“You can search me,” Dick said, falling back upon his favorite phrase. “He must be clear off his bean. I thought he looked pretty much like a half-wit, anyhow.”
Larry sat down upon a fallen tree and propped his chin in his hands. After a time he looked up to say:
“Dick, if I wasn’t so dad-beaned tired, I’d trail Mr. Billy Jones and give him what’s coming to him, if it was the last thing I ever did. But we don’t get out of this with whole skins, either—you and I, I mean. We bit just like a couple of raw suckers; swallowed bait, hook and sinker!”
“Spread it out,” said Dick gloomily.
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face, now,” Larry went on hotly. “Don’t you remember how anxious he was to get us out of the valley, quick, before we could see or hear anything he didn’t want us to see or hear? And that piece of bull about the echoing canyon!—that was an O. C. material train we heard, all right, but it wasn’t any six miles away or anything like it. I’ll bet it was right in that valley and less than half a mile from us when we heard it!”
“But good goodness!” Dick gasped. “That would mean that they are six miles ahead of us! That can’t be; they’re stopped in that rock cutting just this side of the Nose. Haven’t we heard them blasting there every day?”
“It makes no difference. They’ve got around that cutting in some way and have gone on blasting to fool us and make us think they’re stuck there. They’re in the Yellow Dog with their track; and that isn’t all: I’ll bet they’ve arrested Blaisdell and Olsen and are holding them on some trumped-up charge to keep them from carrying the news!”
“But why should this Jones fellow chip in to help them?”
“That’s easy. I expect they have paid spies out all over the valley, and he’s one of them. He saw an easy way to bamfoozle us, and he took it; that’s all.”