
+it was a habit than for any imaginable danger that might
+threaten them or their belongings.</p>
+
+<p>On this particular night it was Dick’s turn to take the
+first watch up to midnight, and after Larry and Purdick
+were asleep he put some pitchwood on the fire and got
+out the mineralogy book, meaning to kill some of the
+waking time by reading. Most naturally, after the test
+they had just made, he turned to the various sections on
+gold and gold testing, and was soon so deeply interested
+as to forget what he was sitting up for, to become completely
+oblivious to his surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps for this cause that he failed to hear a
+slight rustling in a clump of young spruces on the opposite
+side of the fire; failed, also, to see a shadowy figure
+hopping away into the night—the figure of a man walking
+with the aid of a crutch. If he had heard and seen, and
+had known that the vanishing spy had been a listening
+witness to all that had been said and done at the camp-fire,
+it is safe to say that nothing less than manacles and
+a gag would have kept him from leaping up and giving
+the alarm.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX<br>
+<small>THE SPIDER’S WEB</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">On the morning following the test made upon the
+bit of gold quartz that Purdick had picked up,
+Larry, who had the watch from three o’clock to daybreak,
+found himself getting so sleepy in the final hour
+of his watch that he had to get up and stir around to keep
+awake.</p>
+
+<p>Renewing the camp-fire so that there might be a good
+bed of coals for the breakfast cooking, he contrived to
+kill time until it was light enough to enable him to see
+the surrounding objects. Then, as Dick and little Purdick
+were still sleeping soundly, he picked up the hammer
+they used for breaking samples and started out for an
+early-morning walk, meaning to have a look at a curious
+rock and earth deposit he had come upon the evening
+before, after it was too near dark to examine it closely.</p>
+
+<p>Turning to the left along the bench or ledge over which
+they had climbed to reach the camping place, he pushed on
+around the mountain until he came to the rock and earth
+slide that he wanted to investigate. Finding it nothing
+more than an interesting example of one of the prehistoric
+upheavals that have folded the earth’s crust into so many
+singular and apparently impossible combinations in the
+western mountain ranges, he was about to turn back when<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>
+he saw, just at his feet, a curious round hole in the clay
+of the slide.</p>
+
+<p>Now there is one good thing that prospecting for minerals
+does for anybody who goes at it seriously: it
+develops a habit of scrutinizing the whys and wherefores
+of things—any little thing; the habit of prying observation
+which is usually credited, in stories, to the detective,
+but which really belongs to every thoughtful student in
+any field. Larry stooped to examine the hole in the clay.
+It was a little over an inch in diameter and about two
+inches deep, circular at the bottom and elliptical at the
+top.</p>
+
+<p>Squatting beside it, Larry stared at it reflectively. His
+first assumption was that it had been made by a bug or
+insect of some sort, but that conclusion was set aside
+when he remembered that no burrowing bug that he had
+ever heard of made a hole just like this. After a little,
+he took the tape measure from his pocket and with it
+described a circle three feet in diameter with the curious
+hole for its center. Then he got down on his hands and
+knees and crawled around the circle with his eyes on the
+ground, making two complete circuits before he was
+satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing doing,” he muttered, as he got upon his feet
+again; and then, with a slow grin: “Muttonhead!—of
+course there wouldn’t be, at three feet!”</p>
+
+<p>Resorting to the tape again, he struck a wider circle,
+spacing it six feet from the hole. This time there were
+results—or one result, at least. At a point just beyond
+one side of the bigger circle there was another hole, the
+exact mate of the one he had first discovered; round at
+the bottom and elongated considerably at the top. Noting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>
+the direction of the elongation and the lining-up of the
+two holes, he paced off another six feet, and there, under
+his eyes, was a third hole.</p>
+
+<p>With his lips pursed in a soundless whistle he climbed
+to the top of a near-by boulder and let his gaze sweep the
+slopes below. The morning calm was on the landscape,
+with no breath of air stirring to whisper in the trees.
+The boulder-top height commanded a view for miles in
+three directions, but there was nothing to be seen but the
+statuesque procession of buttes and valleys, mountain
+slopes and wooded gulches.</p>
+
+<p>Preparing to go back to camp, Larry did a characteristic
+thing; that is to say, it was characteristic of him.
+One of the three holes was in a sort of plastic clay, much
+like that used by sculptors in modeling. Going down on
+his knees, he dug carefully all around the hole with his
+pocket-knife, lifting out a chunk of the clay about the
+size of a pint cup with the hole intact in the middle of it.
+Wrapping the lump of clay in his handkerchief, he swung
+away to retrace his steps to the camp in the farther gulch.</p>
+
+<p>Both Purdick and Dick were up when he got back,
+and Purdick had breakfast nearly ready.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello, you old early bird,” Dick called out. “Got a
+handkerchief-ful of worms already?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry didn’t say what he had. Putting the handkerchief-wrapped
+“specimen” in the cleft of a rock, he
+turned in to help Purdick dish up the breakfast; and
+later, while they were eating, he said nothing about his
+curious find. But when the last flapjack was eaten, he
+reached for the lump of clay, unwrapped it, and showed
+it to the others.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you make of that?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span></p>
+
+<p>Both Dick and Purdick examined the “specimen”
+closely.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the answer?” said Dick, looking up.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what I’d like to have you tell me. I found
+three of those holes a quarter of a mile away around the
+mountain. They were about six feet apart, and all
+alike.”</p>
+
+<p>It was Purdick’s shrewd intelligence that jumped to
+the one inevitable conclusion. “A crutch print!” he
+breathed; “<em>the</em> crutch print!”</p>
+
+<p>Larry nodded. “That was the way I doped it out.”</p>
+
+<p>Without another word Purdick got up and began to
+circle the camp site with his nose to the ground. In the
+little grove of spruces to the left he found what he was
+looking for.</p>
+
+<p>“Half a dozen of ’em over here,” he announced; “one
+deep one, as if the crutch had been leaned on for a good
+while.”</p>
+
+<p>For a little time nobody said anything, and when the
+silence was broken, it was Dick who broke it.</p>
+
+<p>“The guess we made last night—that these scamps had
+given up and gone away—doesn’t go,” he said soberly.
+“They’re still camping on our trail, and those marks over
+there under the spruces must have been made after we
+camped here last night. If we hadn’t been keeping watch,
+we would probably have lost our guns again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” said Larry.</p>
+
+<p>“Meaning that you want me to say what I think we
+ought to do?” asked Dick.</p>
+
+<p>“Something like that—yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right; I’ll say it. I’m about fed up on this thing,
+and here’s my fling at it. Let’s leave Purdy here with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>
+the jacks and dunnage, while you and I go after these
+fellows and read the riot act to them—tell them they’ve
+got to quit chasing us around and spying on us or there’ll
+be trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“That won’t do, Dick,” he objected. “In the first place,
+we don’t know where to go to look for them, and in the
+second, they’d be three to two, and they’d just laugh at
+us. More than that, we can’t prove anything on them;
+couldn’t even in a court, unless we could bring the Natrolia
+storekeeper to testify that they sold him our rifles.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we could at least give them fair warning,” Dick
+persisted; “tell them that we’ll shoot on sight if anybody
+comes messing around our camp.”</p>
+
+<p>Again Larry shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Even at that we’d have the weak end of the thing.
+This is all wild land, and they’ve got as good a right in
+any part of it as we have. No; the only thing to do is to
+go on as we’ve been doing. They won’t interfere with
+us so long as we don’t find the Golden Spider—and that’s
+a good bet that they’ll never interfere with us at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Everything goes,” Dick acquiesced. “But I’ll say this
+much: if they come monkeying around any time while
+I’m on watch there’ll be blood on the moon. As I say,
+I’m fed up. Let’s call it a back number and move on up
+to that ice cave. To-day’s as good a day as any to do a
+little exploring among the ‘pretties.’ ... Oh, chortle, if
+you want to!”—this to Larry. “When you go down in
+there and see what I saw, you’ll say it’s worth all the
+trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>It was while they were loading the jacks that Purdick
+said:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span></p>
+
+<p>“There’s one thing that we’ve sort of overlooked. If
+that cripple was spying and listening last night, any time
+before we turned in, he must have seen us run the test
+on that piece of gold quartz.”</p>
+
+<p>“Supposing he did,” said Dick.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all right, of course—if he saw and heard everything
+that was done and said, heard me say that I
+couldn’t remember where I found the piece of quartz.
+But if he only saw and heard part of it.... You see
+what I’m getting at. We tested a piece of gold ore, and
+it was rich enough to make us all go bug-eyed. Gold ore,
+to that bunch, means the Golden Spider. Supposing he
+rambled off with the notion in his head that we’ve discovered
+the lost mine at last?”</p>
+
+<p>“Humph!” Dick grunted. “In that case, I’ll probably
+get my shot at one or two of ’em sooner than I expected
+to. Got Lop-Ear cinched, Larry? All right; let’s go.”</p>
+
+<p>The distance up to the ravine of the ice cave proved to
+be less than they thought it was and it was soon traversed.
+Upon reaching the site of the former camp they found
+that a curious change had taken place in the ravine bottom.
+The round hole melted by the heat of their camp-fire
+was very considerably enlarged, not sidewise, but
+lengthwise, and the ice had disappeared—thawed away
+completely, showing the bare rock walls of a narrow
+crevice on either side, though there was still a miniature
+torrent racing along at the bottom of the crack.</p>
+
+<p>By reason of these changes it was no longer necessary
+to use the rope as a means of descent into the depths.
+At its up-mountain end the ice-freed crevice ran out in
+a series of rude, stair-like steps, down which it was easy<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>
+to scramble. It was Dick who led the way into the cave,
+after they had unloaded the burros and picketed them.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee! all my pretty ice stalactites are melted and gone,”
+he lamented; and then: “Whew! feel that current of
+warm air, will you? No wonder the ice has disappeared.
+Where do you suppose the warm wind is coming from?”</p>
+
+<p>His assertion concerning the disappearance of the ice
+decorations was verified when they got far enough down
+to get a glimpse into the great chamber he had seen and
+tried to describe after his two companions had hauled
+him out of the well hole at the end of the picket rope.
+There was no ice to be seen anywhere, though the walls
+were still wet in spots as from some melting reservoir
+overhead.</p>
+
+<p>Larry lighted a candle and began to examine the walls
+of the chamber, and Dick laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“Once a prospector, always a prospector,” he said jokingly.
+“Expecting to find a bonanza down here, old
+scout?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not quite,” Larry answered. “I was just wondering
+if this is a water-cut canyon—or was once, before it got
+filled up and covered over.”</p>
+
+<p>“What else would it be?” Purdick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not much of a geologist,” Larry returned, “but
+we all know this: that every mineral vein in the world
+was once just a crack in the rocks that got filled up at
+some later time with gangue matter and mineral-bearing
+stuff. It just occurred to me to wonder if this isn’t one
+of the cracks that failed to get filled up—in this part of
+it, at least.”</p>
+
+<p>“You couldn’t tell,” Dick put in.</p>
+
+<p>“No; not positively, of course. But I believe I’m right,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>
+just the same. This wall rock doesn’t show any trace of
+water-wearing. It’s as clean as if the crack had been
+split open only yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick laughed. “Let’s make the geology a little more
+practical and go on. I’d like to see how far this thing
+extends, and what makes the warm wind.”</p>
+
+<p>Their passage through the crevice was unobstructed
+for quite a considerable distance. Slowly the daylight
+from the crack-like opening in the ravine bottom receded,
+growing fainter and fainter until at length it disappeared
+entirely and they were dependent upon the candle to
+light their way. And still the crevice held on, going
+deeper and deeper into the mountain, narrowing in some
+places to tunnel width, and then widening out again into
+a spacious corridor.</p>
+
+<p>They had gone possibly a quarter of a mile from the
+ravine entrance, though in the silence and darkness it
+seemed like a much greater distance, when Larry called
+a halt.</p>
+
+<p>“Hold up a minute, fellows,” he cautioned. “We’re
+getting too far away from our base of supplies. After
+what we found out this morning, it won’t do to leave the
+jacks and all our belongings sticking around where anybody
+can pick them up and walk off with them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Gee! I forgot all about that,” said Dick. “Let’s
+hurry back. Maybe those crooks have cleaned us out
+already!”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick had the candle at the moment and was digging
+with the pick end of the geologist’s hammer at a soft
+streak of something in the left-hand wall.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish we had another candle,” said he. “I’d like to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>
+stay here long enough to see what this is. It looks like
+a small vein of galena.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind that now!” Dick exclaimed. “We can
+come back again, if we want to. We mustn’t leave our
+traps alone another minute!”</p>
+
+<p>Hurrying as well as they could over the broken stone
+floor of the crevice, and stumbling now and again into
+the small torrent that was coursing through it, they won
+back to the daylight crack and climbed out. Their alarm
+had been needless. The jacks were grazing peacefully
+in the ravine, and the camp dunnage was lying just as
+they had left it.</p>
+
+<p>Dick laughed rather shamefacedly.</p>
+
+<p>“What is there about an underground job to make a
+fellow get panicky all in a minute?” he asked. “When
+you mentioned what might happen up here while we were
+all down yonder in that cellar, I could just see those three
+crooks digging out through the woods with every last
+thing we had in the world.”</p>
+
+<p>“Umph!” said the practical-minded Larry. “Great
+thing to have a vivid imagination. Got enough of the
+exploring, or do you want to go back?”</p>
+
+<p>“<em>I’d</em> like to go back,” Purdick asserted. “I more than
+half believe that I found a vein of mineral just as you
+fellows turned in the fire alarm.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was looking down at the rude flight of natural
+steps up which they had just clambered in getting out of
+the crevice.</p>
+
+<p>“If you fellows think it’s worth while, I believe we can
+get the jacks down there,” he suggested. “If we do that,
+we can carry the dunnage down and load the jacks in the
+cave.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span></p>
+
+<p>“And take ’em with us?” Dick said.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes, as far as we go—or as long as the going is
+possible for them. Why not?”</p>
+
+<p>“There isn’t any ‘why not,’” Dick broke out, with
+a swift return of the exploring enthusiasm; and he and
+Purdick went to catch the burros.</p>
+
+<p>But after the little beasts had been brought to the head
+of the precipitous stairway, the old adage, that one man
+can lead a horse to water, but twenty can’t make him
+drink, seemed to apply to donkeys as well as to horses.
+Fishbait shied and braced himself like the end man on a
+tug-of-war rope, and Lop-Ear, taking the cue from his
+file leader, did the same.</p>
+
+<p>Now there certainly wasn’t, or wouldn’t appear to be,
+any sufficient reason for going to any great amount of
+trouble to get the burros down into the cave; but human
+beings are curious creatures, in a good many ways. Realizing
+fully that, in all probability, the game wasn’t at all
+worth the candle, the three set their heads determinedly
+upon getting the pack animals underground, and the more
+the jacks held back, the more determined they became.
+So, after a good deal of pulling and hauling and pushing
+and heaving, the little pack animals were finally got down
+to the comparatively level floor of the crevice, the packs—less
+cumbersome now because the provisions were running
+low—were adjusted, a couple of candles were lighted,
+and once more the exploring expedition—which had now
+become a caravan—moved forward.</p>
+
+<p>Once in the depths, the burros gave no more trouble;
+indeed, as Dick remarked, they trudged along much as
+if they had been reared as mine mules. Reaching their
+“farthest north” of the previous exploration, they stopped<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>
+long enough to let Purdick examine his galena find, which
+turned out to be, not galena, but a small pocket of pyrites
+not worth bothering with.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond this point the slit in the rock narrowed again,
+and became quite tortuous in its course; so narrow and
+so crooked in places that they had some trouble in getting
+the loaded jacks through. The torrenting stream which
+had been underfoot in the first few hundred yards had
+now taken to disappearing and reappearing, dodging underground
+and then coming out again to flow for a time
+through a channel in the floor of the cavern. The roof
+of the natural tunnel, ten or twelve feet high where they
+had entered it, now came down in some places so low
+that they could reach up and touch it with their hands;
+touch it, and also see what it was made of.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t much like the looks of this stuff overhead,”
+Larry said, holding his candle up to light the low-hanging
+roof. “You can see what it is: nothing but loose rocks
+and forest rubbish that has been blown or washed in from
+the surface. If it should take a notion to fall down and
+plug this runway, we’d be strictly out of the fight.”</p>
+
+<p>“You said something then,” said Dick. “Here’s hoping
+she doesn’t take the notion—not while we’re in here,
+anyway.”</p>
+
+<p>Now this was a good hope, but in making it Dick
+failed to put enough staying power in it. At one of the
+tightest places in the narrow passage, where the walls
+were pinched together and the roof was hardly man-head
+high, Dick, who was tail-ender in the procession of
+three and was leading Lop-Ear, was brought up standing
+by a sudden pull on the halter from behind.</p>
+
+<p>Facing around to let his candle show him what the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>
+sudden halt meant, he saw that Lop-Ear, or his pack,
+or both, were stuck in the passage. It didn’t seem to be
+a very bad stick, so he hunted up a niche to put the candle
+in, wrapped the hackamore strap around his hands, and
+braced himself for a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull
+all together.</p>
+
+<p>The scheme worked all right, so far as starting the
+stopped rear-guard was concerned. While Dick pulled
+manfully, the little pack-beast dug its hoofs in, humped
+its back, and came through the squeeze triumphantly.
+But the triumph was short-lived. At the releasing of
+the resistance to his pull, Dick had to run backward a
+few steps to recover his balance. The little involuntary
+backward run was probably all that saved his life, as
+well as that of the burro. For that was the precise instant
+when the weak-kneed hope that Dick had offered
+turned loose its hold: there was a rumbling sound like a
+huge earth sigh, a choking rush of dust-laden air, and
+the tunnel roof, in the exact spot where the high-piled
+jack load had touched it, had fallen in and plugged the
+passage.</p>
+
+<p>Dick yelled promptly to his companions, who had
+passed out of sight around the next turn in the corridor,
+and they both came back to see what was wanted. Dick
+held his candle up to show them the plugged passage.</p>
+
+<p>“Humph!” said Larry; “that does settle it. We’re
+trapped for fair, I should say. How did it happen?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick explained. “Lop-Ear was stuck and I pulled on
+the halter to help him through. I guess he humped himself
+so hard that the pack knocked against the roof and
+loosened it. I wonder how long it’s going to take us
+to dig our way out?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span></p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head. “That’s a horse—or a donkey—of
+another color. Depends on how much of the stuff has
+fallen. Purdy, run on ahead to where we left Fishbait
+and get the pick and shovel from his pack.”</p>
+
+<p>When the digging tools were brought, they attacked
+the plug manfully, spelling one another with the pick
+and shovel. A full hour of the hardest kind of work got
+them nowhere. Apparently there was no end to the
+amount of broken rock and earth mould that had fallen
+in; and, worse than that, they had no place to put the
+stuff as they dug it out. All they could do was to pile
+it up behind them as they dug, and that merely shifted
+the obstructing plug from one place to another.</p>
+
+<p>“They say that curiosity killed the cat,” said Purdick,
+at the end of the hour of hard labor, when they sat down
+on the pile of débris for a breathing spell. “If I hadn’t
+been so curious about that pocket of pyrites and persuaded
+you fellows to come back into this hole——”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing like that,” Dick cut in promptly. “If there’s
+any blame lying around loose, it’s mine. But taking the
+blame doesn’t get us out of here. What do you say,
+Larry?”</p>
+
+<p>“There doesn’t seem to be much left to say—only
+more of the same. We’re in here, and we’ve got to dig
+our way out, if it takes a month of Sundays.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” Dick grunted. “The grub won’t last for more
+than two Sundays, if it does that; and we can’t feed the
+jacks on bacon and canned stuff.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Larry, “you tell it. What else is there
+to do?”</p>
+
+<p>Dick didn’t tell it, but Purdick did.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a warm current of air blowing through<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>
+here before that stuff fell down and stopped the hole;
+we all noticed it. Maybe there is another way out, at
+the farther end of this thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Say, that sounds like a piece of sure-enough common
+sense,” said Larry, jumping up. “Why didn’t we think
+of that before? Let’s try for it, anyhow, before we
+wear ourselves out with any more of the digging.”</p>
+
+<p>Suiting the action to the word, they clambered back
+over the pile of detritus they had heaped up and got the
+caravan in trail again. Whatever the cavern lacked in
+width—though now they found it wide enough in most
+places—it made up in length. For hours, as it seemed
+to them, they wandered on and on, sometimes along
+level passages, but oftener going down-hill.</p>
+
+<p>It was far past noon when they stopped to eat a bite of
+cold meat and bread left over from the breakfast cooking,
+and still there appeared to be no end to the crevice.</p>
+
+<p>“Good goodness! we must have come miles through
+this thing,” Dick exclaimed, munching a mouthful of the
+corn-bread sandwich. “If we have to go back and dig
+out the way we came in——”</p>
+
+<p>“Here’s hoping mighty hard that we won’t have to do
+that,” Larry interrupted. “How’s your hope, Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s grin looked pale, but that was only because
+the candle light was poor.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m still betting on that warm wind that we felt when
+we first came in,” he said. “That came from outdoors
+somewhere; it must have.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right; let’s go find it,” said Larry, bolting his last
+mouthful; and the march into the black depths was resumed.</p>
+
+<p>Not for very long, however. A few hundred feet<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>
+beyond their halting place they came to an obstacle
+“right,” as Dick named it. In a narrow passage which
+led to a much larger space beyond, a huge boulder had
+fallen in from above, leaving only a rat-hole, so to speak,
+between its bulk and one side of the tunnel; a space
+through which they could look, with the help of the
+candles, but through which not even little Purdick could
+squeeze himself.</p>
+
+<p>That brought on more talk; pretty serious talk. Dick
+was for turning back and making another desperate
+assault on the plug that Lop-Ear’s struggles had brought
+down, and his urgings would have prevailed had not Purdick,
+who was staring through the narrow slit ahead,
+this time without the aid of the candles, suddenly broke in.</p>
+
+<p>“Say, fellows! I believe I can see something like a
+glimmer of daylight ahead! Come here and look!”</p>
+
+<p>They all looked, putting the lighted candles well in the
+background. What they saw was hardly daylight; it was
+nothing more than a grayish sort of dusk. But they knew
+perfectly well that it must come from daylight somewhere.</p>
+
+<p>“That answers the question for us,” said Larry definitely.
+“We have the hammer and drills and dynamite.
+We can drill and blast this rock in less time than it will
+take us to go all the way back and dig out through that
+roof slide. What do you say?”</p>
+
+<p>They didn’t say, particularly. They got out the tools
+and fell to work. It turned out to be a most grueling
+job, drilling a shot hole in the big stone. There was
+hardly room in which to swing the hammer properly,
+and the one who was “striking” could keep it up for only
+a few minutes at a time. But the sight of the shadowy<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>
+illumination beyond the obstacle kept them going, and
+they wouldn’t give up, didn’t give up or stop, only once
+for the evening meal, until they had the hole drilled well
+into the center of the boulder.</p>
+
+<p>Next came the loading and firing, and that, too, brought
+on more talk. They knew that the gases liberated by
+the exploding dynamite would, unless there were a ventilating
+outlet somewhere beyond, fill the cavern and stifle
+them. By this time it was well on into the night, and it
+was Larry’s suggestion that they load the hole in readiness
+for firing, and leave it until morning.</p>
+
+<p>“We’re too tired to chew off any more excitement to-night,”
+was the way he put it; so they led the jacks back
+to one of the larger chambers where the peek-a-boo torrent,
+as Dick called it, took what appeared to be its final
+dive underground, moved their packs, and, unrolling the
+blankets, turned in on the hard floor to sleep as they could.</p>
+
+<p>It was half-past five in the morning when Larry’s self-tripping
+mental alarm clock went off, and he got up and
+roused his two companions.</p>
+
+<p>“Time’s up,” he said. “Help me get the mules and the
+stuff a little farther back out of the way and we’ll shoot
+the moon.”</p>
+
+<p>They made their preparations for the big shot with
+some little trepidation. Dick, who, because his father
+was a mine owner as well as a railroad manager, knew
+the most about underground mining, was the mainstay
+of the other two.</p>
+
+<p>“We needn’t be nervous,” he said. “Half the time the
+miners don’t take the trouble to go back very far in a
+tunnel, even when they fire a whole round of blasts.
+What you do is to hold your mouth open and cover your<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153"></a>[153]</span>
+ears with your hands. And with all these crookings
+there’s no fear of flying rocks.”</p>
+
+<p>When everything was as ready as they knew how to
+make it, Larry took the lighted candle and went to put
+fire to the fuse, which they had cut long enough to give
+the firer plenty of time to rejoin his companions. When
+he came back, the hand that held the candle was shaking
+a little, in spite of all he could do. “She’s going,” he
+announced, and then they blew the candles out and cowered
+against the nearest rock wall in the black darkness
+to wait for the shock.</p>
+
+<p>To all three it seemed as if the waiting interval would
+never end. Time, at such a crisis, moves as if it were
+leaden-winged. Dick had his mouth open, but he held
+his breath until he was about ready to burst. “Gracious!”
+he gasped, “did we cut that fuse a mile long?”</p>
+
+<p>If either Larry or Purdick made any reply there were
+no ears to hear it. The fire had reached the dynamite
+at last. There was a sucking blast of air that seemed to
+be trying to tear them loose and fling them back into the
+rearward depths, a noise that was like a collision of
+worlds, and then a sickening gust of the powder fumes
+to warn them not to be in too much of a hurry to run
+forward to see what the big blast had accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>They didn’t hurry. After a wait of about five minutes,
+Larry relighted his candle, and they waited again until
+the candle flame was burning brightly to show that the
+deadly fumes were dissipating. Then they crept forward
+cautiously. Around the last of the crooking turns in the
+passage they found a litter of broken rock, and they were
+almost afraid to look into the boulder nest. What if the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154"></a>[154]</span>
+shock had brought down the roof, and so trapped them
+more securely than ever?</p>
+
+<p>It was Dick who got the first look. “Hooray!” he
+yelled. “We did it! She’s wide open—you could drive
+a wagon through!”</p>
+
+<p>In a hush of eager expectancy they pressed forward
+over the pile of shattered rock. Just beyond the place
+where the boulder had stopped the way, the cavern made
+an abrupt turn to the left, and at a little distance beyond
+the turn they came out into the blessed daylight at the
+mouth of what appeared to be marvelously like a man-made
+tunnel.</p>
+
+<p>Gasping and gulping down the fresh morning air into
+their gas-filled lungs, they stood for a moment in the
+tunnel mouth and looked around them. In the foreground
+there was a deep gulch, and the slope facing the
+tunnel and its backgrounding cliff looked singularly like
+a small mine dump. Purdick was staring down into the
+gorge as one suddenly transfixed. When he found speech
+it was to say, like a person talking in his sleep: “I remember
+now, it was right down there that I found that piece
+of rotten quartz—the piece with the gold in it.”</p>
+
+<p>When he said that, Dick began to look around. A
+moment later he dragged Purdick and Larry back into
+the tunnel and pointed upward and outward. “Look!”
+he whispered, with awe in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>The tunnel mouth faced east, and the sun was just
+rising over the opposite mountain to shine full in upon
+them. In the jagged upper arch of the tunnel lip, untouched,
+as it seemed, by the outrush of gases from the
+big blast, a spider’s web, a perfect wheel, was suspended,
+and at the hub of the wheel sat a great spider waiting for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155"></a>[155]</span>
+its prey. And as the rays of the morning sun fell upon
+the web, the body of the spider hung like a drop of molten
+gold in a net of silver gossamer. Dick’s voice sank to
+less than a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>“The golden spider!” he breathed. “Good goodness,
+fellows—are we awake, or just dreaming!”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156"></a>[156]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X<br>
+<small>NOTICE TO QUIT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">While the three young prospectors, standing just
+within the mouth of the cliff crevice, stared at the
+spider-web with its eight-legged globule of molten gold
+hanging in the center, a small cloud drifted across the
+face of the rising sun and instantly the golden illusion
+vanished. The halo-like wheel of silken silver became
+just an ordinary spider-web, and the big spider changed
+its hue to a dusty brown. Dick drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“It sure got me for a minute,” he said. “For about
+two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail I thought we were looking
+at old Jimmie Brock’s golden spider—thought we’d
+blundered into his lost mine by the back door.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, see here,” said Larry, looking around curiously.
+“Are you right sure that we haven’t?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course we haven’t. That spider is only a coincidence.
+Uncle Billy didn’t say anything about the mine
+being in a cave.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was holding the candle, which he had not yet
+blown out, up to the side wall of the crevice. On the
+smooth surface of the rock there were marks; letters and
+words partly obliterated but still traceable. “Look
+here!” he called quickly; and this—filling in a missing
+letter or so here and there—was what they read:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157"></a>[157]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p class="noic">THE GOLDEN SPIDER LODE</p>
+
+<p class="noi">The undersigned claims sixty days to drive
+discovery tunnel and three months to record
+on this vein.</p>
+
+<p class="right">James Brock, Discoverer.</p>
+
+<p class="noi">Dated October 16, ——.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The year number was effaced, but they knew that the
+hand that had scrawled this notice on the rock had been
+dead for nearly three years, so they could easily supply
+that.</p>
+
+<p>“For mercy’s sake!” gasped Dick; “old Jimmie’s ‘discovery’
+notice! It <em>is</em> the mine, after all. Talk about your
+miracles—why, great gracious! if that roof hadn’t happened
+to tumble down back yonder and fairly <em>made</em> us
+come and look for some other way to get out——”</p>
+
+<p>“And to think that I was right here at the foot of this
+slide yesterday, and never once thought of its being a
+mine dump!” Purdick gulped.</p>
+
+<p>They all stepped out and looked down. The situation
+of the mine mouth, or cave mouth, was rather peculiar.
+The cliff which formed the western boundary of the gulch
+was not perpendicular; it was in steps or ledges; and the
+cave opening was on a level with one of these ledges,
+which was, perhaps, eight or ten feet wide in front of
+the cave mouth, forming a sort of dooryard to the opening.
+From that ledge to the steep slope below, there was
+a drop of maybe twelve or fifteen feet, and this had made
+a convenient dumping arrangement for the old prospector.
+All he had had to do was to shove his waste diggings
+out to the edge of the ledge and let them drop.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158"></a>[158]</span></p>
+
+<p>Larry looked over the dumping edge at the heap of
+broken rock below.</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t any wonder you didn’t connect that pile of
+rock with this hole up here, Purdy,” he said. “It doesn’t
+look much like the ordinary mine dump.”</p>
+
+<p>“But whereabouts is the vein?” Dick demanded, and
+he was so excited that he could hardly talk straight.</p>
+
+<p>Turning back into the cave, they were not long in
+finding the lode of decomposed quartz. At a point in
+the natural cavern not more than a dozen feet from the
+entrance, another and smaller crevice branched off, pitching
+up-hill at quite a sharp incline and stopping abruptly
+against a wall of rock at a little distance from its branching
+point. In this pocket-like tunnel they came upon a
+worn shovel and a miner’s pick; a hammer with a broken
+handle, and three stubby rock drills: Brock’s tools, left
+behind when he had sallied out to begin the desperate
+struggle for life through the snows. The quartz vein
+itself was not over a foot wide, but it was exceedingly
+rich in spots—“lenses,” the mineralogists call them. Even
+by the poor light of their single candle the boys could
+see fine, wire-like threads of native gold here and there in
+the brown mass of the rotten quartz.</p>
+
+<p>For a little time they all lost their heads. It was such
+a bewildering, astounding thing that the lost mine, which
+they had all been regarding as more or less of a myth,
+so far as they were concerned, should turn up this way
+as a sequel to an adventure into which, as Dick had said,
+they had been fairly driven by the falling roof in the
+cave.</p>
+
+<p>“Great Land!” he ejaculated. “Think of this thing
+lying here unclaimed and unowned for nearly three long<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159"></a>[159]</span>
+years—and with probably dozens of people besides Uncle
+Billy looking for it! And think of the thousand and one
+chances we had of missing it! If our camp-fire hadn’t
+just happened to melt a hole in that ice a month ago;
+or if we hadn’t gone back yesterday to have a look at
+the cave; or if—oh, gee! there’s simply no end to the
+‘ifs’!”</p>
+
+<p>“I—I guess it just was to be,” said little Purdick, who
+was not half so much of a fatalist as this remark would
+seem to indicate. “We were just kicked into it, as you
+might say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Dick broke in, all a-nerve to get action of some
+sort, “what do we do, Larry? Can we post a notice,
+calling it our discovery, and hustle out to a land office
+and record it? Or do we have to stay here and do a lot
+of work on it before we can claim it in our names?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not enough of a mine lawyer to know,” Larry
+confessed. “The law says that the discoverer of a lode
+must either dig a shaft ten feet deep on it or, if he tunnels,
+his tunnel must go in far enough so that the vertical distance
+from the heading to the surface outside must be
+ten feet or more. Brock was the discoverer, and he did
+more than the law requires, as we can easily see. But
+that was three years ago. Whether we, as re-locators,
+will have to begin all over again, I don’t know.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s all right,” Dick put in; “in that case we’re not
+going to take any chances. We can stay here a week
+and still get out in time to start back to college; and we
+can do work enough in that time to satisfy the law if
+we get busy and don’t loaf on the job. We’ve dynamite
+enough left, luckily, and we can sharpen the drills the
+way we’ve been sharpening them—in a wood fire. Breakfast<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160"></a>[160]</span>
+first, fellows; and after we get the jacks down to
+where they can feed, we’ll go at it for blood!”</p>
+
+<p>This programme, or at least the first part of it, was
+agreed to and set in motion promptly. Going back into
+the crevice cave, they brought up the burros and packs,
+and, not to lose time gathering wood for a fire, they
+made coffee and broiled bacon over the last of the solidified
+alcohol cooking candles.</p>
+
+<p>The breakfast was cooked and eaten just inside the
+mouth of the natural tunnel, and after they had finished
+the hasty meal, they all went out on the dump-head ledge
+to determine the best way of getting the burros down to
+some grazing ground where they could be picketed out.</p>
+
+<p>“Say!” Dick exclaimed, looking over the mountain-scaling
+difficulties that presented themselves, “it’s going
+to be some whale of a job getting the little beasties down
+there, if you’ll listen to what I’m telling you. And if
+we do get them down, they’ll stay down; we could never
+make ’em climb up here again in the wide world—that’s
+a cinch.”</p>
+
+<p>“That won’t make any difference. We wouldn’t want
+to get them back up here,” Larry answered. “We’ll most
+likely want to camp in the gulch ourselves, as long as the
+weather holds good.”</p>
+
+<p>During this little colloquy Purdick had stood aside.
+He was shading his eyes from the sun and looking the
+mountain-narrowed prospect over thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he broke in. “Don’t you
+know, we’ve actually come back to within a few hundred
+yards of the place where we camped night before last!
+When we ran that test on the piece of quartz that I
+found, we were almost right here <em>at</em> the Golden Spider!<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161"></a>[161]</span>
+See that butte with a bald spot on top up yonder?”—pointing
+to the right. “That lies right opposite the mouth
+of the little gulch where we made camp that night. Don’t
+you remember it?”</p>
+
+<p>Now that it was pointed out, they all remembered it.
+Also, Larry remembered something else.</p>
+
+<p>“That isn’t all,” he said. “That clay-and-rock slide
+where I found the crutch prints must be right up above
+us somewhere. I remember, now, there was a broken
+cliff, just like this, lying below it.”</p>
+
+<p>This mention of the crutch prints made Purdick shade
+his eyes and look again. Dick and Larry went along the
+ledge a little way to the left to see if there were any
+practicable descent for the burros in that direction.
+When they came back they found that Purdick had Dick’s
+field-glass and was focusing it upon a point farther down
+the wooded gulch.</p>
+
+<p>“Seeing things, Purdy?” Dick asked jocularly.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I am,” was the low-toned reply. “Take
+the glass and hold it on the mouth of that little pocket
+ravine away down there to the left.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick took one glance—which was all that he needed.</p>
+
+<p>“Smoke!” he exclaimed. “Wood smoke—a camp-fire!”
+and he handed the glass to Larry.</p>
+
+<p>Larry looked long and earnestly. When he passed the
+glass back to Purdick, the good gray eyes were narrowing.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess that means trouble in chunks,” he announced
+soberly. “Of course, it may not be the crowd that has
+been camping on our trail all summer, but the chances
+are that it is. Those crutch tracks that I found were
+pointing down that way. Let’s get inside, out of sight,
+before they spot us.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162"></a>[162]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the shelter of the crevice cave they held an immediate
+council of war. After a little hurried talk it was
+decided that there were two courses open to them. They
+could post a re-location notice—for whatever effect that
+might have upon any one who should find the mine after
+they left it—and slip away quietly in the hope that the
+“jumpers” would follow them and so be drawn away
+from the vicinity; or——</p>
+
+<p>“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted, when Larry had
+got that far. “You said a while ago that you didn’t
+know what the law is about doing ‘discovery’ work on
+re-locations of abandoned claims—which is what this one
+is. If we leave the mine without doing the proper amount
+of work on it, we lose it anyway, don’t we?”</p>
+
+<p>“I was coming to that,” Larry went on. “We can post
+a notice and map the location so that somebody else can
+find it. Then, when we get back to Brewster, your uncle
+can send somebody in to do the work, and make the proper
+record. Of course we’d take a chance doing that. If
+anybody should come along after we go away, and be
+dishonest enough to destroy our notice, we’d lose out.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right; that is one thing we can do,” said Purdick.
+“What’s the other?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry frowned and looked away at the forested mountain
+framed in the crevice opening.</p>
+
+<p>“The other is the surest thing, if we’ve got nerve
+enough to pull it off. If we quit on the job before it’s
+finished, any one of a dozen things may happen to knock
+us out. Maybe we can’t throw these fellows off the track
+so easily. If they’re keeping any kind of a lookout,
+they’ll be pretty sure to see us getting the jacks and our
+dunnage down from this perch. That would mean, of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163"></a>[163]</span>
+course, that they’d wait until we were out of the way,
+and then they’d come up here, find the mine, and ‘jump’
+it. They could do that, and get their claim recorded,
+long before we could get back to Brewster and send
+somebody in here to make our ownership stick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Dick cut in impatiently, “go on; what else can
+we do?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“The other thing is sort of scary, I’ll admit; or, anyway,
+it’s full of stumps that I don’t see any way to get
+over. It’s to stay right here and do the work that we
+meant to do, and stand them off if they come interfering
+with us: fight it out with ’em, I mean. They don’t
+know that we’ve got to hike out at the end of a week, and
+if we can put up a good bluff they may think we’re here
+to stay. Trouble is, we’ll be cooped up in here like rats in
+a trap. They’ll hear the dynamiting—can’t help hearing
+it—and we won’t dare show ourselves outside. Worse
+than that, the jacks will starve—and I’d rather starve
+myself than starve them.”</p>
+
+<p>To the keen surprise of the two others it was little
+Purdick, pale but determined, who rose first to the demands
+of the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>“I vote to stay and hang on and fight it out,” he said,
+and if his voice were a bit husky it wasn’t from fear.
+“If we let go—but we just mustn’t let go, that’s all!
+I’m not saying this because I need the money worse than
+you two do: for that matter, I think the mine ought to
+belong to Mr. Starbuck, anyway. But for us to sneak
+out and leave it to a wide-open chance, after we’ve found
+it.... You know your uncle, Dick, and I hardly know
+him at all; but I’m sure he’ll think mighty small of us<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164"></a>[164]</span>
+if we go back and tell him that we found the Golden
+Spider and didn’t have sand enough to stay and hold on
+to it.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick pounded the small one on the back.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re the right old stuff, Purdy—you sure are!” he
+broke out heartily, and then he chuckled: “And you’re
+the one who said a little while back that you’d be no good
+in a scrap! I’m with you, right from the jump, and I
+know Larry is, too. Let’s get busy. We don’t even
+know that that smoke down yonder means anything more
+than some harmless old prospector’s cooking fire; and if
+it does mean anything else, we’re not exactly babies to let
+somebody take our candy away from us without raising
+a squawk. Let’s have a look at the drills, Larry, and see
+if they’re usable.”</p>
+
+<p>That settled it, of course. But there were still some
+knotty details to be worked out.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve got grub enough, and we can get water by
+going back in the cave to where the torrent disappears,”
+Larry said. “But we’ve got to have fire, and for the
+fire we must have fuel. It strikes me that our first job—before
+these hold-ups get wind of us—is to get in a good
+supply of wood, and at the same time see if we can’t find
+something for the jacks to eat.”</p>
+
+<p>Not to lose any of the time which had suddenly become
+precious, they fell to work at once. First, they clambered
+down to the gulch level, taking the axe and the guns with
+them. In a series of little glades along the small torrent
+which drained the deep ravine they found plenty of
+grass, but as they had nothing but their pocket-knives
+with which to cut it, they found it was going to take a
+good while to harvest enough to amount to anything.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165"></a>[165]</span>
+After a bit, they gave up trying to haggle it off with the
+knives and took to pulling it up by the roots, and in this
+way they soon gathered quite a quantity.</p>
+
+<p>Hurrying as fast as they could, and half expecting
+every moment to be interrupted, they rushed the pile of
+green hay over to the ledge foot by armfuls, and with
+two of them on the ledge to hoist, and one at the bottom
+to load the picket-rope sling, they shortly had the jack-feed
+stored in the crevice.</p>
+
+<p>That done, they flung themselves upon the job of
+wood gathering. This took more time, and was a lot
+harder work; but in a couple of hours they had accumulated
+a fairly good stock of fuel, dragging it up the ledge
+precipice as they had the grass, an armful at a time in
+the rope sling.</p>
+
+<p>Though they worked like salvagers at a fire, the job of
+getting ready to stand a siege cut deeply into the forenoon,
+but still they neither heard nor saw anything of
+the men they were momently expecting to have to deal
+with. It was not until after they were preparing to begin
+work in the gold vein that Larry hit upon the probable
+reason for their immunity thus far.</p>
+
+<p>“Here’s my guess,” he offered. “We have fairly good
+proof that they’ve been trailing us from day to day, and
+it’s been easy because we haven’t tried to cover up our
+tracks. Their permanent camp is probably down yonder
+where we saw that smoke, and some one of the three has
+chased out to see where we went yesterday. He’d have
+no trouble in tracking us up to the place where we began
+to burrow in the ground.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>“No trouble up to that point, but a whole lot of it<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166"></a>[166]</span>
+afterward. Do you think he could track us into the
+crevice?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head. “I don’t know. I suppose he
+could, if he’s any kind of a tracker. But when he comes
+to the place where the roof fell down, he’ll quit and go
+back; you can bet on that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” said Dick, “if this gold vein were only a little
+farther back in the cave, where we could drill and blast
+without being heard from the outside, we’d be as safe as
+a clock. Nobody would ever think of looking down here
+for the outlet to that crack away yonder up the mountain.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can’t tell,” Larry demurred; and then: “You’re
+right about the drilling and blasting, though. We
+needn’t think we’re going to be able to do any great
+amount of mining in here without being found out, if
+there’s anybody around who wants to find out. That
+being the case, we’ve got to watch out sharp. We’ll work
+changing shifts in the heading; two on and one off; and
+the man that’s resting can stand guard at the cave
+mouth.”</p>
+
+<p>While Larry was sharpening the drills, with a flat stone
+for an anvil, and with Purdick working the bicycle-pump
+blower for him, Dick moved the green hay back to
+the enlargement of the crevice where they were keeping
+the burros, and piled the stock of wood where it would
+be out of the way. Next the question of spoil disposal
+came up. What were they to do with the broken rock
+and vein matter as they blasted it out?</p>
+
+<p>“There is one sure thing,” Larry said. “That stuff
+is too rich to be thrown out on the dump. We’ll have to
+pile our diggings here in the cave and sort the ore by<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167"></a>[167]</span>
+hand the best way we can. It would be like throwing
+twenty-dollar gold pieces away to pitch it into the gulch.”</p>
+
+<p>“You said a mouthful, that time,” Dick agreed. “But
+it will clutter us up awfully if we have to pile the spoil
+in here.”</p>
+
+<p>“We can sort it, as I say,” Larry pointed out, “saving
+only the vein matter and shoveling the barren rock out
+over the ledge. But we won’t do that until we’re sure
+we’re not going to be molested. When we begin making
+a fresh dump outside, that will be telling anybody that
+may happen along just what we’re doing in here. And
+if we don’t do the sorting mighty carefully one look at
+the dump will tell any prospector that we’re working a
+quartz gold vein. We want to keep this thing quiet, if
+we can. Saying nothing about the three hold-ups, it
+would be a fierce temptation for anybody to ‘jump’ it
+after we’re gone—take down our notice and throw it
+away and pretend that the place was an abandoned claim.”</p>
+
+<p>“But nobody could make a barefaced robbery like that
+hold in law,” Purdick protested.</p>
+
+<p>Dick smiled grimly.</p>
+
+<p>“If you had lived in a mining country as long as Larry
+and I have, you’d know that a law-suit over a mine is
+about the last thing in the world that any peaceable person
+wants to get mixed up in, Purdy. When you once
+begin, there’s simply no end to it. You see, there’s no
+way of getting any real proof that will satisfy a judge
+and jury. We might swear that we discovered this vein
+on a certain date and posted our notice. Then the other
+fellow would get up and swear that he had discovered it
+at an earlier date and posted <em>his</em> notice. So there you
+are.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168"></a>[168]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Let’s be doing,” Larry broke in; and he and Purdick
+went into James Brock’s tunnel and began drilling the
+holes for the first round of blasts, while Dick, with his
+rifle across his knees, took the first guard watch, sitting
+at the crevice mouth and looking down into the gulch
+through which any intruder must approach.</p>
+
+<p>As the short shifts were planned, each one of the three
+had an hour on and a half-hour off, the watcher taking
+the place of one of the two in the heading at the end of
+each thirty minutes. Nothing happened during Dick’s
+half-hour at the cave mouth. The faint smoke wreath
+that had been distinguishable in the early morning over
+the little ravine farther down the gulch had disappeared,
+and the stillness of the mountain immensities brooded
+over the scene. Carefully and at frequent intervals Dick
+swept the surroundings with the field-glass, but there
+was nothing to indicate that there was a human being, or,
+indeed, any living thing, within miles of his sentry-box
+on the face of the broken cliff.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of one shift all around they knocked off
+for dinner. The fire had been kept going, and Purdick
+made up and cooked enough pan-bread to last for a
+couple of days.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s because we’ve got to go light on our wood
+pile,” he said. “It’s too much hard work to get the stuff
+up here.” Then to Larry, who had had the last half-hour
+at the cave’s mouth: “Anything stirring outside?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing. We might be the only people between the
+two ranges of the Hophras, so far as any sign of life
+in the gulch goes.”</p>
+
+<p>“But we know pretty well we’re not,” Dick put in,
+making himself a sandwich of bacon and hot pan-bread.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169"></a>[169]</span>
+“I’ve been figuring and calculating on about how long it
+would take a man to climb from the gulch to the place
+where we ducked into the cave, find out all there is to
+be found out there, and get back. What do you say,
+Larry?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry laughed. “Anybody’s guess is as good as mine.
+But that doesn’t cut any figure. If their camp is down
+yonder where we saw that smoke this morning, and there
+is anybody left in it, our first round of blasts will give
+us away. They can’t miss hearing the dynamite at that
+distance.”</p>
+
+<p>“What will they do?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“You tell—if you know,” Larry returned.</p>
+
+<p>Dick nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure that out, too.
+Of course, they can climb up on the ledge at the place
+around to the left where we shinned up and down—that
+is, the two with good legs can. But will they take a
+chance on doing that?”</p>
+
+<p>“A chance of getting shot, you mean? I don’t think
+they’ll be much afraid of that. They’re taking us for a
+bunch of kids—what Purdick heard over there in Lost
+Canyon proves that—and they’ll probably think they can
+scare us off.”</p>
+
+<p>“That brings it right down to brass tacks,” said Dick.
+“I think we ought to make up our minds just what we’re
+going to do if the pinch comes. I’ll say, right now, that
+I’m not much good with a rifle. If I should shoot and
+try to cripple one of ’em, just as likely as not my hand
+would shake and I’d kill him. And I wouldn’t want to
+kill the worst scamp in the world unless I was sure it was
+the only way to save my own life.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess we all feel pretty much the same way,” Larry<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170"></a>[170]</span>
+put in. “And I’ll have to admit that I’m with you on
+the poor marksmanship proposition, too, Dick. You
+know how it was last summer when Bob Goldrick used
+to give us an afternoon off in the Tourmaline and let us
+take his rifle for target practice.”</p>
+
+<p>“I sure do,” said Dick, with a sheepish grin. “Seemed
+as if neither one of us could hit the side of a barn.”</p>
+
+<p>It was just here that little Purdick surprised his two
+camp-mates for the second time in one day.</p>
+
+<p>“I can shoot, and shoot straight,” he slipped in quietly.</p>
+
+<p>“You?” queried Dick. “How did you ever learn to
+handle a gun—in a rolling-mill town?”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s smile was reminiscent of some pretty hard
+times in the past.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve done mighty nearly everything in the world to
+earn a living, first and last, as both of you know,” he
+explained. “One summer I helped in a shooting-gallery,
+and when business was slack the boss let me practice.
+When he found out that I had a sort of good eye for it,
+he’d make me go out in front and start the game—just
+to show customers how easy it was to make bull’s-eyes.
+It is easy, too, after you get the knack of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re elected,” said Dick; “that is, if you don’t mind
+being the goat.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s smile broadened into a grin.</p>
+
+<p>“You fellows will have to call the shots—say where
+you want ’em placed. That’ll put the responsibility on
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they
+made ready to fire the first round of blasts on the gold
+vein. Larry, the careful one of the three, did the fuse
+fixing and tamping of the holes, and when all was ready<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171"></a>[171]</span>
+he applied the match and they all retreated to safety in
+the upper part of the natural cavern. There was the
+usual thunder burst of noise, or rather four of them coming
+in quick succession, the queer sensation which every
+deep-shaft miner knows; a feeling as if one’s neck were
+suddenly pulled out to goose-neck length and then snapped
+back like a retracting rubber band; the rush of compressed
+air forced inward by the expanding gases, followed
+by the suction of the reaction; and the thing was
+over.</p>
+
+<p>Having had considerable experience with dynamite
+during the summer, they waited for the air to clear. As
+soon as it became breathable, they crept forward to see
+what the explosive had done. The round of shots was
+a handsome success. The little tunnel was filled with
+the broken rock and vein matter, and the heading, or
+tunnel end, had been advanced the length of the deepest
+drill hole.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s business,” said Dick. “We can walk her back
+into the hill any old distance we want to—give us time.
+Now let’s see if the racket has stirred up anything exciting
+on the outside.”</p>
+
+<p>Apparently it hadn’t. Looking out of the cave mouth,
+they saw no change in the surroundings; no indication
+that there had been any ears but their own to hear the
+roar of the dynamite. Dick wanted to go to work at
+once, clearing away and sorting the ore thrown down
+while there was still daylight enough to enable them to
+see, but Larry counseled patience.</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s give those sneak thieves time enough to come,
+if they’re going to come,” he advised, so they all three
+stood guard at the mouth of the cave for a full quarter<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172"></a>[172]</span>
+of an hour, six eager eyes searching every detail of the
+gulch for signs of an approaching enemy and finding
+none at all.</p>
+
+<p>“False alarm,” said Dick at last. “We’d better get
+busy before we have to light candles to see by. With the
+sun over behind the mountain, it’s going to get dark early
+in this hole.”</p>
+
+<p>Not to miss any of the precautions they had so firmly
+agreed upon, it was decided that two of them should
+sort the ore from the rock while the other stood guard
+at the crevice mouth. This arrangement functioned all
+right until Dick, who was one of the two sorters, began
+to go into hilarious ecstasies over the prodigious richness
+of some of the “lenses” that had been shot down, shattered
+bits of the rotten quartz held together by wire-like
+lacings of native gold. After a time, his ravings got to
+be too much even for Larry, who was doing the guard
+stunt. Again and again he was tempted away from his
+place at the cave mouth by Dick’s, “Oh, gee-whiz, Larry!
+Duck in here just for a second and see <em>this</em> piece! There
+never was anything like it in this world!”</p>
+
+<p>And then—for the fifth or sixth time Larry had dodged
+back from his post at Dick’s call, and all three of them
+had their heads together over the most beautiful of all
+the specimens that had yet been dug out of the heap of
+shattered rock. Suddenly the waning daylight sifting in
+through the narrow crevice entrance was cut off, and a
+raucous voice bellowed:</p>
+
+<p>“Say! What the blazes are youse fellows doin’ in our
+mine, I’d like to know? Climb down out o’ this, the
+bunch o’ yuh, afore I drill yuh so full o’ holes that your
+own mothers won’t know yuh!”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173"></a>[173]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI<br>
+<small>FINDERS KEEPERS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">At the summons for which they had been looking—and
+hadn’t looked judiciously enough—the three
+Golden Spiders, kneeling beside the partly sorted pile of
+ore and broken stone, were taken at a tremendous disadvantage.
+Larry’s rifle was the only one within reach,
+and this had been put down while he was handling the
+piece of rich ore that Dick had thrust at him.</p>
+
+<p>The intruder, a heavily built man with a swarthy face,
+ragged black mustaches and a beard that looked as if it
+might be a month past its last shave, had apparently come
+well prepared to enforce the notice to quit. He carried a
+rifle in the crook of his arm, and there was a formidable-looking
+pistol sagging in its holster on his right hip.</p>
+
+<p>Dick was the first to get upon his feet, and what he
+said was no measure at all of the scare that was gripping
+him inside.</p>
+
+<p>“You say this is your mine? I g-guess you’ll have to
+prove that before you can run us off,” he blurted out.</p>
+
+<p>“Prove nothin’!” retorted the invader with an ugly
+rasp in his voice. “Me and my pardners was pardners
+with old Jim Brock when he worked the ’sessment on
+this here claim. You fellers pack up and git out whilst
+yuh can do it with whole skins. Git a move, I say!”</p>
+
+<p>Up to this point little Purdick was the only one who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174"></a>[174]</span>
+was doing any moving. Being behind Dick and Larry,
+and also having the pile of shot-down rock for partial
+concealment, he was trying by slow inchings to get hold
+of Larry’s gun. He knew it would probably be quick
+suicide for Larry to turn around and try to pick it up,
+but he thought that he—Purdick—might be able to get
+it if Dick would only go on arguing with the big hold-up
+and so gain a little time. Dick didn’t disappoint him.
+Arguing was the thing Dickie Maxwell did best.</p>
+
+<p>“But see here,” he contended, facing the big man
+boldly; “you can’t chase us out this way. If you’ve got
+a legal right to this claim, all you have to do is to go into
+court and prove it and we’ll give up. But——”</p>
+
+<p>“There ain’t no ‘buts’ about it!” roared the swarthy
+desperado, loosening the big revolver in its sheath. “I
+ain’t honin’ to commit no murder, but if yuh git me
+madded—pass me them guns, butt foremost, and then git
+yer traps and pile out o’ here, and do it mighty sudden,
+’r I’ll blow yuh to kingdom come!”</p>
+
+<p>Again little Purdick was the only one who moved.
+All his efforts to reach Larry’s gun without being caught
+at it failed. Six inches was as near as he could come to
+touching it. But the small one was blest with a brain
+that could shuttle at the rate of a mile a minute under
+pressure, and all the time he was reaching for the rifle, he
+was trying his hardest to think of some other expedient
+that would rid them of the intruder.</p>
+
+<p>It was the desperado’s final threat that gave Purdick
+the bright idea—that “blow yuh to kingdom come.” The
+daylight was fading fast, and with it Purdick faded,
+backing out of the scene noiselessly and taking scrupulous
+care to keep himself in line with Dick and the sheltering<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175"></a>[175]</span>
+rock pile. When he had crept to where the jack
+packs were lying, it seemed as if it took him an endless
+time to find what he wanted, and his hands were shaking
+so that they fumbled helplessly in the dark. Around the
+turn in the crevice he could hear Dick still trying to
+argue, with the hold-up breaking in to curse and swear
+and threaten all sorts of hideous things that were going
+to happen when he got sufficiently “madded.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick’s hurried preparations were finished at last,
+and with trembling fingers he struck a match and held
+the flame to the frayed end of what looked in the match-light
+to be a length of thick, blackish string. The next
+moment he had darted around the sheltering turn in the
+crevice to fling a yellow cylindrical object at the feet of
+the intruder—a paper-covered cylinder with a spitting,
+fizzing, black string hanging out of it.</p>
+
+<p>“<em>Dynamite!</em>” he yelled, and with the yell grabbed
+Dick’s collar with one hand and Larry’s with the other,
+and in a burst of strength that would have been miles
+beyond him a few short weeks earlier, dragged them both
+headlong over the rock pile and behind it, falling flat on
+top of them to hold them down.</p>
+
+<p>It worked. There was a deafening explosion a few
+seconds later, but there was no intruder in sight to be
+blown up by it. Instantly, Purdick leaped to his feet,
+caught up Larry’s rifle and ran to the cave mouth. The
+dooryard ledge was empty, but a great crashing in the
+young trees below told what had become of the man with
+the large threats and the small self-control in an emergency.
+Having escaped the dynamite, he was doing his
+best to get out of rifle range.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176"></a>[176]</span></p>
+
+<p>Larry was the first to speak when he and Dick joined
+Purdick at the cave entrance.</p>
+
+<p>“We sure had it coming to us—or I did, anyway. I
+‘white-eyed’ on my lookout job. I had no business to go
+gold-crazy just because you did, Dick.” Then to Purdick:
+“You bully little old fighting rat—how did you
+come to think of the dynamite?”</p>
+
+<p>“He put it into my head by saying what he did about
+blowing us all up if we didn’t get out. But I had an
+awful time fixing the cartridge in the dark. I was scared
+stiff for fear I’d leave too much of the stuff in the paper
+and kill us all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you didn’t use a whole stick?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Good land—no! I guess we wouldn’t be here if I had.
+I took it all out but just a little, and filled the paper up
+with sand to make it look like a whole stick. I thought
+probably that just the look of it would crack his nerve,
+and it did.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Larry, with a hunch of his broad shoulders,
+“we know where we’re ‘at’ now, at least. We’ve
+got to stick and fight it out, after this, whether we want
+to or not.”</p>
+
+<p>“You bet we’ll stick,” Dick asserted; and then: “The
+cold nerve of that outfit! Just plain hold-ups, as we’ve
+been saying they were. Now there’s this about it: we
+can’t afford to be chicken-hearted with toughs like they
+are. I more than half believe they’d shoot, and shoot
+to kill, if they thought that was the only way to get rid
+of us.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Purdick put in quietly. “We can shoot,
+too, if we have to. You fellows go in and go on with
+the ore sorting. I’ll be doorman for a while.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177"></a>[177]</span></p>
+
+<p>Since it was now nearly evening, with little daylight
+in the crevice, Dick lighted a candle and the ore sorting
+was continued. Purdick sat down with his rifle between
+his knees and got what satisfaction he could out of a
+reversed and very beautiful sunset. The sun had gone
+behind the great range at his back, and the gulch and
+its tributary ravines were slowly filling with a rising tide
+of dusky blue that was like a mist, only in the high altitudes
+it isn’t a mist; it is just pure color. But it was
+only in the shadow that the colors were subdued. In the
+upper air the sunlight was still streaming in a gorgeous
+flood, crimsoning the few high clouds and setting the
+distant peaks of the eastern Hophras aglow with a pinkish
+fire.</p>
+
+<p>Full of hardship as his life had been, Purdick had a
+keen sense of the beautiful in nature, and again and again
+he had to remind himself that he was doing guard duty,
+and that the siege of the Golden Spider had now fairly
+begun. What would be the next move on the part of the
+three men who were trying to steal the mine? Would
+they try force again? Or would they——</p>
+
+<p>Purdick grew very thoughtful when the alternative suggested
+itself. If the would-be robbers had been spying
+thoroughly enough, they must know that the cave was not
+provisioned for a long siege; that in a few days at farthest
+hunger would do what their first attempt at force had
+failed to do. Then there were the burros. They could
+live for a little while on the grass that was stored in the
+cave, and after that they could starve for a few days
+longer. But the end must come shortly, even for the
+tough little animals.</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick was in the midst of these ominous cogitations<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178"></a>[178]</span>
+when he saw a red flash down among the trees in
+the gulch bottom to the left, something smacked like a
+pair of clapped hands a few feet over his head, and on
+the heels of that came the rattling echoes of a rifle shot.
+Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised his rifle, aimed
+it at the spot where he had seen the flash, and fired. At
+the double crack of the guns, distant and near, Dick and
+Larry came running.</p>
+
+<p>“What was it, Purdy?” Dick demanded.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing much. Somebody down there took a crack
+at me, and I handed it back.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did you hit him?” Larry wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t tell, of course. I fired at the place where I
+saw the flash. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to let
+them know that we’re on the job. Stand back a little.
+They may shoot again.”</p>
+
+<p>They waited in silence for a time, but there were no
+more shots. After a time a reddish glow appearing among
+the trees far down the gulch told them that the raiders’
+supper camp-fire had been lighted.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess that ends it for a while, anyway,” Larry commented.
+“They’ll hardly try to rush us in the dark.”</p>
+
+<p>“That may be,” Dick allowed. “Just the same there
+mustn’t be any more cat-napping on sentry post for us.
+They mean business. They’ve spent a whole summer
+chasing us all over the lot, and they’re not going to let go
+now, with the big prize fairly in sight.”</p>
+
+<p>After supper, which was eaten at the mouth of the
+cave where they could keep watch, they made their dispositions
+for the night. There was a bed of dry wash
+sand back in the cavern, and they shovelled enough of
+this out to the entrance corridor to pad the bare rock<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179"></a>[179]</span>
+floor for a makeshift bed. Purdick took the first watch,
+and when he called Dick a little before midnight, there
+was nothing to report. Dick, the easy-going, comfort-loving
+member of the trio, found it pretty hard work
+keeping awake, with no fire and not much chance to stir
+around, but he managed to stick it out until three o’clock,
+when he roused Larry.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing doing,” he said in low tones so as not to
+waken Purdick. “I could see the glow of their fire a
+little when I first came on, but that’s gone down now. I
+don’t believe we’re going to hear anything more from
+them before daylight.”</p>
+
+<p>His prediction proved true. Larry sat through the
+long hours of early-morning darkness and heard nothing,
+saw nothing until the breaking dawn showed him a column
+of smoke rising above the distant pocket gulch to the left.
+Larry thought he was safe to go back into the cave and
+start the breakfast fire, and he did it, though he would
+not risk leaving his post long enough to go after the
+coffee water which could only be obtained by carrying it
+from the disappearing stream beyond the place where
+they had blasted the big boulder.</p>
+
+<p>The crackling of the fire roused Purdick, and he sat
+up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Anything startling?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Larry shook his head. “Nothing yet. They’re getting
+breakfast, I suppose. Their fire’s going, anyhow.”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick unwound himself from his blankets.</p>
+
+<p>“Good example they’re setting us. We’ll do likewise.”
+And he got up to go after the water and fry
+the bacon.</p>
+
+<p>They ate as they did the night before, sitting at the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180"></a>[180]</span>
+cavern mouth where they could see the gulch in both
+directions. Immediately after breakfast the ore sorting
+was resumed, with Purdick on watch under a new spider
+web which had been spun during the night. For an
+hour or more Dick and Larry pawed over the heap of
+broken rock, picking out the brown vein matter and piling
+it on one side, and leaving the barren rock to be shovelled
+out to the entrance and over the edge of the dooryard
+cliff.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until they began getting rid of the rock
+that hostilities opened up. Purdick, who was still on
+watch, had neither seen nor heard anything moving in
+the gulch below, but as Larry ran the first shovelful of
+stone out to the dumping edge, a rifle clanged somewhere
+in the woods and a bullet spatted against the cliff a foot
+or so from the cave mouth. Purdick was ready, but
+there was nothing to shoot at. A gun flash doesn’t show
+in the daylight, and the powder in a modern high-powered
+rifle cartridge doesn’t make much smoke; not enough
+so that a single discharge is visible at any great distance.</p>
+
+<p>“So that’s the game, is it?” Larry growled, ducking
+to cover before a second shot could be fired. “We’re not
+to be allowed to go out on our own doorstep. All right;
+here’s the answer,” and, standing in the cave passage
+where he couldn’t be seen from the gulch, he got rid of
+the spoil by pitching it, a shovelful at a time, into the
+depths below. The dooryard ledge was only about ten
+feet wide, and the shovel throw across it was comparatively
+easy.</p>
+
+<p>With the working ground cleared, the drilling for another
+series of blasts was begun, the routine of the previous
+day being followed; that is, half-hour shifts all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181"></a>[181]</span>
+around, with two of them striking and drill-holding in
+the tunnel heading and the other on watch. Larry had
+the first half-hour at the cave mouth, and during that
+time a number of shots were fired from the gulch. They
+did no harm. The upward angle was so great that the
+few bullets well enough aimed to enter the crevice did
+nothing worse than to knock a splinter of stone from
+the roof now and then. At first, these leaden invitations
+to quit were a good bit unnerving, but they soon learned
+that the way to let the enemy know that he wasn’t accomplishing
+anything was to keep the <em>ping-ping</em> of the striking
+hammer going steadily, and in a short time the useless
+bombardment stopped.</p>
+
+<p>By noon they were ready to fire another round of blasts
+in the tunnel, and they did it, retreating as before into
+the depths of the cave, in the confident assurance that
+the sputtering fuses would be a sufficient protection
+against an invasion for the few minutes they would have
+to leave the cave mouth unguarded. The roar of the
+blasts followed quickly, and after the gas had been given
+time to dissipate itself, the sorting process began again,
+this time with Dick doing guard duty.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see but what we can keep this thing up indefinitely,
+as long as our grub lasts,” Dick said, as he took
+his place as sentry. “This old cave is as safe as a fort.
+They can’t possibly rush us, so long as we keep watch
+and are ready for them.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a matter of brains,” Larry offered. “They’re a
+poor lot if they can’t think up something better than anything
+they’ve tried yet.”</p>
+
+<p>The words were hardly out of his mouth before they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182"></a>[182]</span>
+all heard what sounded like the rumble of a distant explosion.</p>
+
+<p>“What was that?” Purdick demanded, and as he spoke
+the answer came, first in an avalanche of earth and
+small stones rattling down from above upon their “dooryard”
+ledge, and an instant later in the thunderous fall
+of a huge boulder that, striking fairly upon the ledge,
+bit a huge scallop out of it exactly in front of the cave
+entrance as it went grinding and crashing on into the
+gulch, mowing down big trees in its path as if they were
+dry weed stalks.</p>
+
+<p>At the first rattling warning, Dick had thrown himself
+back into the crevice, and it was well that he did so,
+for the impact of the mighty projectile upon the ledge
+was like the explosion of an enormous shell, sending
+flying fragments of stone in all directions.</p>
+
+<p>“Speaking of brains,” Dick gasped, when he could get
+his breath, “I guess they’ve got a few right along with
+’em. Gorry! They must have shot a whole mountain
+down on us! Our dooryard’s gone, clear up to the hilt!”</p>
+
+<p>Dick’s announcement was no exaggeration. Where
+there had been a step-like ledge and a straight drop from
+the edge of it, there was now a great gash and a steep
+slope running quite up to the cave mouth. And the protection
+which the projecting ledge had given them from
+rifle fire from below was gone. A good marksman in
+the gulch could now shoot directly into the crevice, still
+at a high angle, to be sure, but not so high but that the
+bullets could penetrate for a dozen feet or more before
+they would hit the roof.</p>
+
+<p>While the avalanche aftermath of little stones and
+earth was still clattering down from the cliff brink above,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183"></a>[183]</span>
+the bombardment was renewed. Every few minutes, at
+the crack of a gun in the gulch, a whining missile would
+come through the exposed crevice mouth to hit the roof
+and scatter stone splinters and bits of hot lead all about
+the place.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Dick, after they had quickly withdrawn
+out of the line of fire, “what next?”</p>
+
+<p>“More of the same,” gritted Larry the stubborn.
+“We’re not dead yet. Get back on the sentry job, Dick,
+and Purdy and I will shovel this stuff out of the way
+and get ready for another go at the drilling. We won’t
+stop to do any more sorting just now.”</p>
+
+<p>Carrying out this programme, it was only a short time
+until the cheerful <em>ping-ping</em> of the hammer upon steel
+began to sound again in the vein tunnel, and, as before,
+the work noises stopped the firing from below. Dick was
+chuckling triumphantly when, at the end of his half-hour,
+he went up into the tunnel to swap jobs with
+Purdick.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve got the combination on ’em, Larry,” he remarked.
+“Letting them know that they’re not stopping
+us, I mean. They’ll have to think up something different,
+now.”</p>
+
+<p>If they were thinking, the determined mine “jumpers”
+seemed to be taking it leisurely. The afternoon passed
+without any more warlike demonstrations, and by the
+time the growing dusk was beginning to thicken in the
+gulch the drillers had another round of blasts ready to
+be fired the first thing the next morning.</p>
+
+<p>“Have they given it up and gone away, do you suppose?”
+Purdick asked, after the supper had been dished<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184"></a>[184]</span>
+up and they were eating with appetites untouched by the
+exciting happenings of the day.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing like that,” Larry asserted. “They’ll hit us
+again—don’t make any mistake about that.”</p>
+
+<p>“What will they try next?” Dick wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said Larry. “If I knew I’d be hustling around
+to get ready for it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Seems to me it’s leaning our way yet,” Dick offered.
+“They’ve found they can’t scare us out, or shoot us out,
+or avalanche us out, and, as I said this morning, they can’t
+rush us when there are only three of them, and one of the
+three a cripple. For that matter, they’ve made the rushing
+business harder now than it was before. With our
+door-yard gone, the only way for them to charge would
+be right up the smashed-out slope, and it would take a
+lot of nerve to do that when they know that there are
+three rifles here at the top.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is one way, if they only think of it,” Purdick
+offered. “They can starve us out in a few days. Maybe
+that is what they’ve made up their minds to do now.
+They don’t seem to be doing anything else.”</p>
+
+<p>The suspicious quiet held out until late in the evening,
+up to the moment when Dick and Purdick were preparing
+fresh sand beds on the floor of the cave mouth, while
+Larry sat with his gun between his knees at the edge of
+the newly made avalanche gash. Then, out of the darkness
+either to the right or left, Larry could not tell which,
+came a harsh voice saying: “Hey! Youse fellies in th’
+hole!”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Larry called out, bringing his gun up to
+the “ready.” “Spit it out. What have you got to say?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just what my pardner said last night!” rasped the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185"></a>[185]</span>
+voice. “Ye’re to take yer traps and clear out o’ that
+mine!”</p>
+
+<p>Purdick and Dick were listening with Larry, and Purdick
+whispered: “It’s the cripple—‘Twisty,’ they called
+him—that’s talking. I’d know his voice anywhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why should we clear out?” Larry asked. “It’s our
+discovery. You didn’t know anything about this place
+until you heard us at work in here.”</p>
+
+<p>“That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. We’re old Jim
+Brock’s pardners, and the mine belongs to us!”</p>
+
+<p>“You needn’t take the trouble to hand out that line of
+talk,” Larry flung back. “One of your partners gave us
+that fairy tale last night. We know all about you fellows.
+You’ve been following us around all summer because
+you didn’t know where James Brock’s abandoned
+mine was, and you thought we did know. We didn’t
+know, any more than you did; but now that we’ve found
+it, we’re going to keep it.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence to follow this, and Purdick
+whispered again: “Whereabouts is he?”</p>
+
+<p>Larry whispered back: “I don’t know, but I think he’s
+around to the left where we climbed up and down yesterday
+morning.”</p>
+
+<p>“Keep back a little,” Purdick warned. “If he gets you
+in range, he’ll shoot, just as like as not.”</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the little silence the raucous voice began
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“Ye’ll not keep it long—not any longer than it’ll take
+the sheriff to get in here fr’m Natrolia.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” Larry snorted. “The sheriff hasn’t got anything
+to do with us!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186"></a>[186]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Yuh’ll see when he gets here. Ye’re jumpin’ our
+mine.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing doing,” said Larry. “I don’t know where
+you are, but wherever it is, you can stay there and talk
+foolishness all night if you want to. It won’t get you
+anywhere, though.”</p>
+
+<p>Another silence, and then:</p>
+
+<p>“Listen: ye’re nothin’ but a bunch o’ kids, and ye don’t
+know what ye’re up ag’inst. You don’t want to make
+this a fight for blood, because if ye do, there’s only the
+one way it can end. Ye’re in there, and if we give the
+word, yuh’ll never come out alive.”</p>
+
+<p>It was here that Dick, who seldom consented to be a
+permanent listener in any conversation, chipped in.</p>
+
+<p>“Lots of good it’ll do you to kill us off!” he snapped
+back. “You talk as if there wouldn’t be any hereafter
+to this thing! James Brock gave this mine to my Uncle
+Billy Starbuck, and you know it because you listened in
+that morning in Brewster and heard Uncle Billy telling
+us about it. Suppose you do turn in and murder us:
+how long do you think it would be before half of Brewster’d
+be over here looking for you three fellows with a
+rope?”</p>
+
+<p>“We’re takin’ chances on that,” was the short reply.
+“And listen—here’s the last word. You get out o’ that
+hole, and do it before mornin’, if yuh ever want to see
+Brewster ag’in. D’yuh get that?”</p>
+
+<p>“We hear what you say,” Larry answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, here’s my affidavy!” yapped the voice in the
+darkness, and a rifle cracked and a bullet whizzed past
+the cave mouth so near that Larry said he felt the wind
+of it—as he probably did.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187"></a>[187]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Give me elbow room!” grated little Purdick, pressing
+forward with his gun, and leaning out past Larry. But
+the would-be assassin was too wary to betray his whereabouts,
+and though they waited breathlessly for many
+minutes with all their five senses concentrated in the
+listening nerve, they were not able to catch the slightest
+sound to betray the manner or direction of his retreat.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said Larry, at the end of the breathless interval,
+“that fellow said that we didn’t know what we were
+up against, but I guess we do. I don’t believe he was
+bluffing, though maybe he was.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not on your life!” Dick exclaimed. “The gold vein
+may pinch out in the next ten feet, or it may be worth a
+million dollars. Nobody can tell, of course; but on a
+chance like that, a bunch of desperate men wouldn’t stop
+a minute at wiping the three of us out to get hold of it.
+And I’m not so sure they couldn’t do it and get away
+with it. We haven’t seen another living soul between
+the two ranges all summer—except my old Daddy Longbeard
+away over yonder under Mule-Ear Pass—and if
+our folks should turn out search parties, they might look
+for a year without getting any trace of us.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Does
+that mean that you think we ought to back-track while
+we can, Dick?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not a bit of it!” was the stout-hearted rejoinder. “At
+least, not for me. How about you, Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>Once again the small one surprised his two camp-mates.</p>
+
+<p>“I was just going to say that if you two want to hike
+out and bring help, I’ll stay and do my best to hold on
+until you can get back.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188"></a>[188]</span></p>
+
+<p>“That settles it,” said Larry briefly. “We all stay.
+Now you two turn in and grab off your forty winks. I’m
+batter up for the first watch.”</p>
+
+<p>Like the night before, this one passed quietly. During
+Larry’s watch the heavens were clear almost up to midnight,
+but when he called Purdick the stars were beginning
+to disappear and there was a muttering of thunder
+in the air. The rain came later and continued in gusty
+showers until well on toward morning; and at an early
+hour, when Purdick came back from watering the burros
+in the inner recesses of the cave, he brought news.</p>
+
+<p>“The creek is away high,” he reported; “twice the
+quantity of water coming down that there was yesterday.
+You can hear it fighting its way through those
+underground channels ever so far back.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the run-off from the rain,” Larry offered, and letting
+it go at that, he asked Dick if anything had shown
+up during his watch.</p>
+
+<p>“Little something,” said Dick. “They have moved off
+somewhere—the hold-ups. A few minutes after dawn
+I saw something stirring down by their camp and I got
+the field-glass. Two of them were crossing the gulch to
+climb the mountain. They were leading a burro, but
+there didn’t seem to be anything on the pack saddle but
+a couple of picks and shovels.”</p>
+
+<p>“Umph! I wonder what that means?” Larry grunted.
+But as there was no answer that any of them could think
+of, this incident, like that of the rising water in the cave
+torrent, had to be left unexplained.</p>
+
+<p>This day, as they all agreed after it was over and they
+were eating supper at the cave’s mouth, was one that deserved
+to be marked with a red letter. There had been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189"></a>[189]</span>
+no interruptions whatever: not the least sign of their
+late harriers. Hour after hour the watch had been scrupulously
+maintained at the cave entrance, but for anything
+that could be seen or heard, they might have supposed
+themselves to be the only human beings in all the upheaved
+world of mountains and valleys.</p>
+
+<p>Then, too, the work had gone splendidly in the tunnel.
+They had fired two rounds of blasts, carrying the heading
+in several feet farther, and the vein still showed no signs
+of “pinching out.” And the ore continued to look as
+good as it had at first.</p>
+
+<p>Having put in a hard day’s work, they made early
+preparations for turning in, and by eight o’clock Purdick,
+who had the first watch, was sitting at his post and listening
+to the deep breathing of his two companions who
+were already asleep. It was not until some little time
+after he had settled himself to his watch that he missed
+the gurgling murmur of the imprisoned torrent, which
+they had been hearing off and on all day; and when he
+did miss it, it suddenly occurred to him that they had all
+been too tired to remember to lead the burros back into
+the cave for their evening watering.</p>
+
+<p>Keeping this in mind to the end of his watch, he spoke
+of it when he roused Dick at midnight. Dick offered to
+take the burros back, but Purdick said no; that it was
+as much his oversight as anybody’s, and he would do it.
+He was back again in a very short time, and, as once
+before, he brought news.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said to Dick,
+speaking softly so as not to disturb Larry, “but the
+creek’s gone dry—dry as a bone. Nothing left but a few
+pools in the hollows, and the jacks drank them dry.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190"></a>[190]</span></p>
+
+<p>“That’s queer,” said Dick. “What do you suppose
+made it do that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t begin to imagine. The only thing I could
+think of was that maybe the rain flood had made the
+creek find another underground channel somewhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s bad,” Dick commented. “Without water we
+can’t last any time at all. But we can’t do anything
+about it until morning. You turn in and get your
+snooze.”</p>
+
+<p>For a sentry seat at the cave mouth they had placed a
+flat rock, and, padding the seat with his blankets, Dick
+settled himself for his watch, with his feet tucked up
+under him and his rifle lying across his lap. It was some
+little time after Purdick’s regular breathing was threatening
+to develop into a snore that Dick heard a curious
+sound like the ticking of a clock. At first he thought it
+was an insect, the bug commonly known as the “death
+watch.” Yet it didn’t seem just like that, either. “Sounds
+more like water dripping from a leaky faucet,” he muttered
+to himself; and just then the two sleepers lying a
+few feet away on their sand bed began to stir uneasily,
+and Larry sat up to say, “Here—what’s the matter?
+This sand’s all wet!”</p>
+
+<p>The startled exclamation woke Purdick and he began
+to struggle out of his blanket. “Pity’s sake!” he
+grumbled. “Is it raining away back in this far?” And
+then explosively: “Say, fellows—Dick! Larry! the water’s
+an inch deep all over this place!”</p>
+
+<p>Dick, the only one of the three who was fully awake
+and alert, was the first to take the real alarm.</p>
+
+<p>“The creek’s doing something to us!” he cried out.
+“Don’t you hear that roar? It’s a flood! And it’s coming<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191"></a>[191]</span>
+this way! Run for it!” Then remembering suddenly
+that, with the door-yard ledge gone, flight out of
+the cave in the darkness could mean nothing but a neck-breaking
+plunge into the gulch below: “The tunnel heading—that’s
+the highest place there is! Climb for it!”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192"></a>[192]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII<br>
+<small>NO SURRENDER!</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="cap">The flood in the cave, already three or four inches
+deep on the floor and pouring out of the entrance
+in a splashing cataract when the three boys made a mad
+scramble for the mine tunnel, rose swiftly to a roaring,
+bellowing torrent as they stumbled in black darkness up
+the inclined drift and crowded themselves into the highest
+part of the heading.</p>
+
+<p>How long the imminent threat of death, either by
+drowning or stifling, lasted they could never tell, though
+minutes can easily figure as hours under such terrifying
+conditions. But one thing they were made quickly to
+realize, and that was that the upward pitch of the tunnel
+was all that was saving them from being drowned, like
+rats in a trap. A sudden, half-suffocating increase in the
+air pressure, making their ears ring and their hearts pound
+like laboring pumps, told them that the water had risen
+above the mouth of the tunnel in the main cave and was
+compressing the pocketed air. And it was the subsidence
+of this pressure that first gave them assurance that the
+worst was over—that the fury was expending itself.</p>
+
+<p>Dick was the first to speak, and his teeth were chattering.</p>
+
+<p>“They’ve g-got us this time!” he stammered. “Th-this
+is what they went up the mountain for yesterday morning<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193"></a>[193]</span>
+with the picks and shovels. They came down into
+the cave and stopped the creek off behind that fallen
+roof and let the water back up. They knew that when
+it got head enough it would push that loose stuff out
+and come down here and drown us!”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess you’ve sized it up about right,” Larry agreed,
+trying to wring some of the water out of his dripping
+clothes. Then: “How about you, Purdy? Are you
+still alive and kicking?”</p>
+
+<p>“As much of me as hasn’t been soaked out and washed
+away—yes. But let’s get out of this wet hole.”</p>
+
+<p>“When we do, it will only be to get into a wetter one,”
+said Dick, shivering in his wet clothes.</p>
+
+<p>Groping their way down the short tunnel in darkness
+that seemed as though it were thick enough to be felt,
+they reached the main cavern.</p>
+
+<p>“Matches!” said Larry. “Have you any dry ones,
+Dick—or you, Purdy? Mine are all soaked.”</p>
+
+<p>But both Purdick and Dick found that their pocket
+match safes had leaked, also.</p>
+
+<p>“No light, then,” Larry said. “That’s mighty bad.
+But I guess we can feel around and find out what this
+Noah’s Ark flood has done to us.”</p>
+
+<p>What the flood had done seemed to be an appalling
+sufficiency. Groping about, they were unable to find any
+trace of their camping outfit. The cave corridor was
+stripped bare of everything, as nearly as they could determine:
+packs, blankets, field-testing outfit, cooking utensils,
+provisions—all were gone. And to make it complete,
+the burros were missing.</p>
+
+<p>“They’d go, of course,” said Dick gloomily, after
+they had groped over every foot of the cave floor and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194"></a>[194]</span>
+had come together at the entrance. “I suppose they’re
+drowned, but if they weren’t, they’d be killed in the fall
+from here to the gulch. Seems to me we’re about at
+the end of things.”</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick’s laugh was a mere cackle, but it was
+no reflection upon the amount of nerve he had left.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m glad you saved your rifle, Dick.” In the excitement
+of the rush for the mine tunnel, Dick had held on
+to his gun simply because it hadn’t occurred to him to
+drop it. “When it’s light enough to see, those fellows
+will probably come climbing up here to take possession.
+If you’ll let me handle the gun, I’ll promise you that not
+all of them will get here with whole skins.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess I’m with you,” said Dick, with a little shiver.
+Some way, in spite of all that had happened hitherto,
+the fight with the mine jumpers had failed to impress any
+of them as a thing which might suddenly develop into a
+life-and-death struggle. But now they seemed to be face
+to face with the last extremity. Without food or fire,
+with practically nothing left but the clothes they stood in,
+and Dick’s rifle and belt of cartridges, they were, in
+effect, at the mercy of the three men who had been dogging
+them all summer. Even if they had been free to
+go unmolested, they knew they couldn’t reach the railroad
+without enduring all the hardships of a long march
+without food.</p>
+
+<p>While they sat at the cave mouth, waiting for the
+dawn, it is safe to say that all three of them took the
+long jump which lies between more or less carefree boyhood
+and responsible manhood. It was Larry Donovan
+who said, at the end of a protracted interval of silence:</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve been thinking, fellows. I guess we’ve come to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195"></a>[195]</span>
+where the road forks. We’re in the hole just about as
+bad as we can be, and I don’t believe anybody would
+blame us if we should turn tail and run for it. I guess
+that’s about what I’d have done a year ago—or maybe
+a week ago. But, somehow, I can’t seem to kick myself
+around to doing it now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Run away?” Purdick broke in. “Fat chance we’ve
+got to run—with those fellows probably laying for us in
+the woods down there. I’m thinking we wouldn’t get
+very far. They can’t afford to let us get away alive
+now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hold on,” said Larry. “You’re forgetting that the
+flood has probably cleaned the cave out above us—washed
+away that fallen-roof stuff. I suppose we can go out the
+way we came in. And if we should start right now,
+we’d stand a fair chance of getting off. No doubt those
+fellows are confidently expecting to find our bodies in
+the flood wreck in the gulch when it comes light enough
+to see; and if they don’t find them, they’ll think we’re
+buried under the wash somewhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you want to go, Larry?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” came the prompt reply. “As I’ve said, a year
+ago, or a week ago, perhaps, I guess maybe you would
+have had to tie me with a rope to hold me here with
+things as they are now. And with a break-away perfectly
+easy. But it seems as if I’d got about ten years
+older in the last hour or so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Here, too,” said Dick. “I can’t quite see myself
+sneaking out by the back door.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just the same, it’s only right and fair to weigh all the
+chances,” Larry put in soberly. “Every hour we stay
+here means just that much less strength to make a get-away<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196"></a>[196]</span>
+up through the cave and over the mountain to Natrolia.
+And if we don’t mean to make a get-away—well,
+in a couple of days at the longest—saying we can
+stand these robbers off for that long—we’ll be starving.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know,” Dick admitted. “But I’m going to stay.
+And when I say that, I’m not thinking of the money
+there may be in this gold vein we’ve been digging in, and
+I don’t believe either of you are. It’s a bigger question
+than that, now, I guess.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve got it right, Dick,” said little Purdick. “We’re
+not fighting for our pockets; we’re fighting to keep a
+bunch of thieves and murderers from taking what doesn’t
+belong to them. I say, No Surrender.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the word,” Dick agreed, and as he spoke he
+passed the rifle and cartridge belt over to the best marksman.</p>
+
+<p>While they were talking, the sky had begun to lighten
+in the east with the promise of another cloudless summer
+day. As the stars were extinguished one by one and
+the growing dawn light crept down into the valleys and
+gulches, they were able to see what the dam-bursting
+flood had done. The broad swath mowed down through
+the forest by the avalanche boulder two days earlier had
+formed a path for the flood, and the cataracting water
+had swept it clean of everything movable.</p>
+
+<p>Far down the slope from the cliff’s foot they saw one
+of the burros grazing peacefully and quite as if nothing
+had happened to it. But the other was lying on its side
+in the path of the flood, and the field-glass showed them
+that it had a broken leg and couldn’t get up.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor old Fishbait!” said Dick mournfully. “If we
+could only get to him and put him out of his misery!”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197"></a>[197]</span>
+Then he refocused the glass and searched carefully for
+some signs of the camp outfit. There was nothing to be
+seen. “I guess it’s all gone on into the gulch creek and
+been washed away,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick got up and stretched himself. The cold soaking,
+with no chance to dry out, had left him stiff and
+numb, and he took a turn around in the cave to limber
+up. When he came back to the crevice mouth, it was
+to say: “Just thought I’d take a squint around to see
+if any of the eatables had been overlooked by the flood.
+They’re all gone; everything’s gone: wood-pile, green-grass
+hay, and even the pile of ore we had sorted out.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry took up a hole in his belt. “That’s breakfast,”
+he said, with a sort of grim attempt to make a joke of it.
+Then: “Let’s get back inside—so as to leave them guessing
+as long as we can.”</p>
+
+<p>They had hardly withdrawn from the lip of the entrance
+before one of the three miscreants came in sight.
+It was the cripple, and he was swinging along toward
+the lower end of the avalanche path. When he reached
+it he began poking around in the débris with his crutch.</p>
+
+<p>“Humph!” Larry grunted. “Looking for our dead
+bodies, I suppose.”</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick’s pale blue eyes were glowing.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I try for it?” he whispered. “I believe I could
+get him, even at this distance.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no!” Larry cut in hastily. “They’re cold-blooded
+murderers, all right, but we mustn’t be. When they come
+after us it will be different.”</p>
+
+<p>While the cripple was poking around with his crutch
+his two accomplices came up. One of them—not the
+black-whiskered one who had been scared off by Purdick’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198"></a>[198]</span>
+dynamite bomb, but the other—walked over to
+where the disabled burro was lying, and, after a momentary
+inspection of the poor beast, drew his pistol and shot
+it. Then he walked out to where the other one was
+grazing, picked up the trailing halter, and led the little
+animal back into the woods.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly afterward, this third man joined the other two
+who were searching the flood wreck. Dick, watching
+them through the field-glass, saw them turn up a pair of
+blankets, a saucepan, the aluminum camp kettle, and one
+of the lost rifles.</p>
+
+<p>Purdick fingered the lock of his gun. “I hope they
+won’t keep us waiting too long,” he said softly.</p>
+
+<p>“They won’t,” Dick returned, keeping the three in the
+field of the glass. “The big one has quit digging and he’s
+looking up here. Now he’s getting his gun....” Then,
+suddenly: “Duck—both of you!”</p>
+
+<p>The warning didn’t come an instant too soon. On the
+heels of it a rifle barked in the gulch, and a bullet sang
+through the crevice opening to spatter itself on the roof
+over their heads.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a try-out,” said Larry. “They’re puzzled because
+they can’t find our bodies, and they think maybe a
+shot or two will make us show up if we’re still here.
+Don’t shoot, Purdy”—to the small one who was flat on
+his face and was trying to get a rest over the cliff lip.
+“Let’s wait until we have to.”</p>
+
+<p>The waiting proved to be a weary business for three
+fellows who were both wet and hungry, and had little
+prospect of relieving either discomfort short of defeating
+the three depredators and possibly forcing them to replace,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199"></a>[199]</span>
+out of their own stores, what they had destroyed;
+a result to which not even Dick, the most imaginative of
+the three, could look forward with any hope of its accomplishment.
+At the best, they could only hope to keep the
+spoilers at bay for a time; and they all knew that the
+time wouldn’t be very long if they had to go without
+food.</p>
+
+<p>After the trial shot which brought no reply from the
+high-lying crevice, two of the men in the gulch resumed
+their search in the flood wreckage, while the third, the
+black-bearded one, went off down stream. It was a full
+hour after sunrise—and the sun, shining fairly into the
+eastward-facing crevice, was doing something to relieve
+the chill of the three sodden watchers—when Blackbeard
+reappeared, leading the burro laden with tools and camp
+dunnage.</p>
+
+<p>“Now we get it,” said Dick. “They’re coming up to
+take possession. I wonder how they’ll work it. They
+can’t make that burro climb up here. It’s too steep.”</p>
+
+<p>But the three men seemed to know what they were
+about. First they drove the laden pack animal as far up
+the avalanche path as it could go, flogging it upward
+until the poor beast was slipping and falling at every
+other step. This brought them within easy range, and
+in a hasty consultation carried on in whispers, the three
+defenders of the Golden Spider decided that they dare
+not wait any longer. As matters stood, Purdick might
+have marked them down and either killed or crippled all
+three before they could reach cover, but they wouldn’t
+take that much of an advantage even of men who were
+no better than midnight assassins.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200"></a>[200]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Hi!—you fellows down there!” Dick shouted. “Keep
+your distance or we’ll fire on you!”</p>
+
+<p>The reply to this sportsmanlike warning came so
+quickly that it seemed as if it must have been planned
+beforehand. Instantly the cripple dodged behind the
+trembling burro, and using it for a breastwork and its
+pack for a rest, opened fire with a repeating rifle, sending
+shot after shot hurtling up into the crevice mouth, while
+his two companions, guns in hand, started to climb
+straight up the slope under cover of this bombardment.
+Owing to the high angle at which the crippled robber
+had to shoot, the defenders of the mine were still safe
+so long as they did not get within the line of fire, and by
+lying flat on the crevice floor they could see without being
+seen.</p>
+
+<p>Little Purdick’s face was white and drawn, but his
+hands did not tremble when he took careful aim at the
+leading one of the two scrambling climbers. “Don’t kill
+him if you can help it,” Larry cautioned, and as he said
+it, the small-calibre rifle spoke. For an instant it seemed
+as if Purdick had missed. <a href="#i_fp200">Then the leading man</a>—it
+was the black-whiskered one—stooped to clasp his right
+leg just above the knee, <a href="#i_fp200">wavered for a second, and ended
+by tumbling backward upon his follower</a>, with the result
+that both rolled together to the bottom of the slope,
+knocking the burro and the cripple down as they went.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i_fp200">
+ <img src="images/i_fp200.jpg" alt="" title="">
+ <figcaption class="caption">
+ <p class="noic"><a href="#Page_200">Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by
+tumbling backward upon his follower.</a></p>
+ </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Larry clapped the small marksman on the back.</p>
+
+<p>“Good work! Bully good work!” he cried. “If you’d
+had a cannon you couldn’t have done any better!”</p>
+
+<p>Dick had the glass to his eyes again. “They’re overhauling
+the shot one and tying his leg up,” he reported.
+“Now the cripple—the natural one—is shaking his fist<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201"></a>[201]</span>
+at us. I’ll bet that little surprise party’ll cool ’em off
+some!”</p>
+
+<p>It did, so far as any further attempt to take the mine
+by direct assault went. As soon as the wounded man
+could get upon his feet and limp along, the three dodged
+in among the gulch trees, towing the laden burro, and
+were lost to sight.</p>
+
+<p>After that there was another unnerving wait. Higher
+and higher rose the sun, and still there were no further
+signs of the enemy. After what seemed like an age,
+Dick said: “Do you suppose they’ve given up?”</p>
+
+<p>“No chance of it,” Larry contended. “They’ve gone
+too far. They know that if they let us get away now
+there’ll be something worse than a charge of mine-jumping
+to face. They’ve tried to murder us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Gee, gosh!” Dick complained. “I wish they’d hurry
+up before I get any hungrier!”</p>
+
+<p>As the time dragged on, there seemed to be little chance
+of the wish being fulfilled. At last Dick jumped up, declaring
+that he’d fly all to pieces if he didn’t stir around
+a bit.</p>
+
+<p>“Stir all you want to,” said Purdick. “Larry and I
+will keep watch.”</p>
+
+<p>Dick tramped back and forth in the cavern for a few
+minutes until he got his stiffened muscles limbered up,
+and then disappeared in the backward reaches of the
+crevice. When he returned he was breathing hard as if
+he had been running.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it?” Purdick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“A knock-out,” said Dick shortly. “There isn’t any
+back door.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202"></a>[202]</span></p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?” It was Larry who wanted to
+know.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve been back in the cave. I noticed that the warm
+wind we felt sucking through the first morning when we
+came in was blowing again. You don’t feel it much
+here at the entrance, but farther down it draws like a
+chimney. While I was about it, I thought I would keep
+on and see if we really had a back door open again, as
+the wind seemed to show. We haven’t. Those fellows
+must have dragged in a whole forest when they built
+that flooding dam yesterday. Most of the tree wreckage
+was pushed on down with the flood to one of the big
+chambers, and that is so chock full of it that a fice-dog
+couldn’t crawl through, much less a man.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you say the wind blows through,” Purdick put in.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes; it’s open enough for that. But even if we
+had the axe we couldn’t hack our way through in less
+than half a day.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” said Larry, setting his jaw grimly. “That
+means fight or die. I guess we’re.... What’s that
+noise?”</p>
+
+<p>They all held their breath and listened. There was no
+mistaking the sounds that came floating to them on the
+indrawing draft of air. They were the measured blows
+of an axe and they seemed to come from somewhere up
+above the crevice entrance.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re up over us somewhere,” Purdick said. “It
+sounds as if they’re cutting a tree down.”</p>
+
+<p>Momentarily expecting another attack, they gathered
+at the cave mouth and waited, little Purdick with his rifle
+at the “ready.” What shape the attack would take they
+couldn’t remotely guess. The step-like cliff into the face<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203"></a>[203]</span>
+of which the crevice burrowed was not very high, and
+on the next step above it there were trees growing; so
+much they had noted on the first morning of their occupancy
+when they had gone into the gulch for the forage
+and the wood. But there was every reason to believe
+that these trees had all been smashed and carried down
+into the gulch by the dynamited avalanche, as Dick pointed
+out.</p>
+
+<p>“Not all of them,” Purdick objected. “That chopping
+is right above us, and it can’t be farther away than that
+upper ledge.”</p>
+
+<p>In a very few minutes all further argument on that
+score had its answer in the crackling sounds made by a
+tree in its fall. A dark shadow swept down diagonally
+from above, and the next moment the cave’s mouth was
+blocked by a great fir standing top downward and apparently
+suspended upside down from the ledge above by the
+still unsevered remains of the chopped trunk.</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” said Larry. “Now what does that mean?
+They can’t use that tree for a ladder.”</p>
+
+<p>Whatever it might mean, it was instantly made plain
+that they were not to be given a chance to investigate.
+Somewhere down in the gulch a rifle cracked and a bullet
+tore its way through the dense foliage of the hanging
+tree. Reckless of his own safety, Purdick tried to part
+the thick branches so that he could see and poke his gun
+through for a reply, but the thick screen was impenetrable.</p>
+
+<p>Courageously persistent, the small one was still trying
+to force his way through the thickset branches when something
+that seemed to take the shape of a huge ball of fire
+came down from above, and a choking gust of resinous<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204"></a>[204]</span>
+smoke drove Purdick back gasping. The man on the
+ledge above had lowered a blazing torch of some kind,
+and the hanging tree was afire.</p>
+
+<p>“We’re done for!” Dick gasped, fighting for breath in
+the stifling smoke cloud that was instantly drawn into
+the crevice by the chimneying draft, and he was starting
+to feel his way toward the inner depths when Larry
+grabbed him and shoved him forcibly toward the gold
+vein opening.</p>
+
+<p>“The mine tunnel!” he choked. “There is no draft in
+there! Hurry, for pity’s sake! Where are you, Purdy?”</p>
+
+<p>The great tree was roaring like a fiery furnace before
+they had stumbled blindly to the small tunnel entrance,
+and tongues of flame were licking far into the crevice as
+if the heat were increasing the natural draft a hundred
+fold. Panting, blinded and choking, they crowded into the
+farther end of the blasted-out pocket which had been
+their refuge from the flood, and though the smoke was
+there before them, the air was still breathable.</p>
+
+<p>As everybody who has ever seen a forest fire knows,
+the mountain conifers burn as rapidly as if their leaves
+were made of celluloid. While the three crowding burrowers
+were still gasping for breath, the flame roar went
+out, but the dense smoke cloud continued to pour into
+the cavern.</p>
+
+<p>Into the silence that followed the expiring flame blast
+came a sharp staccato of rifle shots, yells of rage or dismay,
+they couldn’t tell which, and then more rifle crashes.
+After these there was another interval of silence, which
+was shortly broken by a recurrence of the chopping axe
+blows from above. After a few of the dull-sounding axe
+blows the smoking tree-torch let go and rolled down into<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205"></a>[205]</span>
+the gulch; the welcome sunlight began to penetrate the
+smoky interior of the cave, and a grateful gush of fresh
+air came to make life a little better worth living.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder what’s happened,” said Dick hoarsely. And
+then: “I’m crying so hard I can’t see.”</p>
+
+<p>They were all three weeping copiously, for that matter;
+smoke tears they were, but none the less blinding for all
+that. Rubbing their eyes, they stumbled down into the
+cavern, little Purdick with his gun up and ready to fire.
+At the mouth of the mine tunnel they were met, not by
+a trio of murderers ready to shoot them down, as they
+fully expected, but by an apparition—a tall old man,
+white-haired and with a snowy beard reaching almost to
+his waist.</p>
+
+<p>“Daddy Longbeard!” Dick cried out, dashing the tears
+from his eyes. “Where, for goodness’ sake, did you
+come from?”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” grunted the old man. “Jes’ now I’ve come
+from havin’ a li’l’ round-up with them cusses that was
+tryin’ to burn ye out. Ain’t scorched none, are ye?”</p>
+
+<p>“We’re all alive yet, but that’s about all you can say
+for us,” Dick bubbled. “But what has become of the
+hold-ups? And how did you happen to get here just in
+the very nick of time?”</p>
+
+<p>It all came out in the old man’s chopped sentences.
+Three or four days earlier, an outgoing prospector had
+told him that “Twisty” Atkins, Tom Dowling and Bart
+Jennison, three desperate men who had all served prison
+sentences for various crimes, were camping on the trail
+of three young fellows whom the gossiping prospector
+had called “vacationers.”</p>
+
+<p>“I knowed, right off, what that meant,” the old man<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206"></a>[206]</span>
+went on, “and I made Bill Jenkins—he was the feller
+that was tellin’ me all this—carry a telegrapht message
+over to Nophi for Mr. Billy Starbuck. I writ in that
+telegrapht that his boys was liken to get into trouble over
+here, and that he’d better get him a posse and come on
+in. Then, after I’d waited a day ’r so, and he didn’t
+come, I got sort o’ nervous, and lit out myself.”</p>
+
+<p>“But how did you know where to find us?” Larry
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>The old miner’s grin showed his broken teeth.</p>
+
+<p>“I allowed you’d be somewhere inside o’ that circle
+I’d marked out on the map I gin ye. And this mornin’,
+as I was cookin’ breakfas’, I heerd the shootin’.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what has become of the hold-ups?” Purdick said,
+repeating Dick’s question.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve got two of ’em—‘Twisty’ and Jennison—down
+yonder in the gulch, laid out so’t they’ll have to be carried
+mule-back to wherever they’re a-goin’. Dowling was
+up here on the bench overhead, and he took out when I
+opened up on him. But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars
+that he’s carryin’ a li’l’ chunk o’ my lead with him, wherever
+he’s at.”</p>
+
+<p>All this talk had been carried on at the mouth of the
+cave, and as yet nothing had been said about the Golden
+Spider. But now Dick told their old rescuer that they
+had found James Brock’s wonderful mine; told him also
+how they had happened to find it, and, briefly, what the
+hold-ups had been doing to them since they had found it.</p>
+
+<p>“You didn’t need to tell me that,” the old man was
+beginning; but just as he got that far, there came a shout
+and a rifle shot from the gulch, and they all looked out<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207"></a>[207]</span>
+to see a bunch of mounted men riding out upon the tailings
+of the flood wash. “There’s yer uncle and his
+posse,” said the grim old prospector whom Dick had
+made rich by a simple little blowpipe test. “They must
+’a’ been follerin’ right along behind me. I blazed my
+trail so they wouldn’t have no trouble tellin’ which-a-way
+to come. Reckon we’d better be climbin’ down. You
+boys’ve gone a long time a-waitin’ for yer breakfast.”</p>
+
+<p>An hour later, when the three defenders of the Golden
+Spider had put away a meal big enough to fill up all the
+crevices opened by their missed breakfast, and had told
+Mr. William Starbuck in detail all that had happened to
+them in their wonderful summer, the shrewd-eyed ex-cattleman
+put his arm over Dick’s shoulder and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you’ve had good times, and some pretty tough
+times, but I guess you’ve all grown a good bit since
+you left Brewster in June. You all look it, anyway. And
+I want to congratulate the three of you on the find you’ve
+made, and upon the way you held on and defended it
+after you’d got it. Not many fellows of your age and
+experience would have stood up to those three rascals as
+you did, especially after they gave you a chance to duck
+and run.</p>
+
+<p>“Now about your summer’s work; that is satisfactory,
+too. Even if only one of the rare-metal prospects you
+have staked out proves to be worth working, you will
+have earned your grub-stake many times over. As for
+this gold mine up yonder in the cliff, you may leave that
+to us. We’ll see to it that it is properly guarded, and
+recorded in your names as discoverers, and your father
+and I, Dick, will undertake to find the capital for working<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208"></a>[208]</span>
+it, the money to be paid back out of the earnings of
+the mine when it gets to be a going proposition. But
+there is one thing about that: don’t get your ideas too
+high up. Old Uncle Jimmie Brock’s Golden Spider may
+prove to be a bonanza and make all three of you rich;
+and, on the other hand, it may be only a pocket deposit
+that will merely pay back the development capital. Keep
+that in mind and don’t spend your money until you get it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you meant what you said—about giving the
+mine to us?” Dick asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly I did. A bargain is a bargain. And it’s
+your discovery as much as any other lode would be. I
+only hope it won’t spoil you if it turns out to be a bonanza.”</p>
+
+<p>Larry looked at Purdick, and little Purdick handed the
+look back. And it was Purdick who made answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Larry and Dick will tell you, Mr. Starbuck, that I
+was mighty nearly an anarchist when they brought me
+out here last June,” he said steadily. “I used to believe
+there weren’t any good rich people in the world. I’m
+wondering what will happen to me if it should turn out
+that I’ve got to get over on the other side of the fence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing bad will happen to you, I’m sure,” was the
+kindly reply. “Money isn’t everything; it isn’t anything
+compared with what’s inside of the man who has it—or
+hasn’t it. If you’ve had hard times, you’ll be better able
+to feel for and to help other fellows who are having hard
+times. You’ll know what it means to them, better than
+either Dick or Larry, here.</p>
+
+<p>“Now about your plans. You have only a few days
+left before you will have to start back to college. You’ve<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209"></a>[209]</span>
+finished your job out here, so you may as well start for
+Natrolia at once. We’ll outfit you for the one night’s
+camp you’ll have to make and you can take the burro
+you have left to carry your provisions. I don’t want to
+hurry you off, but the folks in Brewster will be mighty
+anxious until they hear from you. If you start now,
+you can make the top of the range by nightfall.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The sun was sinking to its setting in a far-distant western
+wilderness when three young fellows who had been
+tramping steadily all afternoon up a steep mountain trail
+came out upon the summit of the range and stopped to
+look back upon another wilderness, with the buttes and
+gulches, valleys and rugged upheavals of which they had
+become affectionately familiar during the long summer
+weeks.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” said the smallest of the three. “Has it all been
+real? Or have we only been dreaming it? It’s—it’s
+getting away from me already!”</p>
+
+<p>The other two laughed, and the one of the two whose
+tongue was always the readiest said: “Good land,
+Purdy! if it’s fading out on you now, what will it be two
+weeks from now, when we’re back at the grind in Old
+Sheddon? It’s real enough to me.”</p>
+
+<p>For a long minute the smallest one stood looking
+steadfastly into the depths from which they had lately
+ascended; looked so long and steadily that his eyes filled
+and he had to wink them rapidly to be able to see at all.</p>
+
+<p>“Say, fellows—I want always to remember that bully
+old mountain wilderness just as we’re seeing it now,” he
+said in low tones; “it, and the good times we’ve had this<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210"></a>[210]</span>
+summer, and the way we got tangled up in The Web of
+the Golden Spider. Don’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Here, too,” said Dick Maxwell softly.</p>
+
+<p>And then they turned away reluctantly to tramp down
+the descending trail in the eye of the glowing sunset.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p2 noic">THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap">
+<div class="tnote">
+<p class="noi tntitle">Transcriber’s Notes:</p>
+
+<p class="smfont">Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.</p>
+
+<p class="smfont">Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.</p>
+
+<p class="smfont">Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75002 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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