“What is this creek?—the Yellow Dog?” Dick wanted to know.
The guide nodded.
“I don’t see what our instrumentman was doing up here,” Larry put in with a puzzled frown. “Our survey goes on up the Tourmaline.”
“Sure it does,” said William Jones. “But this is—er—a sort o’ short cut to the—to where I’m a-takin’ you. We hike up over the spur a little furder along.”
It might have been a short cut, but it seemed plentifully long to the two muscle-weary man-hunters when, after what they were estimating as fully three additional miles of mountain-scalings and gulch-headings, their guide halted them on the brink of a broad canyon through which a stream bigger than any they had yet seen was foaming among its boulders. At a point directly below the halting place they saw a rude dam and the beginnings of an irrigation canal; and, half hidden under the trees at the dam site, there was a roughly built log shelter looking from above as if it might sometime have been a hunter’s camp.
“Right there you are,” said William Jones, pointing down at the log hut. “[I reckon you can find your way from here], an’ I’ll have to be gettin’ back, ’r Paw’ll be huntin’ me with a trace-chain.”
They thanked him warmly; they could do no less for a fellow who had voluntarily come miles out of his way to do them a neighborly kindness; and afterward they saw him lose himself in the mountain-top forest through which they had just made their way. Then they descended to the canyon of the tumbling stream.
Dick was the first to reach the weather-beaten log shelter beside the rude dam. It was not even a hut; it was merely a shack, with one side open to the weather, and—it held neither a bunk nor any other sign of recent occupancy!
“Come here, Larry!” Dick called; and when Larry stood staring blankly over his shoulder: “If I didn’t hate slang so bad, I’d say that we’re stung, good and proper! Do you get me?”
“I guess I do,” said Larry. “That long-legged grasshopper in overalls wasn’t telling a word of truth—about Blaisdell or anything else. What made him lie to us that way, and then take so much pains to make the lie stick?”