“I’m not enough of a mine lawyer to know,” Larry confessed. “The law says that the discoverer of a lode must either dig a shaft ten feet deep on it or, if he tunnels, his tunnel must go in far enough so that the vertical distance from the heading to the surface outside must be ten feet or more. Brock was the discoverer, and he did more than the law requires, as we can easily see. But that was three years ago. Whether we, as re-locators, will have to begin all over again, I don’t know.”
“That’s all right,” Dick put in; “in that case we’re not going to take any chances. We can stay here a week and still get out in time to start back to college; and we can do work enough in that time to satisfy the law if we get busy and don’t loaf on the job. We’ve dynamite enough left, luckily, and we can sharpen the drills the way we’ve been sharpening them—in a wood fire. Breakfast first, fellows; and after we get the jacks down to where they can feed, we’ll go at it for blood!”
This programme, or at least the first part of it, was agreed to and set in motion promptly. Going back into the crevice cave, they brought up the burros and packs, and, not to lose time gathering wood for a fire, they made coffee and broiled bacon over the last of the solidified alcohol cooking candles.
The breakfast was cooked and eaten just inside the mouth of the natural tunnel, and after they had finished the hasty meal, they all went out on the dump-head ledge to determine the best way of getting the burros down to some grazing ground where they could be picketed out.
“Say!” Dick exclaimed, looking over the mountain-scaling difficulties that presented themselves, “it’s going to be some whale of a job getting the little beasties down there, if you’ll listen to what I’m telling you. And if we do get them down, they’ll stay down; we could never make ’em climb up here again in the wide world—that’s a cinch.”
“That won’t make any difference. We wouldn’t want to get them back up here,” Larry answered. “We’ll most likely want to camp in the gulch ourselves, as long as the weather holds good.”
During this little colloquy Purdick had stood aside. He was shading his eyes from the sun and looking the mountain-narrowed prospect over thoughtfully.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he broke in. “Don’t you know, we’ve actually come back to within a few hundred yards of the place where we camped night before last! When we ran that test on the piece of quartz that I found, we were almost right here at the Golden Spider! See that butte with a bald spot on top up yonder?”—pointing to the right. “That lies right opposite the mouth of the little gulch where we made camp that night. Don’t you remember it?”
Now that it was pointed out, they all remembered it. Also, Larry remembered something else.
“That isn’t all,” he said. “That clay-and-rock slide where I found the crutch prints must be right up above us somewhere. I remember, now, there was a broken cliff, just like this, lying below it.”