Larry turned his back upon the men who were holding the rope and in a few low-toned words outlined the plan that was trying to shape itself in his mind.
“Ripping—perfectly ripping!” was Dick’s enthusiastic approval. “Not a bit of ivory there”—rapping with his knuckles upon the curly red head of his tent-mate. “But say, could we lug all the stuff that we’d need?”
“The two of us could. But what I’m afraid of is that Mr. Ackerman will say, No.”
“I wonder,” Dick mused. Then he remembered something that had temporarily slipped his mind. “Hold up a minute; Mr. Ackerman has gone to Red Butte to hurry up material and supplies, so cookee told me. Smithy’s our present boss, and if we can swing him into line that’s all we’ll need. Let’s go down and tackle him, right now!”
Twenty minutes later there was an earnest conference going on at the foot of the cliff, with the young wire boss sitting in as the third member.
“I don’t know about holding the bag for you fellows on anything like that,” he demurred, when the plan had been laid before him. “It’s a fine stunt, all right, if you could pull it off; but I haven’t any right to authorize it—with Mr. Ackerman away. It would be a sort of breach of discipline. If he were here, I doubt very much if he would let you two kids take the risk.”
“That’s just the point,” Dick argued. “It’s just as Larry says; the risk will be a lot less for us fellows than it would be for any of our men—just because we are kids.”
“How about it, Larry?” Smith asked, appealing to the big, fair-skinned son of the Brewster crossing watchman.
“Oh, sure; there’s a risk, of course,” Larry conceded. “They’d be pretty hot if they catch us at it. But it ought to be done, and if we’re caught, we can be spared a lot better than a couple of your men.”
But young Smith was thinking of General Manager Maxwell and what he might say if his son were permitted to take risks.