CHAPTER XIINO SURRENDER!
The flood in the cave, already three or four inches deep on the floor and pouring out of the entrance in a splashing cataract when the three boys made a mad scramble for the mine tunnel, rose swiftly to a roaring, bellowing torrent as they stumbled in black darkness up the inclined drift and crowded themselves into the highest part of the heading.
How long the imminent threat of death, either by drowning or stifling, lasted they could never tell, though minutes can easily figure as hours under such terrifying conditions. But one thing they were made quickly to realize, and that was that the upward pitch of the tunnel was all that was saving them from being drowned, like rats in a trap. A sudden, half-suffocating increase in the air pressure, making their ears ring and their hearts pound like laboring pumps, told them that the water had risen above the mouth of the tunnel in the main cave and was compressing the pocketed air. And it was the subsidence of this pressure that first gave them assurance that the worst was over—that the fury was expending itself.
Dick was the first to speak, and his teeth were chattering.
“They’ve g-got us this time!” he stammered. “Th-this is what they went up the mountain for yesterday morningwith 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 andhad 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 towhere 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-awayup through the cave and over the mountain to Natrolia. And if we don’t mean to make a get-away—well, in a couple of days at the longest—saying we can stand these robbers off for that long—we’ll be starving.”
“I know,” Dick admitted. “But I’m going to stay. And when I say that, I’m not thinking of the money there may be in this gold vein we’ve been digging in, and I don’t believe either of you are. It’s a bigger question than that, now, I guess.”
“You’ve got it right, Dick,” said little Purdick. “We’re not fighting for our pockets; we’re fighting to keep a bunch of thieves and murderers from taking what doesn’t belong to them. I say, No Surrender.”
“That’s the word,” Dick agreed, and as he spoke he passed the rifle and cartridge belt over to the best marksman.
While they were talking, the sky had begun to lighten in the east with the promise of another cloudless summer day. As the stars were extinguished one by one and the growing dawn light crept down into the valleys and gulches, they were able to see what the dam-bursting flood had done. The broad swath mowed down through the forest by the avalanche boulder two days earlier had formed a path for the flood, and the cataracting water had swept it clean of everything movable.
Far down the slope from the cliff’s foot they saw one of the burros grazing peacefully and quite as if nothing had happened to it. But the other was lying on its side in the path of the flood, and the field-glass showed them that it had a broken leg and couldn’t get up.
“Poor old Fishbait!” said Dick mournfully. “If we could only get to him and put him out of his misery!”Then he refocused the glass and searched carefully for some signs of the camp outfit. There was nothing to be seen. “I guess it’s all gone on into the gulch creek and been washed away,” he said.
Purdick got up and stretched himself. The cold soaking, with no chance to dry out, had left him stiff and numb, and he took a turn around in the cave to limber up. When he came back to the crevice mouth, it was to say: “Just thought I’d take a squint around to see if any of the eatables had been overlooked by the flood. They’re all gone; everything’s gone: wood-pile, green-grass hay, and even the pile of ore we had sorted out.”
Larry took up a hole in his belt. “That’s breakfast,” he said, with a sort of grim attempt to make a joke of it. Then: “Let’s get back inside—so as to leave them guessing as long as we can.”
They had hardly withdrawn from the lip of the entrance before one of the three miscreants came in sight. It was the cripple, and he was swinging along toward the lower end of the avalanche path. When he reached it he began poking around in the débris with his crutch.
“Humph!” Larry grunted. “Looking for our dead bodies, I suppose.”
Little Purdick’s pale blue eyes were glowing.
“Shall I try for it?” he whispered. “I believe I could get him, even at this distance.”
“No, no!” Larry cut in hastily. “They’re cold-blooded murderers, all right, but we mustn’t be. When they come after us it will be different.”
While the cripple was poking around with his crutch his two accomplices came up. One of them—not the black-whiskered one who had been scared off by Purdick’sdynamite bomb, but the other—walked over to where the disabled burro was lying, and, after a momentary inspection of the poor beast, drew his pistol and shot it. Then he walked out to where the other one was grazing, picked up the trailing halter, and led the little animal back into the woods.
Shortly afterward, this third man joined the other two who were searching the flood wreck. Dick, watching them through the field-glass, saw them turn up a pair of blankets, a saucepan, the aluminum camp kettle, and one of the lost rifles.
Purdick fingered the lock of his gun. “I hope they won’t keep us waiting too long,” he said softly.
“They won’t,” Dick returned, keeping the three in the field of the glass. “The big one has quit digging and he’s looking up here. Now he’s getting his gun....” Then, suddenly: “Duck—both of you!”
The warning didn’t come an instant too soon. On the heels of it a rifle barked in the gulch, and a bullet sang through the crevice opening to spatter itself on the roof over their heads.
“That’s a try-out,” said Larry. “They’re puzzled because they can’t find our bodies, and they think maybe a shot or two will make us show up if we’re still here. Don’t shoot, Purdy”—to the small one who was flat on his face and was trying to get a rest over the cliff lip. “Let’s wait until we have to.”
The waiting proved to be a weary business for three fellows who were both wet and hungry, and had little prospect of relieving either discomfort short of defeating the three depredators and possibly forcing them to replace,out of their own stores, what they had destroyed; a result to which not even Dick, the most imaginative of the three, could look forward with any hope of its accomplishment. At the best, they could only hope to keep the spoilers at bay for a time; and they all knew that the time wouldn’t be very long if they had to go without food.
After the trial shot which brought no reply from the high-lying crevice, two of the men in the gulch resumed their search in the flood wreckage, while the third, the black-bearded one, went off down stream. It was a full hour after sunrise—and the sun, shining fairly into the eastward-facing crevice, was doing something to relieve the chill of the three sodden watchers—when Blackbeard reappeared, leading the burro laden with tools and camp dunnage.
“Now we get it,” said Dick. “They’re coming up to take possession. I wonder how they’ll work it. They can’t make that burro climb up here. It’s too steep.”
But the three men seemed to know what they were about. First they drove the laden pack animal as far up the avalanche path as it could go, flogging it upward until the poor beast was slipping and falling at every other step. This brought them within easy range, and in a hasty consultation carried on in whispers, the three defenders of the Golden Spider decided that they dare not wait any longer. As matters stood, Purdick might have marked them down and either killed or crippled all three before they could reach cover, but they wouldn’t take that much of an advantage even of men who were no better than midnight assassins.
“Hi!—you fellows down there!” Dick shouted. “Keep your distance or we’ll fire on you!”
The reply to this sportsmanlike warning came so quickly that it seemed as if it must have been planned beforehand. Instantly the cripple dodged behind the trembling burro, and using it for a breastwork and its pack for a rest, opened fire with a repeating rifle, sending shot after shot hurtling up into the crevice mouth, while his two companions, guns in hand, started to climb straight up the slope under cover of this bombardment. Owing to the high angle at which the crippled robber had to shoot, the defenders of the mine were still safe so long as they did not get within the line of fire, and by lying flat on the crevice floor they could see without being seen.
Little Purdick’s face was white and drawn, but his hands did not tremble when he took careful aim at the leading one of the two scrambling climbers. “Don’t kill him if you can help it,” Larry cautioned, and as he said it, the small-calibre rifle spoke. For an instant it seemed as if Purdick had missed.Then the leading man—it was the black-whiskered one—stooped to clasp his right leg just above the knee,wavered for a second, and ended by tumbling backward upon his follower, with the result that both rolled together to the bottom of the slope, knocking the burro and the cripple down as they went.
Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by tumbling backward upon his follower.
Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by tumbling backward upon his follower.
Then the leading man wavered for a second, and ended by tumbling backward upon his follower.
Larry clapped the small marksman on the back.
“Good work! Bully good work!” he cried. “If you’d had a cannon you couldn’t have done any better!”
Dick had the glass to his eyes again. “They’re overhauling the shot one and tying his leg up,” he reported. “Now the cripple—the natural one—is shaking his fistat us. I’ll bet that little surprise party’ll cool ’em off some!”
It did, so far as any further attempt to take the mine by direct assault went. As soon as the wounded man could get upon his feet and limp along, the three dodged in among the gulch trees, towing the laden burro, and were lost to sight.
After that there was another unnerving wait. Higher and higher rose the sun, and still there were no further signs of the enemy. After what seemed like an age, Dick said: “Do you suppose they’ve given up?”
“No chance of it,” Larry contended. “They’ve gone too far. They know that if they let us get away now there’ll be something worse than a charge of mine-jumping to face. They’ve tried to murder us.”
“Gee, gosh!” Dick complained. “I wish they’d hurry up before I get any hungrier!”
As the time dragged on, there seemed to be little chance of the wish being fulfilled. At last Dick jumped up, declaring that he’d fly all to pieces if he didn’t stir around a bit.
“Stir all you want to,” said Purdick. “Larry and I will keep watch.”
Dick tramped back and forth in the cavern for a few minutes until he got his stiffened muscles limbered up, and then disappeared in the backward reaches of the crevice. When he returned he was breathing hard as if he had been running.
“What is it?” Purdick asked.
“A knock-out,” said Dick shortly. “There isn’t any back door.”
“What do you mean?” It was Larry who wanted to know.
“I’ve been back in the cave. I noticed that the warm wind we felt sucking through the first morning when we came in was blowing again. You don’t feel it much here at the entrance, but farther down it draws like a chimney. While I was about it, I thought I would keep on and see if we really had a back door open again, as the wind seemed to show. We haven’t. Those fellows must have dragged in a whole forest when they built that flooding dam yesterday. Most of the tree wreckage was pushed on down with the flood to one of the big chambers, and that is so chock full of it that a fice-dog couldn’t crawl through, much less a man.”
“But you say the wind blows through,” Purdick put in.
“Oh, yes; it’s open enough for that. But even if we had the axe we couldn’t hack our way through in less than half a day.”
“All right,” said Larry, setting his jaw grimly. “That means fight or die. I guess we’re.... What’s that noise?”
They all held their breath and listened. There was no mistaking the sounds that came floating to them on the indrawing draft of air. They were the measured blows of an axe and they seemed to come from somewhere up above the crevice entrance.
“They’re up over us somewhere,” Purdick said. “It sounds as if they’re cutting a tree down.”
Momentarily expecting another attack, they gathered at the cave mouth and waited, little Purdick with his rifle at the “ready.” What shape the attack would take they couldn’t remotely guess. The step-like cliff into the faceof 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 resinoussmoke 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 intothe 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 manwent 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 outto 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 workingit, 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’vefinished 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 thissummer, and the way we got tangled up in The Web of the Golden Spider. Don’t you?”
“Here, too,” said Dick Maxwell softly.
And then they turned away reluctantly to tramp down the descending trail in the eye of the glowing sunset.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.