“That’s right,” yells Mark; “you’ll like it better down there.”
We could see Batten edging over toward Bill. He was too far off for us to take a crack at him, but he went careful, just the same, with one eye on us all the time. It was pretty evident neither of them liked our sling-shots very much, and I don’t blame them. A pebble the size of a good marble stings when it’s snapped by a couple of strong rubbers. You can shoot hard enough to kill a squirrel or rabbit, and, while it wouldn’t damage a man very much, it would hurt like fury. I’ve figured it out that soldiers in a battle aren’t so much afraid of being killed or badly injured as they are of being hurt. It’s the idea of pain that scares them, and we could give Batten and Bill about all the pain they wanted.
“There’s only one way they can get us,” says Mark, “and that’s to charge.”
“Yes,” says I, “if they got the grit to keep a-comin’, no matter how hard we hit ’em, we’re beat.”
Batten and Bill had their heads together way down by the river. Every once in a while they’d turn and look or point up to us, so we knew they were hatching up a plan of attack. After a while they stood and studied out the lay of the land.
The cave was about two-thirds up the hill. Mostly the climb was pretty steep, and there were lots of big rocks and boulders and trees until you got maybe a hundred feet from the cave, and there was an open space steeper than the rest. The cave faced on a sort of shelf that stuck out maybe ten feet from the door. Probably it was made by the earth that was dug out of the cave when it was made. Partly that, anyhow, and partly made by cutting the face of the hill smooth and straight. When you make a snow house you generally start by heaping up snow and tamping it down till it’s about the shape of a half-orange. Then when you start to hollow out and make your door, you cut away one side so it’s straight up and down—just slice it off to give you a place to begin. That’s what the folks who dug the cave had done—cut out a chunk of the hill like a big step, L-shaped, and the foot of the L was the little shelf in front of our door.
The hill went up perpendicular about six feet from the top of the door and then slanted away natural again, getting less steep as it came nearer the level ground above.
That, in a general way, is how the land lay.
Batten and Bill studied it over quite a while and then got their heads together again. They seemed to be arguing about something. Batten smashed one hand against the other impatient-like, and it looked as though he was ordering Bill to do what he wanted. We waited to see what that would be.
Both the men started up the hill, but they didn’t get out from behind things any more than they had to. From one tree to another and from one boulder to the next they went slinking until they were almost at the edge of the clear space in front of the cave.