The two men escaped by the skin of their teeth!
“It shore would’a scrambled us up somethin’ turrible!” the old man kept exclaiming.
Next day, he knew, they would find a clean swath cut down the mountain-side,—tall pines swept away, root and branch. He had seen many of these scars, which in later years had become a garden of fire-weed and wild onion, a paradise for birds and squirrels and onion loving bears.
He had seen steep mountains fairly striped by the paths of slides, the forest still growing between stripes. For the steeper the slope, the swifter the slide, as might be expected.
Lucky for them this had been a Southwest slope; for on the North, away from the sun, a slide is even swifter!
He had seen one man buried by crossing the head of a slide which gave way under his foot. Its roar had been heard for miles. Frost-cracked from the solid granite, the side rock that accompanied it had been weathered from the peak. Thus are high mountains worn away.
For perhaps an hour after the near-catastrophe, the air was filled with blinding snow,—not that from the skies, but that of the snow dust raised by the slide.
The circle of the rising moon threw a silver glamor over the scene. “What do you figure makes these ’quakes, anyway?” asked Long Lester.
“The boys have asked that too, and I can’t give it to you all in a breath. But I’ll give you the story before we end this trip.”
At the moment of the earthquake, Ace and Ted, immured on a lower level of the cave, were following a subterranean river. They got well splashed by the waves set up, and worse scared, but it was all over in a minute and they were only a degree more uncomfortably damp than they had been before. Suddenly Ted gave an exclamation. A crag of drip-rock had been shaken from the roof, and there, imbedded in the limestone, lay the plain foot-print of—it might have been a giant!