The cost was the loss of a supper, and a vigil that tried them both to the limit. Creeping cautiously away from the vicinity of the tent and the mine opening, they worked their way back to the top of the cliff overlooking the slide. There they stretched themselves out on the brink to begin their vigil. Slowly the darkness crept up from the distant canyon, rising like a murky tide to the clearer heights, and one by one the stars came out to blaze in the black bowl of the heavens larger and nearer than either of the watchers had ever seen them before.
With the coming of night a cold wind swept down from the snow-gulch heights behind and above them, and they were soon turning up their coat collars and shivering. At their altitude, which, they estimated, could not be less than ten thousand feet, the July nights are cold with a penetrating chill that not even the dry air can temper.
“M-m-my g-gracious!” mumbled Dick, trying to hold his chattering teeth still long enough to get the words out, “th-this is something f-fierce, I’ll tell the wo-world! I’d give a d-dollar if I could get up and run around in ci-circles for a lil-little while. Whoosh! but it’s cold!”
“Shut up!” Larry growled. “If they should be coming they might hear you. Keep those rattling teeth of yours quiet. They make more noise than an automobile gear.”
“But I’m cold!” Dick protested.
“So am I, but I’m not beefing about it. It’s all in the day’s work.”
As nearly as they could judge it was about two hours after they began to freeze solid when the starlight showed them two figures making their way silently along the foot of the cliff, and, a little later, creeping down the edge of the slide to the island boulder. What the two figures did was, of course, invisible from the cliff top; but after a wait of perhaps fifteen minutes two dull explosions, followed by a hissing sound as of a thousand suddenly disturbed snakes, told them that another assisted avalanche of the crawling shale was on its way down toward the twinkling electrics marking the night shift’s attack on the stubborn obstacle.
“Quick, now!” Larry gritted. “They’re coming up, and we must make sure that they’re the same two we saw cooking their supper at that mine hole!”
The trailing of the pair, since the boys were reasonably certain of the route they would take, was hazardous only because of the darkness and the need for doing it noiselessly. None the less, the thing was done, and done right. Not for a single moment did they lose sight of the dodging figures until they saw them enter the tent at the mine mouth.
“The job’s done,” was Larry’s comment, when the weathered tent began to glow with the light of a candle to advertise its occupancy. “Now for the long down-hill hike in the dark.”