CHAPTER VIIIA FELLOW NAMED JONES
“Now then, men—together!”clang!
The material train had just pulled up to the present-moment end-of-track on the Extension with a flat-car load of rails, and the crew, directed by a big-voiced foreman, was unloading the car.
Standing aside to be out of the way, Larry and Dick were checking the shipment of steel. The checking being a purely mechanical process, the two went on with their talk about the thing that had kept every member of the toiling construction force on edge for weeks; namely, the exciting question, which was growing more exciting from day to day, as to whether their railroad or the Overland Central, building at top speed on the opposite side of the canyon, would win the race to the Little Ophir gold field, now only twenty miles away.
“You’ll sure have to hand it to those O. C. fellows when it comes to keeping us guessing,” Dick was saying. “Ten miles back we all thought they were going into Little Ophir on the high level. But now they are dropping altitude so fast that they’ll be on an even grade with us in another five miles or so.”
In the intervals between the rail-clangings Larry had been scanning the cut-out notch in the opposite canyon slope marking the path of the Overland Central.
“Dropping is right,” he agreed “Probably Mr. Ackerman’s guess hits the mark: they’ve made two or three different surveys, and they are changing from one to another as they go along—anything to make the work go faster.”
“Yes; and they’re always picking the one that will do the most to hold us back,” Dick added. “You can trust ’em to do that.”
A few minutes later the unloading was finished and the boys walked on up the grade to where a big gang of hard-rock men were hewing out a path for the track-to-be through a jutting shoulder of the right-hand mountain. Goldrick, who had come to be known on the staff as the hard-rock specialist, was in charge of the rock blasting, and to him Dick and Larry reported for further duty.
“I don’t know of anything pressing just now, unless you take a hike up the line and find Blaisdell, and ask him what he has to report,” the assistant told them. “Mr. Ackerman is coming up this evening, and he’ll want to know what the O. C. people are doing up above—or if they’re doing anything beyond that big rock cutting they’ve been working on for the past week.”
Blaisdell, as the boys knew, was an instrumentman who, with a helper to hold staff for him, had been sent ahead two days earlier to reset grade stakes in the upper reaches of the canyon, and, incidentally, to find out what advance the Overland Central was making at the back of beyond.
Taking Goldrick’s suggestion as an order, Dick and Larry immediately outfitted for a tramp which would probably consume the entire day, getting a haversack lunch put up by the hard-rock camp cook. In lightmarching order they took the trail used by Blaisdell and his man two days before, choosing the steep route over the “Nose,” as the jutting mountain shoulder was called, both because it would save time, and because the more roundabout route up the canyon at the river level was more or less blocked by the cliff through which the rock-men were still only in the process of drilling and blasting the way.
At their first breathing stop, half-way up the mountain, Larry said: “I wonder what can be keeping Ned Blaisdell out so long? I saw him when he started, and they weren’t carrying chuck enough to feed the two of them for more than a day or so.”
“You can search me,” Dick returned. “Maybe he’s been getting into trouble with some of the O. C. bullies.”
Larry thought not. “No,” he said; “his work wouldn’t have taken him very near the O. C. at any point. They’re held up in that big rock cutting half a mile above us, just the same as we are at the Nose. They are not over in Yellow Dog Park yet; and that is where Blaisdell was to do most of his verifying.”
“You can’t tell where those O. C. scrappers are, or what they’re going to do next,” said Dick soberly. “This fight is getting hotter every day. Last Wednesday, when I went over to Red Butte after some blue-prints for the bridge builders, Mr. Briscoe, our right-of-way agent, was in the Red Butte office. I heard him tell Mr. Ackerman that the mine owners at Little Ophir had got out a bond issue to help the railroad that gets there first with its tracks.”
Larry nodded. “I heard about that bond issue. It doesn’t seem just fair. It was promised to our companyearly this spring if we’d agree to build a line in from Red Butte. And now they say they’ll give it to either company that gets there first.”
“That’s what they’re saying now,” Dick asserted. “And there’s another kick coming to the under dog, besides. Mr. Briscoe said that the merchants and big ore shippers were offering, as another hurry punch, to sign contracts agreeing to give the winner all of their business for the first six months. So the losing company will have a dead railroad on its hands for a whole half year.”
The square Donovan jaw set itself firmly.
“We’ve got to win, Dick. It isn’t only the money; it’s partly the way these O. C. folks have acted. It was our right-of-way in the beginning and this is Short Line territory. Besides, they haven’t fought fair; they would have stolen the whole canyon if they’d got into it first, as they were planning to. I say we’vegotto win.”
“Right you are,” said the general manager’s son. And then: “Got your wind again?—all right; let’s go.”
From the top of the spur, which they reached after another stiff climb, there was an extended view to the eastward; a view backgrounded by the mighty bulk of the farther Timanyonis. Somewhere in one of the many upland gulches of the great range lay the gold camp toward which the two railroads were racing. At their feet and far below, the foaming torrent of the Tourmaline gashed its path through the mountains, its narrow, crooking canyon opening out a few miles away in a sort of park-like valley.
“Yellow Dog Park,” said Larry, pointing to the valley. “Queer names they have up in these mountains. I supposesome prospector had a hound dog, and it died or got lost, or something, down yonder in that valley.”
“Queer” fitted the break in the mountain labyrinth into which they were looking down, in the sense that it was singularly unlike any of the canyon widenings in the lower reaches of the river. In shape it was roughly circular and of considerable extent, with so many gulches running down into it that it looked from their height like the center of a many-pointed star. It seemed to be entirely bare of timber, and its color, in sharp contrast to the dark greens of the wooded mountain sides, was a sort of dirty yellow, with here and there a patch of green that was even darker than that of the forests.
From their high lookout they could not trace the course of the river through the valley, though they finally concluded that the Tourmaline must flow along its northern edge, which lay at their left as they faced eastward. In this case it would be hidden beneath its fringing of trees.
“What do you suppose makes those square green patches?” Dick asked, lamenting in the same breath his forgetfulness in failing to bring his field-glass along.
“I’ve been wondering,” said Larry; then: “I’ll bet I know! They’re fields of alfalfa. There’s a hay ranch in that valley, taking its irrigation water from the river.”
“A ranch?” Dick queried—“this far up in the mountains?”
“Sure. With a trig mining-camp that can’t be more than fifteen miles away there’d be a good market for every pound of hay that could be raised. Dad says it used to be that way in the little valleys around Leadville,back in the early days, and some of the hay ranchers made more money than the miners did.”
Dickie Maxwell, still grumbling because he hadn’t brought the field-glass, was trying to make a binocular of his curved hands.
“I don’t see any ranch house,” he offered, “but there is a path or road of some sort winding around across the park. Can’t you see it? It begins down here at the left and goes across sort of cater-cornering to the southeast.”
Larry looked closely and saw what appeared in the distance to be the tiniest of footpaths running in the direction Dick had indicated.
“It’s most likely the ranchman’s wagon road,” he hazarded. “He’d have to have some way of hauling his hay to Little Ophir.”
“Well,” Dick cut in, “this isn’t finding Blaisdell. Shall we climb down and begin the hunt?”
Now the task which had been set them, of finding two human atoms in the maze of forest and mountain which lay at their feet, was not quite so much of a needle-in-a-haystack search as it might appear to be. Since Blaisdell and his helper had gone ahead to reset grade stakes, all the searchers had to do was to find the Short Line survey in the maze and then to follow the staked trail until they came to the resetters.
At first they tried to hold a straight course down the mountain from their lookout summit. But here great Nature intervened. Precipices they could not descend got in the way, and when these had been circumvented, there were steep gulches to be headed and lower spurs to be climbed—with more gulches on their farther sides.
Winding and twisting, climbing and descending, and twice crossing small streams, they came finally into the valley with the curious name—and were so completely turned around that they had to look at their watches and the position of the sun to locate their point of approach, which was far up the southern side of the valley. In other words, they had made more than a quarter-circuit of their goal in getting down to it.
“Gee!” Dick exclaimed—he was beginning to lag a bit from sheer leg-weariness—“the long way around may be the shortest way home, as the old saying goes, but if it is, we didn’t find it. Whereabouts are we, anyhow?”
It was rather hard to tell just where they were, in relation to their surroundings. At the near-hand view the valley didn’t look anything like the yellowish flat they had seen from the heights. For one thing, the yellow turned out to be the dirty fawn-color of disintegrated sandstone; and instead of being flat, as it had looked, the park was thickly “pimpled,” at least in their part of it, with low hills of the weathering stone.
“The first thing to do is to find the line of our survey,” said Larry. “We can’t miss running across some of the stakes if we go straight ahead the way we’re facing now.”
That seemed reasonable. From many former studyings of the maps and blue-prints they knew the general route of the Extension, though this was the first time they had been out this far ahead of the actual working forces. Not having any maps with them, and neither of them being able to recall from memory the exact route of the new line through the valley, there was nothing to do butto hunt for the line of stakes. So they set out northward among the stony hills, keeping a sharp lookout as they went for the line of the survey.
They had gone but a short distance when they came suddenly upon a fellow of about their own age, dressed in patched overalls and a flannel shirt. He had a sharp nose, a rather foolish chin, and greenish-gray eyes that had a furtive trick of dodging—wouldn’t meet squarely the look of other eyes. When they came upon him he was clearing out the sand from a small irrigation ditch. As they approached he leaned upon his long-handled shovel and hailed them.
“Hello, Corduroys! You travelin’, ’r just a-goin’ somewheres?”
“Both,” Dick returned, matching the ditch-cleaner’s grin. “We belong to the Short Line outfit, and we’re hunting for our location stakes through this valley. Do you know where the lines run?”
At the mention of the Short Line, Larry, who was standing a little behind Dick, thought he saw a sudden change flick into the ditch-cleaner’s eyes—the eyes that wouldn’t stay still. Then he took himself to task for being over-suspicious and concluded he was mistaken.
“Do I know where them lines are at? You’re mighty whistlin’ right I do. Didn’t me an’ Paw cut the stakes f’r ’em when they was first laid out?”
“Then you’re the fellow we’re looking for,” Dick chirped. “I’m Dick Maxwell, and Larry Donovan, here, is my bunkie. We’re on the engineering staff under Mr. Ackerman.”
“My name’s Jones—Billy, for short,” was the counter introduction. “Paw, he owns the hay ranch overon t’other side o’ the park. Want me to show you them stakes?”
“If you can spare the time,” said Dick; “and we’d sure be much obliged. But first maybe you can tell us something about a man we’re looking for; Mr. Blaisdell, one of our instrumentmen, who has been up around here for the last two days.”
For just a fraction of a second the boy with the shifty eyes seemed to hesitate. Then, looking steadily down at his own feet as he spoke:
“Why-e-e, yes; mebbe I could. Er—there was a man got hurt yisterday; fell down an’ twisted his ankle, ’r somethin’. Mebbe that’s the one. I didn’t hear him speak his name. Had a Swede felluh with him that he sent to carry the word somewhere—back down canyon to you folks, mebbe.”
Dick and Larry exchanged swift glances. The man who was hurt must be Blaisdell. They remembered now that it was Olsen, the young Swedish axman, who had been sent out with him as his helper and target-holder.
“That’s our man,” said Dick. “Where is he now?”
Again the news-giver seemed to be looking for something on the ground at his feet. After a little pause he said, “He’s—er—he’s up at the head-gate shack, where we get our irrigatin’ water from. It was—um—right around there somewheres that he got hurt.” He stumbled so haltingly over this simple statement that again Larry gathered the impression that Billy Jones was either awkwardly slow of speech; or else something was distracting him most curiously. And somehow, Larry fancied that the distraction came from the effort of listeningfor some unwelcome sound; some sound that was both expected and dreaded.
“Mr. Blaisdell is up there alone?” Dick inquired.
“Why-e-e, yes; we couldn’t tote him over to the ranch house, nohow—the Swede an’ me—an’ he couldn’t walk. So we fixed him up in the—in the bunk, and the Swede hiked back to wherever it was the hurt felluh was sendin’ him. There was—er—we allus keep some grub in the shack—me an’ Paw. Sometimes we have to stay up there over night, when the water’s high.”
Again the two scouts exchanged glances, and Dick said:
“We must go to Blaisdell, right away, Larry. He may be having a mighty bad time of it up there all alone.” Then to Jones: “Can you direct us so that we can find the place?”
The news-breaker threw down his shovel, as one only too willing to accommodate.
“I’ll do a heap better’n that; I’ll go along an’ show you,” he offered. “You felluhs pretty good on the hike? All right; le’s get a move on,” and he immediately set a long-legged pace among the hills that seemed little less than a dog-trot to the two who had already tramped five or six miles over prodigiously rough ground.
Before they had gone very far several things began to impress them, as one might say, with interrogation-points attached. Since a cloud had slipped down from the high peaks to obscure the sun, they couldn’t determine the direction in which they were going, but it seemed to both of them that their guide was taking them back nearly over the route they had so lately traversed in coming into the valley.
That was one thing; and another was that they saw no grade stakes anywhere along the way. Again, Dick, who had a quick ear for unusual sounds, thought he could hear, far away to their left, a tiny, insect-like clicking that would have been set down at once, in other circumstances, as a distance-diminished chatter of air-drills burrowing in solid rock. Dick told himself scoffingly that of course it couldn’t possibly be air-drills, and he was wondering, as they hurried along, what high-altitude insect it could be that kept up such an incessantchink-a-chink-a-chink.
It was not until after they had measured an exceedingly crooked course of perhaps half a mile among the sandstone buttes that they came to a stream which they took to be Yellow Dog Creek, inasmuch as it wasn’t nearly big enough to be the Tourmaline. Up the stream the ditch-cleaner led the way at his space-devouring stride, and in a short time the boys saw that they were approaching the head of the valley, if a many-pointed star could be said to have a head.
This conclusion apparently verified itself when they presently plunged into a canyon, the gash in the mountain through which the creek entered the valley. Up this canyon their guide hurried them, slackening his pace only after two or three twists in the gorge had shut off any view of the rear.
It was along about this time that Dick began to grow curious.
“Say, Jonesy; what canyon is this?” he asked.
“Echo Canyon,” the guide flung back over his shoulder. Then he halted abruptly. “Listen,” he commanded.
Distinctly—so clearly that they could have sworn thatthe source of it couldn’t possibly be more than a mile away at the farthest, came thechooka-chooka-chookaof a locomotive laboring with a heavy train. Their guide’s grin showed a bad set of teeth.
“That’s why it’s called ‘Echo’,” he explained. “You wouldn’t reckon you could hear them O. C. trains ’way down yonder in the lower canyon, would you now? It’s six mile in a bee line, if it’s a foot.”
It appeared grossly unbelievable, to be sure, but seemingly the fact remained. They could hear the laboring engine; and, in the nature of things, it couldn’t be any nearer than William Jones had declared it to be.
“What is this creek?—the Yellow Dog?” Dick wanted to know.
The guide nodded.
“I don’t see what our instrumentman was doing up here,” Larry put in with a puzzled frown. “Our survey goes on up the Tourmaline.”
“Sure it does,” said William Jones. “But this is—er—a sort o’ short cut to the—to where I’m a-takin’ you. We hike up over the spur a little furder along.”
It might have been a short cut, but it seemed plentifully long to the two muscle-weary man-hunters when, after what they were estimating as fully three additional miles of mountain-scalings and gulch-headings, their guide halted them on the brink of a broad canyon through which a stream bigger than any they had yet seen was foaming among its boulders. At a point directly below the halting place they saw a rude dam and the beginnings of an irrigation canal; and, half hidden under the trees at the dam site, there was a roughly built log shelter lookingfrom above as if it might sometime have been a hunter’s camp.
“Right there you are,” said William Jones, pointing down at the log hut. “I reckon you can find your way from here, an’ I’ll have to be gettin’ back, ’r Paw’ll be huntin’ me with a trace-chain.”
They thanked him warmly; they could do no less for a fellow who had voluntarily come miles out of his way to do them a neighborly kindness; and afterward they saw him lose himself in the mountain-top forest through which they had just made their way. Then they descended to the canyon of the tumbling stream.
Dick was the first to reach the weather-beaten log shelter beside the rude dam. It was not even a hut; it was merely a shack, with one side open to the weather, and—it held neither a bunk nor any other sign of recent occupancy!
“Come here, Larry!” Dick called; and when Larry stood staring blankly over his shoulder: “If I didn’t hate slang so bad, I’d say that we’re stung, good and proper! Do you get me?”
“I guess I do,” said Larry. “That long-legged grasshopper in overalls wasn’t telling a word of truth—about Blaisdell or anything else. What made him lie to us that way, and then take so much pains to make the lie stick?”
“You can search me,” Dick said, falling back upon his favorite phrase. “He must be clear off his bean. I thought he looked pretty much like a half-wit, anyhow.”
Larry sat down upon a fallen tree and propped his chin in his hands. After a time he looked up to say:
“Dick, if I wasn’t so dad-beaned tired, I’d trail Mr.Billy Jones and give him what’s coming to him, if it was the last thing I ever did. But we don’t get out of this with whole skins, either—you and I, I mean. We bit just like a couple of raw suckers; swallowed bait, hook and sinker!”
“Spread it out,” said Dick gloomily.
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face, now,” Larry went on hotly. “Don’t you remember how anxious he was to get us out of the valley, quick, before we could see or hear anything he didn’t want us to see or hear? And that piece of bull about the echoing canyon!—that was an O. C. material train we heard, all right, but it wasn’t any six miles away or anything like it. I’ll bet it was right in that valley and less than half a mile from us when we heard it!”
“But good goodness!” Dick gasped. “That would mean that they are six miles ahead of us! That can’t be; they’re stopped in that rock cutting just this side of the Nose. Haven’t we heard them blasting there every day?”
“It makes no difference. They’ve got around that cutting in some way and have gone on blasting to fool us and make us think they’re stuck there. They’re in the Yellow Dog with their track; and that isn’t all: I’ll bet they’ve arrested Blaisdell and Olsen and are holding them on some trumped-up charge to keep them from carrying the news!”
“But why should this Jones fellow chip in to help them?”
“That’s easy. I expect they have paid spies out all over the valley, and he’s one of them. He saw an easy way to bamfoozle us, and he took it; that’s all.”
It was past the middle of the afternoon, and Dick reached for the haversack, took out the neglected luncheon and divided it.
“It’s up to us, Larry; harder than it’s ever been before, because we were foolish enough to let that unwashed sand-shoveler put it all over us that way. We’ve got to find out what’s going on and carry the news back to our folks. Nice prospect for this late in the day! I’ve just about tramped the tramp all out of me, as it stands. We must have covered something like five or six miles getting here from the valley.”
“Every foot of five, anyway,” Larry agreed, talking around a hungry mouthful of bacon sandwich. “But here’s hoping that we can find a shorter way back, and it’s dollars to doughnuts that we shall. We know now that Jonesy was trying to lose us, which was why he ran us all over the lot getting here. This must be the upper canyon of the Tourmaline itself, and I expect, if we hunt around a bit, we’ll find our grade stakes—and most likely the O. C.’s as well. If we follow the river down——”
The interruption was a series of thunderous explosions that shook the air in the canyon and were bandied back and forth between the cliff walls in echoing rumblings lasting for a full half-minute.
“That was something that Jonesy didn’t count on—planting us so near that we could hear the blasting—didn’t think of it, I suppose,” Larry went on. “That touch-off wasn’t more than a mile away at the farthest, if I’m any judge.”
Hurriedly despatching the belated midday meal, they took the trail again, this time following the river. Almostimmediately they came upon a series of grade stakes; two sets of them, in fact, overlapping each other. Within twenty minutes the familiar clinking of the air-drills could be heard, and now Dick knew what the mysterious high-altitude insect was whose chip-chipping he had heard at the beginning of the long roundabout over which the fellow named Jones had led them.
Presently the work noises came to them so plainly that they no longer dared to follow the canyon trail at the river level. If their surmise that Blaisdell and his man were held as prisoners was correct, they would doubtless suffer the same fate if they should fall into the hands of the O. C. force.
Realizing this, they climbed laboriously out of the canyon, and from the top of the cliffs a little farther on they were able to look down upon an exceedingly busy scene; a huge rock cutting just fairly begun, with its battery of chattering air-drills, hustling gangs of laborers, puffing spoil train, and big steam shovel.
Sorely as time pressed, Larry nevertheless snatched a few minutes in which to make a rough sketch of the incomplete cutting, knowing that the information would be valuable in estimating how long the rival railroad was likely to be delayed at this particular point.
“Hurry!” Dick urged, glancing at his wrist watch. “We don’t want to be caught by the dark in getting back to camp. We’ll never find our way out of this mountain tangle if we have to tackle the job in the night.”
By keeping well up on the heights they were able to trace the grade of the Overland Central back to the point where it entered the upper canyon, and beyond that, alongthe southern edge of the valley of the Yellow Dog to the “enemy’s” newest material and supply camp.
Under cover of the forest on the steep slope just above the camp they were able to note the great piles of material that had been brought up, and even while they looked, another laden train was nosing its way into one of the several side-tracks. Also, from their elevated lookout they could see the completed track winding among the sandstone buttes all across the circular valley, disappearing finally under the northward cliffs.
Dick grunted.
“I ought to have a leather medal,” he said; “for forgetting to bring my field-glass along this morning. If we’d had it back yonder on top of the Nose we wouldn’t have mistaken that piece of track for a wagon road.” Then as a new complication suddenly struck him: “Heavens to Betsy, Larry! Do you see what we’re in for now? To get to the upper canyon we’ll have to cross their track—at grade! And that means a crossing fight that may easily hold us back for days and days!”
Once more Larry had been sketching; this time making a rough bird’s-eye map of the valley, with the O. C. line running across it, and the location of the big material camp carefully marked.
“That’s all,” he said at last, buttoning the note-book into his pocket. “Now comes the real tug of war. It’s five o’clock and worse, and we’ve got at least six or seven miles of mighty hard tramping ahead of us before we can break in with our news. How are you fixed for it?”
Dick stretched his legs with a groan.
“I don’t believe I’ve got more than half as many jointsas I started out with this morning,” he said with a grin. “But I’m game; the gamest thing you know.”
To prove it he laid hold of the big round boulder beside which he had been crouching and drew himself up. To his shocked astonishment the big rock tilted slowly under his pull, and he had barely time to spring quickly aside before the boulder turned completely over and went bounding and crashing down the slope like a small avalanche, gathering a following of smaller stones as it went, and heading directly for the busy camp at the slope foot.
“Great Peter!—you’ve done it now!” Larry exploded; then: “Up with you and run for it—if you don’t want to be nabbed and chucked into some hole with Blaisdell and Olsen!”
Whatever had been done with Blaisdell and his target-holder, it is certain that no alarm was ever answered more promptly than that given by the descending boulder. Instantly the big camp began to buzz like a nest of disturbed hornets. With a final leap the bounding stone crashed into a cement shed, sending a gray cloud of the “Portland” skyward much as if a charge of dynamite had been exploded under it. And now men came running from all directions, some of them with guns.
Luckily for the two scouts, the foresting on this part of the mountain side was fairly dense. At the crack of a rifle and the whine of a bullet from below, they forgot their weariness and ducked and ran diagonally up the slope. At the first chance they had to look back, they saw some half-dozen of the armed men coming on in hot pursuit. And a scant five hundred yards or so was all the start they had.
“Hold your wind, and for pity’s sake don’t stumble!” Larry gasped. “Here’s where we’ve got to dig for it! Those fellows never will believe that we didn’t roll that stone on purpose!”
For the first few breath-cutting minutes their capture seemed fairly inevitable. Their pursuers were fresh, while they, themselves, were almost in the last ditch of fatigue, so far as a foot-race was concerned. Once, indeed, they raced upon the raw edge of the catastrophe. A thinly wooded bit of ground that they were forced to cross gave one of the pursuers a chance to come within gunshot range and they both heard his shouted, “Stop, or I’ll fire!” a command which was quickly followed by the report of a gun. But the man’s aim—if he had really taken any—was bad, and a last-gasp spurt carried the fugitives once more into the welcome shelter of the denser wooding.
From that on, with aching muscles protesting agonizingly at every step, they slowly distanced their pursuers, leading the chase up and on, higher and farther into the heavy timber on the approach to the bald heights where no timber grew. Not until the dusk was rising from the gulches could they be certain that they had shaken off the pursuit; and it was then that Dickie Maxwell threw himself on his back under the trees, white, spent and gasping.
“I’m all in, Larry!” he panted. “I couldn’t make another mile if my life depended on it! Go on, if you can find the way in the dark, and leave me. The news doesn’t need two mouths to tell it.”
But Larry wasn’t built that way. Stiff and sore as he was himself, he knelt over the spent one, massagingand kneading the stiffened muscles and giving Dick a trainer’s manhandling that made him cry out under the very roughness of it.
“Oh, gee!—let up!” pleaded the squirming sufferer. “I’ll try it another whirl if you’ll quit. I’d rather ache and go on than to be beaten to death and take it lying down!”
With the shades of night creeping ghost-like through the solemn forest they hit the invisible trail again; heading westward and ever westward, rolling down steep hillsides into deep gulches, and crawling painfully up the corresponding steep on the other side, stumbling blindly over fallen trees and rocks; going on and on after their feet and legs were so numb and stiff that they could hardly be sure they had any, and with their eyes, for which they had small use in the darkness, leaden heavy with sleep.
The end came suddenly when it did come. At a moment when even Larry’s fine endurance was at its last gasp they saw a camp-fire twinkling far below them. They didn’t run down to it; they merely let go all holds and tumbled. The camp was that of their own hard-rock men at the foot of the Nose, and they nearly rolled into the embers of the fire before they could stop themselves.
It was Mr. Ackerman, their chief, who picked them up and listened to their stammered-out report of the day’s adventures. This time there was no word of commendation for what they had done; but that was only because the time they had fought so hard to save had suddenly become vitally precious.
Almost as in a dream they heard the chief snapping out his orders; heard the bustle and clamor of a camp turningout to go into swift action; heard the camp cook hammering upon his dish-pan to awaken the laggards.
Dickie Maxwell, smiling beatifically, turned sleepily to his exhausted running mate.
“Glory be, Larry!” he muttered weakly; “we’re going to make a fight for it; a crossing fight, at that. Here’s—hoping—we’ll be there—to see!” And then, still more sleepily: “Huh! if anybody should rise up to inquire—I’ll say we put one over on a fellow named Jones, after all—what?”