The retreat to the upper air was quickly made. On the hillside to which the camp salvage had been carried they found the men sitting or lying around under the trees waiting for some one to come and tell them what to do. Bannagher had sent one member of his shift over the mountain to try to find Goldrick; and two more had gone out in the opposite direction to carry the news of the disaster to the camps below.
Larry and Dick found a candle in their own camp dunnage, and Larry, searching in the heap of tools and equipment that had been carried up from the store shack, secured a coil of light rope. As if moved by a common impulse, neither of them said anything to anybody about their recent discovery. In a few minutes they were back in the great central cavern under the “Old Man,” Dick carrying the lighted candle and Larry the coil of rope.
A survey of the place made possible by the better light was almost awe-inspiring. The great domed chamber in the heart of the mountain was fully a hundred feet in diameter, with a height of at least fifty feet in the center. It was irregularly circular in shape, and there were half a dozen passages leading out of it in different directions.
But that was not all. Through a multitude of seams and cracks in one side of the chamber, drops and little rivulets of water were oozing to form shallow spreading pools on the floor; pools which were already beginning to drain into the largest of the out-going passages. Instantly the same conclusion struck both of the boys.
“It’s the backed-up river forcing its way through cracks in the rock!” said Dick in an awed whisper.
“You’ve said it,” Larry agreed. “It has just begun coming in; you can see by the way the pools are spreading.” Then: “Say, Dick! it’s down-hill all the way from that prospect hole in the gulch to this place—pretty steeply down-hill, at that. Do you know what that means?”
Dick shivered.
“Don’t I know? It means that we’re away below the level of that flood-pond, right now!”
Larry nodded.