The tree was some seventy-five feet high and nearly as broad as it was high; and its huge trunk grew so close to the wall of the canyon that the ends of its great limbs on that side had been pressed tight up against the rocks.
"Well, we are here at last!" Thure's face was flushed and his eyes were sparkling with excitement. "Now, for the hidden entrance to Crooked Arm Gulch!" and his eyes turned eagerly to the walls of the canyon.
The wall of the canyon near the tree, so far as their eyes could judge, was a solid mass of cracked and seamed rocks, that sprang from the bottom of the canyon almost straight upward for five hundred or more feet. There did not appear to be break or opening of any kind, nor did it look as if there ever had been such an opening.
For half an hour the two boys and Rex and Dill and Mr. Dickson searched excitedly up and down the wall of the canyon near the tree, without one of them finding the first sign of an entrance to the hidden gulch.
"Great Moses, but this is exasperating!" complained Thure, staring indignantly at the blank walls of rock. "To be held up like this, when almost at the entrance to the Cave of Gold! But we have got to find it," and the heat of his excitement having cooled down a little, he began a more careful and systematic search of the face of the wall of rock.
"Found it?" yelled Ham, who at this moment came round the turn in the canyon at the head of the remainder of the company.
"No," Dickson called back. "Not a sign of an opening anywhere in sight."
"I reckon this is where our trouble begins," Ham declared a few minutes later, when he stood near the Big Tree and searched the precipitous side of the wall of rock vainly with his keen eyes. "It shore don't look as if there ever had ben any gulch entrance thar."
"Let us have another look at the map," suggested Mr. Conroyal, after all had searched the face of the wall of rock in vain for some time. "Possibly we have overlooked some little point of guidance on it."
Thure at once procured the map and handed it to his father; and all crowded anxiously around him, as he seated himself on a rock and spread the map out on his knees.