Limiting themselves to a single haversack in which to carry a noon-day lunch; to the haversack and Dick’s field-glass; they struck out without telling anybody where they were going. Since it was impossible to make the climb on the canyon-facing side of the mountain, they made a long detour, zigzagging back and forth through the forests on the western slope of the peak, and stopping now and then as they gained altitude to catch their breath and to admire the magnificent view which opened out in wider and still wider spreadings as they ascended.
At noon they had reached the timber line, which, at this point, was as abruptly marked as if the bald heights above it had been cleared by human hands. As they had prefigured and planned to do, they came out of the forest well to the westward of the slide head; but now they had only to circle the peak, without climbing any higher.
After eating the luncheon which the camp cook had put up for them they began the circling. A mile or more of it brought them to a narrow terrace or bench, with the higher heights, in the gulches of which some of last year’s snow still remained, stretching away above them.
It was in this circumnavigating process that they came upon a thing to prove that they were not the first climbers to scale the rugged heights of Bull Peak. The proof was a broken clay tobacco pipe, black from much use, and it was Dick who saw it and picked it up.
“One of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘footprints’,” he laughed. “Where there is a pipe, there must have been a man to smoke it. Puzzle picture: find the man. Who was he, and what was he doing away up here?”
“You tell me that, if you can,” said Larry. Then: “Great minds run in the same ruts, you know. Maybe he was like us—some fellow who wanted to see where the shale slide starts from. Which brings on more talk: we ought to be getting somewhere near the thing by this time. Let’s hike to the top of that cliff and see if it won’t give us a better lookout.”
Climbing to the summit of a crag a little farther around to the eastward, they presently found themselves directly above that which they had come to see. Spreading downward from the foot of the cliff ran the mile-long slide; and at the bottom of it, so far away that the big machine looked like a child’s toy, they could make out the steam shovel, the alternating bursts of steam from its exhaust pipe serving to identify it.
Further investigation showed them the cause of the slide. The cliff upon which they were standing had for its underpinning a vast bed of the shale which had doubtless been disintegrating and shelling off under the action of the weather for centuries in the past.
“Heavens to Betsy!” Dick exclaimed, peering down at the huge shale ledge, “there’s enough of it there to keep us digging our right-of-way for the next hundred years!”
“There sure is, if we don’t come up here and stop it,” Larry put in.