“Jove!” exclaimed Merry. “There are two fellows on a bowlder down there. See them? They are just below that chaparral of mesquite. One of them looks like the colonel to me. Wonder if the other is Darrel?”
“Not on your life!” murmured Clancy. “The other is Jode.”
“Sure enough!” agreed Ballard. “We’d better lead our horses back from the rim, and drop down on the rocks. If the colonel and Jode happened to look up here, they’d see us.”
Ballard’s suggestion was carried out at once; then, on their knees, the lads continued to peer downward. Presently the colonel and Jode got up and began climbing. They passed well to the left of the chaparral, angled across the face of the slope, and stepped upon a ledge that jutted out from the gulch side.
“I’m next to what’s going on down there,” said Merry. “Remember what Bleek told us, Clan, when I asked him where Jode got that dynamite for the cartridge?”
“He said something about Hawtrey stumbling on a ‘prospect,’” was the answer, “and that Jode was to fill a hole, and the colonel was to load it and set it off.”
“That’s what the colonel is about to do. Let’s move down the gulch a little way and find a place directly over the ledge.”
A hundred yards carried the boys to a spot above the ledge. Masses of splintered granite and loose bowlders covered the slope between the ledge and the crest of the gulch wall. The boys were able to look over the intervening rocks, however, and get a clear view of the ledge level.
Colonel Hawtrey, on his knees, was at work capping a fuse and ramming dynamite into the hole where the blast was to be set off.
“You’re right about it, Chip,” said Clancy. “The colonel’s going to have a little blow-up, down there, and probably he’ll make a ‘strike.’ How many poor prospectors, do you suppose, have passed that ‘prospect’ by? That’s the way things work out, in this world. Here’s the colonel, with more mines and money than he knows what to do with, just falling right over a good thing. Now——”