CHAPTER III.—ALEX FINDS USE FOR HIS KODAK.
When the long freight train dashed by Alex without slowing down, he stood for an instant frowning and shaking his clenched fist at the rear brakeman, who swung his lantern in derision and passed into the caboose.
“Nice thing!” muttered the boy. “Now we’ve got to stop here all night! Whee! Case will have a fit, all right! If this hard luck keeps up, he’ll get so he can have two fits at a time! That will be fine!”
Alex was about to turn to the track again and walk back to the flat car when the thought came to him that the conductor might have misunderstood orders regarding the exact location of the sidetracked car and stopped at the wrong place. Railroad men often did things like that, he reasoned!
“He stopped, all right,” the boy muttered, “for there wasn’t a hint of the rumbling of wheels in the air for full five minutes. Now, if he didn’t stop to pick us up, what did he stop for? I’ll go and find out!”
It was a problem which, to the inquisitive mind of the lad, required an immediate solution, so he faced east again and plodded along the track in the gathering night. A short distance away he came to a spot where tracks showed that the train had halted.
It was in a narrow canyon between two towering peaks, and, just off the south rail, lay a great rock. Around it were the footprints, and also the deep indentations of a crowbar, which had evidently been used by the trainmen in prying the boulder off the steel highway.
“They came pretty near stopping here all night!” Alex mused, looking over the ground. “That rock certainly would have stopped them good, and, at that, some of the crew might have been taken away on a car door!”
There was no doubt that a terrible wreck would have taken place had the train struck the obstruction while running at full speed. But, because of the steep grade and the heavy train, the momentum had not been great, and the watchful engineer had seen the rock in time to prevent trouble.
“I wonder how that rock got on the track, in the first place?” the boy muttered. “Doesn’t seem as if it could have fallen from that summit. If it had, it would have been broken into bits.”
“I just believe some one put it there,” was the conclusion, as he examined the ground. “I reckon some rough neck wanted to tip the train off the track!”
This conclusion, hastily formed though it was, led to other insistent questions. If the boulder had indeed been placed on the track by human hands, where were the ruffians who had done it? Had they hidden in some of the cars, or “on the rods,” and gone on with the train? Were they still in that vicinity?
“I think I’d better be getting back to the boat,” the boy muttered, a vision of bandits and train robbers peering out at him from the rocks presenting itself. “If there are any Jessie James persons about here, we boys would better keep together.”
Alex gave a parting poke at the great rock and turned around to look over the country to north and south. There was little to see. On each side of the tracks loomed a wall of rock. But, a short distance to the east, the right-of-way curved off to the south, following a ledge of rock which led downward. Straight ahead there was a dip, the earth falling away from the tracks and exposing a vista of wild canyons and rugged and forbidding crags.
As the lad turned he saw a red gleam in the canyon straight ahead. It was not the glow of the sunset. It was too late for that. Besides, the canyon was considerably lower than the floor of the pass, so the latest rays of the sun would not have reached it at all. The landscape darkened as he looked, and directly he saw leaping flames and figures passing to and fro in front of the blaze.
“That accounts for the obstruction on the track, all right!” Alex decided. “I guess we’ve gotten into a nest of thieves!”
“Well, you needn’t tell them what you’re thinking about!”
Alex turned quickly about, not at first recognizing the voice, then a white body launched against his breast, nearly bringing him to the earth.
“Down, Captain Joe!” he exclaimed. “Do you want to tip a fellow off his feet?”
Then he looked up at Clay with a grin.
“I thought you were a train robber!” he said. “Wonder you wouldn’t scare a fellow to death!”
“Why don’t you come up to supper?” asked Clay.
“Huh!” replied the lad. “Never you mind supper! Just come along with me and see what I have found!”
“Gold?” asked Clay.
“Train robbers.”
“You’ll be finding red lions next!” laughed Clay. “Come on back to the boat. I left Case alone, of course, to come after you, and there’s some one prowling around.”
Alex emitted a low whistle.
“That’s one of my train robbers, then,” he said. “I’ve got a trained band of ’em over in the next canyon.”
The boy pointed to the smouldering glow straight to the east.
“Hunters, probably,” Clay suggested.
“Hunters, of course,” Alex replied, “but they’re hunting something besides wild animals.”
“If I had your imagination, I’d be writing fiction for the magazines,” Clay answered. “Why do you call them train robbers?”
“Because they tried to throw that freight from the track—the freight that just passed. The trainmen had to roll a rock off the track. That’s what the stop was for.”
It was now Clay’s turn to express amazement by a low whistle.
“But why should they want to throw a freight off the track?” he asked in a moment. “There’s nothing nourishing in the looting of a freight. Suppose we go over and see who they are?”
“Well,” Alex replied, “I’ll go if you think best, but I’ll tell you this first. That freight was running on the time of a passenger. See? Oh, they’re train robbers, all right, and if there is any one prowling around the boat it is one of the bunch. You may be sure of that!”
Captain Joe now moved away from the boys and approached the lip of the canyon, where he paused and expressed disapproval of the men outlined against the fire by a series of savage growls.
“Come away, Captain Joe!” ordered Clay.
The dog growled again, but drew away from the canyon.
“We can’t take him along with us,” Alex declared. “He would give us dead away. We’ve got to slip up to the fire and find out what is doing without making our presence known.”
“That seems to be the proper way,” admitted Clay.
“Go back home. Captain Joe!” ordered Alex in a whisper.
The dog understood and replied by a wag of a sawed-off tail that he would go if the boys thought it best that he should, but that he wished it understood that he did so under protest.
“Go back to Case!” ordered Clay.
Captain Joe gave one reluctant growl with his face to the canyon and started away.
“He feels just like I used to feel when the big boys sent me out of a ball game at Lincoln park,” Clay laughed. “He thinks there is something going on here that he ought to be in with.”
When the dog disappeared from view the boys turned to the canyon.
“There’s a ridge we can follow,” Clay said, pointing, “and it will bring us out some distance to the right of the fire, with a lift of rock between us and our mysterious friends. Be careful, though, for it is getting darker every minute.”
“If it wasn’t dark,” Alex grunted, “we wouldn’t be going into the canyon at all.”
The boys made their way as silently as possible down the “hogsback,” but, with all their caution, a dislodged stone now and then thundered from under their feet to the bottom of the canyon. However, the wind was still blowing a gale, and they hoped that this would drown the noise of their advance.
It took them a long time to get down to the level of the campfire, which now supplied all the light they had to guide them. There were a few stars visible, but a low-lying mass of clouds was scudding overhead, and these shut out what little light came from above except at rare intervals.
“This doesn’t look much like a day on the Columbia!” Alex declared, blowing warm breath on his half-frozen fingers. “Huh! It is cold enough here to freeze the ears off a brass cat!”
“If the Rambler could talk,” Clay said, falling into the mood of his chum, “she’d be saying things about being taken on a cruise to the top of the Rocky Mountains. Look out, now! The ledge turns here, and straight ahead is a drop of a thousand feet, I guess, from the time it takes to bring the sound of a rolling stone back to us.”
The adventurous lads turned with the ledge, crawling now on hands and feet and keeping close to a ridge which formed the summit of the long crag. Presently they came to a rock which blocked their way.
The campfire was just beyond the rock, so they did not attempt to pass around the obstruction. They nestled down in the shelter of the boulder for a time and listened, but the wind was so strong that it carried any words which might have been spoken at the fire off to the east.
In moving about Clay bumped his face against a hard substance under Alex’s coat.
“Say,” he asked, rubbing his nose, “what kind of an infernal machine have you got under there? Are you trying to carry away a piece of the mountain? Or just blow it up? You nearly broke my face.”
Alex clapped his hand to his side and Clay could feel him chuckling, his body shaking with suppressed mirth.
“I’ve got the big idea!” Alex said, then. “That’s my dandy kodak you bunted into! Had it with me, taking pictures, to-day, and forgot to leave it in our luxurious private car. Lucky, eh?”
“I don’t see any luck in it for me,” grumbled Clay, still nursing his nose. “Why don’t you keep out of the way when you go about armed like that?”
Alex chuckled again and moved around the angle of the rock, toward the fire. Clay seized him by the foot and held him back, squirming.
“You’ll find out if they are train robbers if you go fooling around there,” he said. “What fool thing are you trying to do?”
“Leave go of my foot!” exclaimed Alex kicking like a mule. “I’m going to get a snapshot for my private collection.”
“You may get a shot that won’t be much of a snap,” Clay replied, in better humor. “Can you get by the angle of the rock far enough to do the trick? I’d like a copy of that photograph myself.”
“Of course I can,” was the reply. “I can see four men at the fire now, and they are all set for a good picture. Wait a minute!” he added. “One of them is going to throw a lot of brush on the blaze. I’ll show you a peach of a flashlight effect before long.”
The boy edged farther along, and Clay heard him snickering as he brought out the kodak and waited for the right moment to come. Clay became impatient, presently, and advanced toward him.
“Get back!” Alex whispered, almost in his ear, as he pushed against him. “I had eight films in and I’ve used ’em all. And there’s a giant of a man coming out this way. Get back! Take a tumble in some hole in the ground! I guess he saw me!”