That, in itself, was a stiffish undertaking, eating up time most voraciously, as all mountain climbers caught out after nightfall in the Rockies will be willing to testify. The detour they were obliged to make could not have measured less than four wearisome miles, and what with feeling their way and having to head gulches and scramble down precipices in blackness that was almost Egyptian, it was fully midnight before they reached camp.
As it turned out, the slowly crawling dynamited avalanche had beaten them only by a half-hour or so; and as they tramped in, hungry and muscle-sore, the chief engineer, Goldrick, and Jones, the second assistant, were just returning from the scene of the latest overwhelming; a shale flood that had once more buried the pile-driver and the steam shovel.
Most naturally it didn’t take the boys long to tell their story, and at its close the chief’s comment was brief and to the point.
“It is another O. C. trick to delay us,” he asserted. “I didn’t think that Orrin Grissby, their chief, would get down to anything as mean and criminal as that! Those two men are doubtless on his pay-roll, and they are pretending to be working a mine as a blind, in case anybody should happen to run across them up yonder.”
“Well,” said Jones, who was a young man with a square jaw and the cold gray eye of a fighter, “do we take it lying down?”
“Not by any manner of means!” snapped the chief. “You pick out a half dozen of your huskies that you can depend on and go up after those sham miners. If these boys found their way down in the dark, you can find your way up. Bring those fellows in and we’ll swear out a warrant for them. They’ll go to jail, if there’s any law left in the Timanyoni!”
Being a young man of swift action and few words, Jones quickly disappeared to put the order into effect. It was then that young Goldrick spoke up.
“That stops one of the exciting causes; but I suppose we’ll always be having trouble with this slide, from what the boys say. That shale cliff up there will keep on shedding from now till doomsday.”
It was just here that Dick Maxwell, tired and sleepy as he was, put in another word.