“This is fierce, Tinny!” gasped Jerry, as a big rock narrowly missed the head of the tall lad.
“It sure is!” was the gloomy answer, as they slid along together, like passengers on some grotesque, gigantic escalator. “Thunder Mountain is living up to its name!”
Jerry was about to make some reply, but suddenly they were all overwhelmed with soft dirt, brushwood and bushes, together with a patch of young trees. A quick shift in a part of the slide had sent them head over heels into a gully, and then had thrown down on top of them this mixed mass.
For several seconds there was ominous silence, and an onlooker in a place of safety might reasonably have supposed it was all over with the Motor Boys.
But, as if in a daze, Jerry gradually found himself breathing. Then, though there was a strange sense of an oppressive weight, he managed to move and found that he was gradually freeing himself.
About the same time, and one after another, the others in the party found that they were not even seriously hurt. The old miner managed to wriggle out from beneath a mass of soft, blue earth. He was followed by Ned and Bob. Jerry staggered to his feet, shook himself as a dog does on coming from the water, thereby dislodging from him a lot of gravel and dirt.
“Where’s Tinny?” asked Bob, in a strained voice, as he shook his head to get rid of a lot of dirt in his ears.
“I don’t know,” Jerry started to say, but the voice of the mine owner interrupted him.
“Here I am—a little winded but still in the ring!” cried Mallison. His face that he thrust out from the center of an uprooted bush was bleeding, and at first the boys thought he had been seriously hurt. But he wiped the blood off with a dirty hand, thereby making his face look worse, but proving that the cuts were only superficial.
Then, slowly, staggering, limping, sore and bruised, but whole in limb though not exactly sound in wind, they managed to stand on what seemed solid ground—a great shelf of rock. All about them was a mass of débris deposited by the landslide. There were hills and hollows, mounds and gullies, great cracks and fissures in the bluerock-strewn earth.