CHAPTER VIIITHE ICE CAVERN
For a second or so after he had seen the camp-fire disappear as if a conjuror had waved his wand over it, Purdick was too greatly astounded even to yell. Twice he opened his mouth to shout at his two sleeping companions, but no sound came. With his teeth rattling in something that was a good bit like panic, he felt his way over to where Dick and Larry were lying rolled in their blankets and shook them awake.
“Wake up! S-s-something’s happened!” he stuttered.
“What is it?” said Dick sleepily, getting up on an elbow. Then: “Hello! What made you let the fire go out?”
“I didn’t!” Purdick protested. “S-s-something sus-swallowed it!”
Larry sat up, fumbled in the knapsack that he had stuffed under his head for a pillow, and found matches and a candle-end. When he struck a light, the mystery was explained—partly. In the place where the fire had been there was a round hole possibly three feet in diameter, and out of it a faint wreath of smoke and steam was issuing.
“Well, I’ll be dogged!” Dick exclaimed. “Wouldn’t that jar you? Did it go all at once, Purdy?”
“Right while I was looking at it. First I saw the bedof 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, theybuilt a fire in another place, gathered enough wood to keep it going through the remainder of the night, and after they had talked a little while, Dick and Larry turned in and Purdick resumed his watch. According to their agreement, Purdick roused Dick at midnight and took his own turn at the blankets, and at three o’clock Dick called Larry.
At daybreak the two who had slept through the last of the night watches turned out to find Larry already cooking breakfast.
“Haven’t been down in the hole to take a bath, have you?” asked Dick, rubbing his eyes open.
“Not yet,” Larry grinned. “Thought I’d let one of you fellows try it first. I lowered the bucket and got the coffee water out of it, though. Help yourselves, if you want to wash up.”
Dick let the bucket down and brought it up brimming. “Pour for me, Purdy, and then I’ll return the compliment,” he said; and as Purdick took the bucket and gave him the first slosh: “Gee-whizzikins-whillikins! Talk about your liquid ice! Whoop-ee! but that’s cold!”
“Sure it’s cold,” said Larry with another grin. “Didn’t expect it to be hot, did you—out of an ice well?”
While they were at breakfast they speculated a good bit on the peculiarity of an ice cavern being there in the bed of the little ravine in the heart of summer, and Dick was all for exploring it. So, after the meal, a boatswain’s chair was rigged at the end of the picket rope, and Larry and Purdick lowered the curious one into the well, taking a turn around a convenient tree for a snubbing hitch. When Dick was hauled out he had a fairy tale to tell.
“It’s the most wonderful thing you ever saw!” he declared.“There’s a cave down there big enough to drive a truck through, and it goes right on down the mountain somewhere. As far as you can see, it’s lined with ice in the most beautiful crystal formations, dazzling, blinding white, just from the little light it gets from up here. We ought to take a day or so off and explore it.”
Larry shook his head.
“It’s a side-issue,” he said firmly, “and we mustn’t forget that we are under pay. There are those two tungsten prospects and the vanadium claim, on all of which we’ve got to do the discovery work required by law before we can record and hold them. After we’ve done that we can come back here, if you want to, and take a look at your ice cave. But business comes first.”
“Oh, I guess you’re right—you most always are,” Dick admitted, making a wry face. “But I’m going to hold you to that coming-back promise before we leave this part of the country. I want to see where this cave goes to.”
Having settled it that way, they packed and struck out for one of the tungsten prospects they had found some ten days earlier, reaching it in good time to pitch a sort of semi-permanent camp near-by.
Wolframite, scheelite, ferberite and huebnerite, all mineral combinations from which the metal tungsten is obtained, occur in a number of curiously different formations, sometimes in the limestone, sometimes in the red sandstones and shales, sometimes in veins whose walls are granite or gneiss. What the three young prospectors had found, or believed they had found, in this first location was a vein of scheelite—which is the tungstate ofcalcium—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 stepsin the test were set forth, with their results. “Now a pinch of the iron powder.”
“There you are,” Larry summed up, when, with the addition of the iron, the blue color came back. “I guess we’re pretty safe to begin digging to-morrow morning.”
Accordingly, the first thing the next morning they got out the hammer and drills, dynamite, caps and fuse, and became stone quarriers, setting themselves the task of driving a “discovery” tunnel on the vein, because it was easier to tunnel than to sink a shaft. Being new to the quarrying trade, they made slow work of it, blistering their hands plentifully the first day or two, and learning only by laborious experience in drilling the hard rock how to place their blasts where they would do the most good.
Taking one thing with another, they spent nine of the long summer days on this job before Larry’s pocket tapeline told them they had the necessary ten feet of depth; after which it took part of another day to lay off the claim and stake it and post it with the proper notice. In honor of the leading burro, they named the lode the “Blue Fishbait.”
Shifting that afternoon to the location of the other tungsten deposit they had discovered, they went through the same process here. In this place, however, the mineral, which was wolframite or ferberite, was in a softer formation; which was lucky because it was so situated that they couldn’t uncover it by tunnelling, and had to sink a shaft ten feet down on the vein. Larry took half a day to hack out a rude windlass with the hand-axe, and again they set to work drilling and blasting.
A week sufficed for this second “discovery” development,and once more they moved on, this time to the vanadium deposit they had uncovered and located on the day of the bear’s visitation. By this time they had acquired a good bit more skill in handling the hammer and drills and dynamite, and were able to make the rock fly in fairly adequate quantities at each shot. It was Dick, the impatient one, who was continually urging speed and still more speed. This workaday rock digging, merely for the purpose of earning the right to record a claim, didn’t appeal to him, and he was eager to have it over with, and to get back to the really interesting part of the prospecting—ranging the mountains back and forth and looking for new lodes.
“Gee, fellows!” he said, as they sat around their camp-fire one night at the vanadium claim, “do you realize that this is the second week in August, and that we’ve got to be back at Old Sheddon the first week in September?”
“I’m realizing it mighty hard,” Purdick asserted. “I want what Old Sheddon is trying to give me in the way of an engineering course, but I haven’t had enough of this bully old wild life here in the mountains yet, not by a jugful.”
Larry’s broad smile was good-naturedly joshing.
“What you’ve been needing all your life was a quarryman’s job outdoors, Purdy,” he commented. “It’s sure making a man of you. You don’t look much like the little white-faced hospital rat you were when you came in with us in June.”
Purdick pulled up a shirt sleeve, made a fist and slowly curved his arm upward. “Look at that muscle!” he bragged. “Essence of striking-hammer did that. Talk about your hour a day in the gym. Make it ten hours aday 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 expectedthat 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 notpay 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?”
“Whenwe 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 tohim, 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 coursethatdidn’t take any nerve.”
“That’s all right; sleuthing a cripple is one thing, and a stand-up fight is another,” Purdick qualified. “I guess I wouldn’t be much good in a real, for-sure scrap.”
They went on talking for a little while, Dick getting back to his cocksureness that the Golden Spider would be found, and Larry throwing cold water in bucketsful, as he usually did when the lost mine was under discussion. As once before, it was little Purdick who broke in to turn the talk current into another channel.
“Talking about minerals—and we’ve been eating and drinking and sleeping them all summer—I’d like to know what this is,” he said, taking a piece of brownish stone from his pocket. “I picked it up when we were scouting along this afternoon and dropped it into my pocket and forgot it.”
Larry and Dick both examined the specimen and could make nothing of it. “Brown stone” was the only name that fitted it, and it had no lustre, and no metallic “streak” when it was scratched. The only hint it gave of being other than it seemed to be—a bit of soft brown stone—was in its weight. Dick looked at his wrist watch.
“It’s early yet,” he said. “Get out the blowpipe and chemicals, Purdy, and we’ll run a test on it.”
Since the specimen crumbled quite easily, it was only a matter of a few minutes to grind a small part of it to powder in the porcelain mortar. To the powder was added a little borax to serve as a flux for any metal there might be in the sample, the mixture was heaped upon the cake of prepared charcoal, and the blowpipe flame was turned upon it, Dick furnishing the breath for the blast.
In due time the tiny heap began to fuse and disappear, but not all of it. In the small burned cavity in the charcoal cake lay a bright pinhead button of metal: light yellow while hot, but cooling to a deeper yellow when the blowing stopped.
During the long summer of prospecting the three apprentice mineralogists had had experience enough in ore testing to know at once that only one metal in the entire list—and only one form of it, at that—could be thus smelted pure from the vein matter in a simple blowpipe flame. Dick was the first to find speech.
“Free gold!” he gasped. And then: “That stuff is disintegrated quartz! Pity’s sake! I ought to have known it at sight. Goodness knows, I’ve seen enough of it in the mineral cabinets at home to know what it looks like.”
Larry was dropping a few drops of strong nitric acid into a test tube while Purdick lighted the alcohol heating lamp. Carefully depositing the tiny globule of metal in the acid, Larry heated the closed end of the tube in the alcohol flame. This was to determine the pureness of the gold. If it were alloyed with silver, the hot acid would immediately dissolve the silver. But there was no chemical reaction visible, and the tiny globule remained apparently undiminished in size; which meant that it was practically all gold.
“It’s the pure quill,” Larry declared, speaking for the first time since the testing began. “Now then, Purdy, where did you find it? That’s the next thing.”
But now Purdick was in despair.
“I can’t tell—can’t remember, to save me. I’m not even sure that I should know the place if I should see it again. I just picked up that bit of stuff as I’ve been picking up hundreds of other bits of rock in the last few weeks, and I don’t know what made me keep it, unless it was the queer, rusty-iron color. I do remember now that I thought it was a bit of iron ore and wondered what it was doing up here among the granites.”
“Well,” said Dick with a grim little smile, “you’ve discovered a gold mine and you’re in the same fix that we all are with the Golden Spider. You had it, and you’ve lost it.”
“Could you go back over the route you took this afternoon?” Larry asked.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t do even that much.”
“Was it higher up the mountain than this—or lower down?”
Purdick put his face in his hands and tried to think, and the harder he tried the more confusing the recollections—or no recollections—became.
“I don’t know,” he said at length. “You know we all separated in the afternoon, agreeing to meet here. I remember climbing two or three gulches, and working around one place where there was a steep slope and a pile of broken rock. At the top of the slope, as I recall it, there was a cliff. I remember that, because I had half a mind to climb up to the cliff to find out what kind of rock it was. But the slope was pretty steep and I didn’t.”
“And was that where you picked up this piece of quartz?” Dick asked.
Purdick made helpless motions with his hands.
“Don’t ask me,” he protested. “The more I try to remember, the worse off I get.”
“Well,” Larry put in, with a copying of Dick’s grim smile, “you’ll always have it to tell that you once discovered a gold mine—a real bonanza, at that. Let’s turn in and hope that you may dream out the place. I guess that’s about the only hope there is left.”
A few minutes later they had made their simple preparations for the night. Though they had long since concluded that the three would-be mine jumpers had given up the chase, they still kept up the habit they had formed of dividing the night into three watches, more becauseit 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.