Copyright, 1923, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

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Printed in the United States of America

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Published September, 1923

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[2] 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[3] 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[4] 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’?”

[5]

“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[6] 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[7] 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[8] 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,[9] 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[10] 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.”

[11]

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.

[12]

“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[13] 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.

[14]

“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[15] 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[16] 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!

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.

[18]

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[19] 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[20] 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?”

[21]

“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[22] 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[23] 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[24] 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[25] 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.

[26]

“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[27] 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[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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.

[31]

“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[32] 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[33] 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.

[34]

“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!”

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.

[36]

“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[37] 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[38] 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[39] 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[40] 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[41] 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.[42] 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[43] 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[44] 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[45] 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[46] 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?”

[47]

“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.”

[48]

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.[49] 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[50] 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[51] 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!”

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[53] 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[54] 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[55] 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[56] 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[57] 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[58] 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[59] 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.”

[60]

“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.[61] 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[62] 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.”

[63]

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[64] 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[65] 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?”

[66]

“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.

The old miner wagged his beard in denial.

[67]

“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[68] 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[69] 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[70] 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.”

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.”

[72]

“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[73] 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[74] 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.

[75]

“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[76] 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,[77] 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[78] 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[79] 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[80] 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[81] 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[82] 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[83] 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,[84] 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[85] 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[86] 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!”

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[88] 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?”

[89]

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[90] 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[91] 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[92] 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[93] 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[94] 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[95] 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[96] 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[97] 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.”

[98]

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[99] 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[100] 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[101] 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[102] 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.[103] 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.”

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[105] 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?”

[106]

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[107] 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[108] 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[109] 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[110] 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[111] 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[112] 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[113] 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[114] 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[115] 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.

[116]

“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!”

“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.

[117]

“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[118] 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[119] 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.”

[120]

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[121] 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.

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[123] 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[124] 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.[125] “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[126] 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[127] 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,[128] 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[129] 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[130] 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[131] 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[132] 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.

[133]

“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.

[134]

“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.”

[135]

“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[136] 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.

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[138] 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[139] 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.

[140]

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[141] 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:

[142]

“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[143] 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,[144] 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[145] 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.”

[146]

“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[147] 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[148] 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?”

[149]

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[150] 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[151] 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[152] 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[153] 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[154] 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[155] 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!”

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:

[157]

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.

[158]

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[159] 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[160] 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![161] 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.”

[162]

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[163] 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[164] 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.[165] 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[166] 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[167] 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.”

[168]

“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.[169] “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[170] 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[171] 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[172] 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!”

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[174] 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[175] 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.

[176]

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.”

[177]

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[178] 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[179] 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[180] 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[181] 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[182] 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,[183] 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[184] 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[185] 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!”

[186]

“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.

[187]

“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.”

[188]

“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[189] 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.”

[190]

“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[191] 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!”

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[193] 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[194] 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[195] 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[196] 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!”[197] 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[198] 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,[199] 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.

[200]

“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.

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[201] 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.”

[202]

“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[203] 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[204] 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[205] 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[206] 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[207] 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[208] 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[209] 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[210] 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