Patsy looked after him and set her lips firmly. “Just you wait, young man,� she promised him, “till next week when Anne Lewis comes. We’ll show you what it means to dare and double dare us.�
For weeks Dick had been going off alone every few days, and coming back late, tired and dirty and with a joyful air of mystery. The others were too busy with gardening and Red Cross and Corn Club work to make any real effort to find out where he went.
But he always watched to make sure that he was not followed, and he never relaxed his precautions at the mine. He pulled his ladder in and out, blurred his footprints, and stirred up the dead leaves so as not to make a path. It would take, he proudly thought, a Sherlock Holmes or a bloodhound to trace his course.
He had examined the main room without seeing any place that it seemed worth while to work in the crude fashion possible to him. The most promising places, he thought, were in the spurs of the lower tunnel, where there was more clay than rock. If he dug a little farther—a few inches or some feet—perhaps he would find silver that the miners had missed.
He planned to extend each spur a certain distance; at first he said ten feet, but a little work convinced him that was too far, so he decided to go six feet—or five—or four. It was too discouraging to compute how long it would take to go even four feet, at his snail-like rate of progress. He could not use alone the drill and sledge hammer he had brought from Mr. Mallett’s shop. So he had to content himself with digging along a ledge, breaking off rough bits of rock and eagerly examining them for silver.
He had inquired furtively about dynamite, but the law made it difficult for him to get it—fortunately; for in his ignorant, inexperienced hands there would probably have been an accident which might even have cost him his life.
On this pleasant June afternoon, Dick went blithely with his Cousin Mayo to Larkland. He nearly always went there on his way to the Old Sterling Mine; it was only half a mile off the road; and the distance to the mine seemed shorter to him when he had a carrier pigeon for company.
Breeding and blood were telling in the Larkland pigeons. Mr. Osborne showed Dick that afternoon a marked copy of The Bird World telling, with big headlines, about the thousand-mile flight of a young pigeon trained by Mr. Mayo Osborne, of Virginia.
“I bet Snapshot will make a record, too,� said Dick, stroking the plumage of a petted young bird.
“Dick,� said Mr. Osborne, suddenly, “I’m glad to have your help and interest about these birds; I want you to learn all you can about training them. Your Cousin Polly knows all there is to know about their feeding and care. But when I go away——�