'It's a pity if he is, my lad,' said old Wharton, 'for he'll only be calling you to shoot him out of his pain. He's most sure to have a leg broke or his back smashed.'
'But he hasn't, though, have you, old chap?' shouted Snap, who had scrambled breathlessly over the logs to the spot from which his old horse had called to him.
'But, Dick,' the boy added, 'how on earth are we ever going to get him out of this?'
And he well might ask. 'The Cradle' couldn't stir, and no wonder. He had seen the danger as well as his masters, and with that wonderful instinct which sometimes serves a beast better than our reason serves us had taken the best means he could to escape it. Finding himself deserted, he crouched down on the lee-side of the great pine which had fallen across Snap's path, and by tucking his knees under him had managed to crawl almost under its projecting side like a rabbit. Tree after tree had crashed over him, but the great butt against which he crouched was solid, and now when Snap found him he was absolutely untouched, but shut in as if in a cage by the great fragments of trees which had broken just over his head. By taking off his pack (which contained two out of the three rifles), and by the free use of an axe, which was also attached to his pack, our friends at last set the old pony free, and they all laughed heartily as they watched him crawling almost on his belly amongst the timber, even lying down and pushing himself under a log on his side, until the cunning old rascal was rubbing his head on his master's sleeve again.
The other pony they found later on, but, as Dick said, no one but Snap could have had such luck as not to lose his horse in the late storm. The second pony was crushed to pieces. The first tree that struck the poor brute had broken its spine as if it had been a dry twig, and crushed it as a cart-wheel would crush a rat. The pack, too, was crushed and buried under the trees, the only thing which had escaped being Towzer's rifle, which had got torn away from its lashings before the pony was killed.
'Well, we might have done a lot worse,' said Wharton; 'there are all the rifles safe, and old Cradle has the flour and a frying-pan, the axe and the kettle. We shall do very well.'
'Much good the kettle will be,' said Towzer; 'the tea is somewhere under that dead horse, and so are the beans and bacon.'
'Yes,' added Frank, who had been hunting about amongst the packs, 'and there isn't a match that will strike amongst us.'
'Never mind that,' said Wharton. 'You have the only muzzle-loader amongst us, haven't you, Frank? Hand it here. We'll camp just where we are.'
Frank obeyed, and the old man chose a spot where some fallen trees formed a kind of square, the centre of which he cleared from debris, and then, taking an axe, he just trimmed off the wet outside of one of the great trunks, and made a big hollow in the dry, half-burnt tinder. This done, he greased a piece of rag, and, having 'salted it over,' as he expressed it, with grains of gunpowder, he rammed it loosely into one of the barrels of Frank's muzzle-loader, and then fired it into the hollow he had prepared. After one or two tries he succeeded; the rag caught fire, and set fire to the dry wood, and it kept the boys very hard at work with their axes and a rope to cut off and separate the huge log which formed their camp-fire from the logs around it.