Here they had to grope and feel their way among the piled-up stores, and once Dick stumbled and fell over a box of the canned stuff, falling, luckily, upon a heap of sacked flour and thus saving the crash that might have betrayed them. Down at the farther end of the building the ruddy light of a camp fire was shining through the cracks, and toward this flickering beacon they made their way cautiously.
Through the wall cracks they could both see and hear. The members of the Overland Central’s advance engineering party were sitting about the fire, talking and smoking, and the two boys soon heard enough to tell them that Larry’s guess had been right; the engineers were waiting for the arrival of the construction crew.
Since it was still too early to make any further move towards an escape, Larry and Dick settled themselves, each at his spying crack. For what seemed to them an interminable time the circle around the fire remained unbroken; and when the men finally began to drop out of it they went only one or two at a time to the bunk shack on the opposite side of the camp area.
None the less, since all things mundane must have an end, there did come a time at last when there were only two of them left; the big chief and another whom the boys took to be the boss bridge-builder. It was the bridge-man who said:
“About them two kids you caught this afternoon; what are you goin’ to do with ’em?”
“Been thinking about that,” said the giant. “It won’t do to let them go back to Ackerman and spill the beans. What we’ve got to do is to let Ackerman come on with his transitmen and get past the mouth of the gulch, going up. Then, before his graders come along, we can cut in behind him and grab the canyon before he catches on. Besides, we’ll have the advantage of being between him and his working force.”
“But you can’t very well keep the kids here,” the other man objected. “They’ll be missed and looked for.”
“No; we won’t keep ’em here; we’ll send ’em up to Burnt Canyon with the teams going back to-morrow. We can hold ’em on some sort of a trespass charge until the job is put across. And about their being missed: that’s up to Ackerman. If there’s any worrying to be done, we’ll let George do it.”
“Do you know who the boys are?”
“No; but I have a sneaking notion that one of them is General Manager Maxwell’s son.”