To this Bob replied, as was expected, by a couple of shots from his revolver, which, up to this time, he had fairly forgotten in the surprise of the unexpected attack, but Morris dodged behind a rock at the first flash, and no harm was done.
He did not return this random fire, but kept wide-awake for a few minutes, thinking Bob might come back with his companions. This, however, he did not do, and Morris lost no further time in starting home.
Bob admitted afterward, that he thought that at least two men had attacked him, which spoke well for Morris’s activity, and that it was Max who was giving him the shaking. Wet, sore, chilled and altogether dazed, he was in no condition to lead an attack against an ambushed enemy in the middle of a snowy night, nor were his accomplices eager to go and avenge his wrongs, preferring, so long as their own precious skins remained whole, to stay where they were and scold at him for his failure.
All this happened on Friday night, and to that fact the superstitious miner attributed his misfortunes.
The storm ceased before daybreak. Then what a strange, new, glorious landscape was that the sun rose upon! Its beams streamed athwart limitless spaces of snow. Overhead, the height Sandy had partly ascended rose in rounded outlines, a huge dome of unblemished white. Ahead, as if a mighty drift had been heaped across the gap between the mountains, lay the saddle over which the trail led through the woods; and inside the gorge all the roughnesses were smoothed, all the bowlders and prostrate logs, the boughs of the spruces and cottonwoods, bushes, ferns, and weeds, were packed full and weighed down with the soft and flurry flakes.
Beyond calling for a little shoveling inside the fort, the snow was no hindrance, of course, to the underground work of the firm of B. B. & Co. They hammered away at improving their tunnel all day on Saturday and until late at night, and followed it by a pleasant Sunday’s rest, in spite of their cramped quarters and tedious guard-duty.
The case was far different with the unfortunate jumpers, who, at the Aurora, had no shelter, and no way of getting free from the snow and the wet.
This misfortune was doubled by a thaw on Sunday afternoon, suddenly letting loose a great flood of melted snow, and turning the creek into a torrent, which, before Monday morning, had so swollen as to cover the trail and ford with a rushing flood six or eight feet deep, that it would have been madness to cross.
Old Bob and his companions, therefore, were not only very uncomfortable, but between the impassable creek and the unscalable wall on one side, and the rifles of our friends on the other, they were really prisoners.
“I reckon they’re getting hungry over yonder, too,” remarked Morris, when a heavy rain on Monday night had produced a second flood in the creek. “I don’t believe they have grub enough to last much longer. They couldn’t have brought a great deal with ’em, and it must be about used up.”