In a hush of eager expectancy they pressed forward over the pile of shattered rock. Just beyond the place where the boulder had stopped the way, the cavern made an abrupt turn to the left, and at a little distance beyond the turn they came out into the blessed daylight at the mouth of what appeared to be marvelously like a man-made tunnel.
Gasping and gulping down the fresh morning air into their gas-filled lungs, they stood for a moment in the tunnel mouth and looked around them. In the foreground there was a deep gulch, and the slope facing the tunnel and its backgrounding cliff looked singularly like a small mine dump. Purdick was staring down into the gorge as one suddenly transfixed. When he found speech it was to say, like a person talking in his sleep: “I remember now, it was right down there that I found that piece of rotten quartz—the piece with the gold in it.”
When he said that, Dick began to look around. A moment later he dragged Purdick and Larry back into the tunnel and pointed upward and outward. “Look!” he whispered, with awe in his voice.
The tunnel mouth faced east, and the sun was just rising over the opposite mountain to shine full in upon them. In the jagged upper arch of the tunnel lip, untouched, as it seemed, by the outrush of gases from the big blast, a spider’s web, a perfect wheel, was suspended, and at the hub of the wheel sat a great spider waiting for its prey. And as the rays of the morning sun fell upon the web, the body of the spider hung like a drop of molten gold in a net of silver gossamer. Dick’s voice sank to less than a whisper.
“The golden spider!” he breathed. “Good goodness, fellows—are we awake, or just dreaming!”
CHAPTER X
NOTICE TO QUIT
While the three young prospectors, standing just within the mouth of the cliff crevice, stared at the spider-web with its eight-legged globule of molten gold hanging in the center, a small cloud drifted across the face of the rising sun and instantly the golden illusion vanished. The halo-like wheel of silken silver became just an ordinary spider-web, and the big spider changed its hue to a dusty brown. Dick drew a long breath.
“It sure got me for a minute,” he said. “For about two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail I thought we were looking at old Jimmie Brock’s golden spider—thought we’d blundered into his lost mine by the back door.”
“Well, see here,” said Larry, looking around curiously. “Are you right sure that we haven’t?”