“Those O. C. people don’t deserve to have us consider them in the least, Larry. We ought to blow their old dam to bits and let them have what’s coming to ’em when it goes out—at that place where they’re building their trestle in the creek bed. It’d fix them good and plenty, I guess.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Larry admitted. “As you say, they’ve earned it and it’s coming to ’em. I never will believe that they didn’t blow that cliff down on purpose to make trouble for us.” Then, after a little pause: “I—guess—it’s up to us, Dick, to say whether we get square with them or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this: we’re the only ones who know anything about this cave. If we keep our mouths shut, Mr. Ackerman will dynamite the dam. There isn’t anything else he can do, so far as he or anybody else will know.”
“Huh!” said Dick; “so you’ve thought of that notion of keeping still, too, have you? Let’s fight it out right here. Do we, or don’t we?”
For a full minute there was nothing but the steady drip, drip of the leaking flood to break the dead silence of the great cavern. At last Larry said:
“I’ve got a mighty mean temper, Dick, and I can never tell when it’s hammering me over into something that oughtn’t to be done.”
“A mean temper?—you?” Dick forced a laugh. “That’s a joke. Why, Larry Donovan! you’re just about the most even-tempered fellow I’ve ever known!”
“You say that because you don’t really know me, Dick—inside, I mean. By nature, my temper is like a fulminate of mercury fuse-cap—set to go off if you so much as drop it on the floor. All the Donovans are that way. But when I was a little kid I got fighting mad one day—blind, crazy mad—and nearly killed another little kid; hit him with a brick. Young as I was, it made an awful dent in me; and away back at that time I began to learn to sit on my temper, telling myself I’d have to or else I’d be a murderer some day before I knew it.”
“Well?” said Dick; “you can sit on it all right now; I’ll bear witness to that.”