There certainly didn’t look to be. The opposite gulch was narrow and quite thickly wooded, and from any point of view they could obtain, it seemed to end abruptly against forested cliffs at its farther extremity. On the other hand, there were the stake markings pointing plainly and directly across at it.
“What’s your notion, Dick?” Larry asked, after another thoughtful inspection of the surroundings. “What’d we better do next?”
“I’ll say we ought to hurry right back to camp and report to Mr. Ackerman.”
“Maybe you’re right; but I sort of hate to go in with only half a report like this. I’d like to explore that gulch over yonder first.”
“Granny! Why, Larry! you can explore it from here—every foot of it!”
“It looks that way, I’ll admit. Yet you can’t be sure at this distance. Here’s my shy at it: you go on back to camp and tell Mr. Ackerman what we’ve found, so far, and I’ll hunt me up a place to cross the river and go dig into that gulch a little. It’s sort of up to me, you know, Dick. Your father took me out of the round-house wiping job and gave me my chance to make good on this one. And I shan’t be making good all the way through if I stop here.”
Whereupon, Dickie Maxwell argued. Besides carrying a cherubic smile for the staving off of deserved reprimands, he owned a streak of pertinacious obstinacy that was hard to down. Moreover, with the evidence of his own two good eyes to back him up, he was fully persuaded that an exploration of the pocket gulch, either singly or collectively, would be just so much time and effort thrown away.
Larry didn’t argue; he merely held out. So, at the end of it Dick grinned and gave in, saying, “Oh, well, you old stick-in-the-mud—if you’ve got to go dig into that gulch before you can get another good night’s sleep, let’s mog along and have it over with.”
“But you needn’t go,” Larry put in.