Dick had paused several times in his conversation to give Charley the call and he now did so again.
In a moment they caught sight of a shadow coming along the shore of the lake and soon Charley, with his clothes as badly saturated as Dick’s, came hurrying up.
It was a joyful meeting and the next ten minutes were devoted to explanations and telling their respective stories.
Charley’s experience had been just the same as Dick’s, except that he was swept into the lake and had a hard job getting ashore, as he had become greatly exhausted.
“Lucky old P. D. didn’t rise near me or I should have been a goner,” he said. “Strange you didn’t hear me holler, Dick. I kept it up all the time.”
“So did I,” replied Dick, “but we must have been a long way apart at the beginning. Now, Charley, what is to be done? Here we three are in this hole and the thing is to get out as quick as ever we can, but for the life of me I don’t see how we are going to do it without running into Mudd and his gang.”
Clara had explained her situation fully by this time. It appeared that she had been on her way to the mine her father owned in the neighborhood of the Black Hills, the man Bill Struthers having been sent down to the railroad to meet her and guide her through the Bad Lands to the mine.
Mudd, she declared, was a man whom her father had used in his business, but had to discharge on account of dishonesty. “He’s a thorough scoundrel,” Clara went on to say; “he swore to be avenged on father and this is the way he has taken to do it. He brought me here and sent Bill in to tell father that the horse ran away with me and was lost. They expect father will offer a big reward to the man who finds me and I know they mean to trump up a story about my being captured by Indians and held for ransom. When they have got all the money they can out of father I suppose they mean to let me go.”
They kept on talking thus until Dick called a halt by making the remark quoted above.
“I’m blest if I see how we are going to get out,” said Charley. “We can’t go back up through the boiling pot, that’s certain. Perhaps Miss Eglinton will tell us how she was brought down into the cave.”