CHAPTER IIIIN WHICH DICK DROPS OUT
Consternation was about the only word that fitted when Purdick had told the tale of the lost book. What he had said was perfectly true. Though they were all three taking engineering courses in college, no one of them knew enough about mineralogy as a science to do any practical prospecting for metals without a text-book. Besides, there were the Government maps; lacking them, they could never locate a claim, so as to be able to tell where it was situated, even if they should be lucky enough to find one.
At the moment, none of them thought much of the loss of James Brock’s little sketch map of the Golden Spider. Uncle Billy Starbuck’s evident conviction that the lost mine would never be found unless it was by pure accident had its effect; and, anyway, the real business of the summer was to be a search for the baser, though not less valuable, metals. And unless they could determine the presence of these—as they couldn’t hope to without the help of the “Dana,” there was no use in going on.
“Well,” said Dick, drawing a long breath, “that fixes us, good and plenty. I guess it’s us for a hike back to Nophi, and a wait until we can wire for another copy of the book and another set of the Survey maps.”
Larry shook his head.
“It’s likely to be a good, long wait. That copy of the ‘Dana’ was the only one to be found in Brewster—so the man that sold it to me said; and the maps will probably have to come from Washington.”
It was here that little Purdick had his say.
“This crazy break is on me and nobody else,” he cut in. “I had no business to forget the book when we were packing up last night. If you fellows will wait here for me, I’ll go back after it.”
“A lot of good that would do!” said Dick. “Those three hold-ups will be on the trail ahead of you, and you can bet they won’t miss finding the book in daylight, if they did overlook it last night.”
“I know,” Purdick went on, “but it’s up to me to try it, just the same. I deserve all that’s coming to me.”
At this, both of the others protested vigorously. There was little chance that the returning desperadoes wouldn’t find the book as they passed the camp site; and Larry and Dick both urged, with a good deal of truth, that Purdick was too “soft” to tackle the job; unfit, and too unused to roughing it in the open. Purdick let them go on until they had talked themselves out, but he wouldn’t give up.
“What you say is so true that it hurts,” he came back. “All the same, I’m going. I made the break, and it’s my job to patch it up, if I can. All I want to know is whether you’ll wait for me here, or at the foot of the pass on the other side.”
Dick and Larry exchanged glances. One of Purdick’s outstanding qualities—the one by which he was best known in Old Sheddon—was a certain patient, gamey obstinacy that never knew when it was beaten. Theyknew 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 forLarry 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 animpasseto 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 frozensnow 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 anarrêté; 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 slowlyalong 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 thesame, they continued to waggle. That was the main thing.
None the less, when the race for Larry’s goal was won, Purdick was done, finished,écrasé, as our French friends would put it. Dropping down upon the snow crust, he could do nothing but gasp and groan, not so much from sheer exhaustion as in bitterness of heart because he had such scanty reserves of strength and endurance.
“That’s right; take it easy,” said Larry, whipping the short-handled axe from his belt. “This next shift is a one-man job.” And as he spoke he attacked first one and then another of the stunted trees with the axe and hacked them down in a few handy blows. “There are the toboggans,” he jerked out; “now for the brakes,” and in a few minutes more he had two smaller trees down and trimmed to bare sticks with stubby branches left at the butts and the stubs sharpened to points.
Purdick sat up, rubbing the calves of his legs.
“Great Peter!” he exclaimed; “do you mean that we’re going to slide down on those trees?”
Larry chuckled.
“You’re one fine little guesser, Purdy; I’ll say that much for you. I’ll bet you haven’t had a sled ride since you were a little kid, but you’re going to have one now—the kind that you’ll talk about after you get old and toothless and take your youngest grandchild on your knee to tell it what a daring little old rooster you used to be in your younger days.”
“But, for mercy’s sake, Larry!—it’s a mile down to that timber, and it looks like ten! When we hit those big trees——”
“I know; you’ll say there won’t be anything left of us.But we’ll have to risk something if we want to beat those fellows on the trail. It’s our only chance. And I’m betting largely upon these brake sticks. You take the stick under your arm, so, and lean back hard on it if you find yourself going too fast. The sun’s getting a little work in on the crust now, and I’m hoping that these stubby branches will cut in deep enough to do the braking act.”
“I’m still game,” said Purdick, getting up like an old, old man and helping Larry to swing the cut-down trees into position with the butts pointing down the steep slope. And then, as one who knows he has to be slain and wishes to have it over with: “Let me go first, and you can come along afterwards and gather up the remains.”
“Nothing like it,” said Larry firmly. “I’ve done this thing before, and you haven’t. You watch me go, and then do exactly as I do.” And with that, he straddled his tree, took the steering stick under his arm and shoved off.
Little Purdick had held his breath so many times during the past twenty-four hours that he did it now quite automatically. To his town-bred notion, Larry was simply committing suicide, or so it seemed as the big bunch of evergreen, with Larry riding it, hurled itself down the first steep declivity, utterly out of control—it appeared; and it was not until the tree and its rider were a mere flying dot in the lower distance that Purdick could summon the nerve to mount his own vehicle and push it off.
Of what happened to him in the next sixty seconds or so he never had a very clear picture. There was no working up to speed; no interval in which to grow up to the crowding sensations of the thing. With a slithering hiss the makeshift sled was off, and at the first downward dash the brake stick caught in the crust, ripped a furrowapparently 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 siteand 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’vegotto run!” gasped Purdick. “Pitch out, and I’ll try to keep you in sight.”
Luckily, this last race was a short one. A scant quarterof 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 manlounged up to the wood edge, kicked at the remains of the fire, turned the beds over with an investigative foot, and even went so far as to stoop and look around under the low-spreading branches of the nearer trees. As he did this, it was only Larry’s quick wit that saved them from certain discovery. With a swift premonition of what the man was going to do, he reached up and pulled one of the low-hanging branches of the little tree down so that its foliage screened them perfectly. But for that, the peering robber must have seen them.
“Nothin’ doin’,” said the man gruffly as he straightened up; and a few seconds later the two riders and their foot follower had gone on to disappear around a jutting cliff in the canyon.
“Gee, Larry, but that was a close one!” sighed little Purdick, after the clinking hoofbeats had died away into silence. Then: “I guess I’ll have to have something done to my old heart. It makes altogether too much noise when there’s anything due to happen. Why, if that big thief had been listening half as sharply as he was looking, he could have heard it as plain as a trap-drum! What do we do next?”
Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was still only the middle of the forenoon.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “We’ll have to go back to the pass by the trail, and the middle of the day is going to be the worst time to hit the snow. The wet pack will be as slippery as grease, and we’ll be pretty sure to get snow-blind with the noon glare. Suppose we go back in the woods a piece and bed down and catch up on a little of the sleep that we lost last night. How does that strike you?”
“It strikes me right where I live,” said Purdick, yawning in the mere anticipation of a rest halt. “I suppose there is no danger of those rascals coming back?”
“Not the least in the world. What they’ll do if they really mean business—as I’m much afraid they do—will be to go down to Nophi and outfit the same as we have for a trip over the range. It’s perfectly plain that they believe they have a sure pointer on the whereabouts of the Golden Spider through us, and, as I told Dick, I don’t believe we’ve seen the last of them. But that’s a future. Let’s hunt us a hole and turn in.”
The hole-hunting was a short process. A few hundred yards above their former camping place they found a little dell under the trees where the fallen needles of many seasons lay a foot deep. There is no better wilderness bed when the fir needles are dry, and within a very few minutes after they had stretched out on the fragrant, springy carpet, each with his locked hands under his head for a pillow, they were asleep.
During his year in college, Larry had often said that he had an alarm clock in his head, proving the assertion by his ability to wake up at any given hour in the night merely by fixing that hour in his mind before going to sleep. Upon this day-nap occasion in the Lost Canyon wood he set the alarm for three o’clock, and, true to his boast, it lacked but a few minutes of three when he sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked around sleepily to try to make out where he was and how he came to be there.
It all came back in a moment, and he reached over to shake Purdick, who was still sleeping like a log.
“Wake up, Purdy,” he said. “Time to eat a bite o’ pie.”
Purdick came up with a snap. “Gee!” he yawned; “I sure did cork it orf in me ’ammick that time! How long have we been at it?”
“Six hours solid. And I’m as hungry as a wolf. Let’s see what you’ve got in that haversack.”
The eatables were produced and they fell to like famished savages. Purdick had provided pretty liberally, but what with the early breakfast, the hard travelling that had followed it, and the lapse of time, they didn’t leave much of what Purdick had thought would suffice for at least two meals.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Larry, meaning the gorging which left only a couple of bacon sandwiches for that possible second meal. “We’ll catch up with our supplies by late supper-time, at the very worst, and I know you’d rather carry your share of the grub under your belt than in the haversack.”
“I sure would,” Purdick admitted. He had never before known what it was to have such a gorgeous appetite as the mountain air was already giving him. “I see where we’re never going to be able to stay out all summer without back-tracking to civilization for more eats every few minutes.”
Larry laughed and sprang afoot.
“Just now we’re going to back-track to Mule-Ear Pass. Feel up to it?”
“I feel up to anything. As the fellow says in that old English stuff that the English Prof. made us take for side-reading last winter: ‘Fate can not harm me—I have dined.’ Let’s get a move and have it over with.”
That was a simple way of stating it: “Let’s get a move and have it over with,” like swallowing a dose of medicine.But there were a good many wearisome moves to be made before they won up to the final ascending loop in the snow trail, and they saw now—had been seeing ever since they struck the snow path—how impossible it would have been to get the burros up the mountain in the thawing daytime.
They had been talking about this, and their good luck in being warned beforehand by Mr. Broadwick in Nophi, when Larry said:
“I hope Dick didn’t have any trouble going down on the other side. I’ll bet it’s no one-man job to get a packed burro out of a drift if it breaks through where there’s any depth.”
“I should say not,” Purdick agreed. “But I guess Dick made it all right. What I’m wondering is how far he had to go before he could pull up and wait for us.”
“It won’t be long, now, before we’ll find out how far he had to go,” said Larry, and they went on toiling up the last of the slippery grades.
By the time they had topped the pass and had their first good look over into the mountain wilderness beyond, the sun had gone behind the high-lifted crests of the Little Hophras. What they saw between the two ranges was a roughly tumbled intervale which could hardly be called a park because it was so cut up by spurs from the surrounding mountains. It was rather a series of parks, some wooded and some bare, with a scattering of the great rounded hills known from Montana to Arizona as buttes.
To their great comfort they saw that the snow did not extend nearly as far down the western slope of their range as it did on the eastern; as a matter of fact, theyhad 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 lightwas, 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 itnow—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!”