“You’re the right old stuff, Purdy—you sure are!” he broke out heartily, and then he chuckled: “And you’re the one who said a little while back that you’d be no good in a scrap! I’m with you, right from the jump, and I know Larry is, too. Let’s get busy. We don’t even know that that smoke down yonder means anything more than some harmless old prospector’s cooking fire; and if it does mean anything else, we’re not exactly babies to let somebody take our candy away from us without raising a squawk. Let’s have a look at the drills, Larry, and see if they’re usable.”
That settled it, of course. But there were still some knotty details to be worked out.
“We’ve got grub enough, and we can get water by going back in the cave to where the torrent disappears,” Larry said. “But we’ve got to have fire, and for the fire we must have fuel. It strikes me that our first job—before these hold-ups get wind of us—is to get in a good supply of wood, and at the same time see if we can’t find something for the jacks to eat.”
Not to lose any of the time which had suddenly become precious, they fell to work at once. First, they clambered down to the gulch level, taking the axe and the guns with them. In a series of little glades along the small torrent which drained the deep ravine they found plenty of grass, but as they had nothing but their pocket-knives with which to cut it, they found it was going to take a good while to harvest enough to amount to anything. After a bit, they gave up trying to haggle it off with the knives and took to pulling it up by the roots, and in this way they soon gathered quite a quantity.
Hurrying as fast as they could, and half expecting every moment to be interrupted, they rushed the pile of green hay over to the ledge foot by armfuls, and with two of them on the ledge to hoist, and one at the bottom to load the picket-rope sling, they shortly had the jack-feed stored in the crevice.
That done, they flung themselves upon the job of wood gathering. This took more time, and was a lot harder work; but in a couple of hours they had accumulated a fairly good stock of fuel, dragging it up the ledge precipice as they had the grass, an armful at a time in the rope sling.
Though they worked like salvagers at a fire, the job of getting ready to stand a siege cut deeply into the forenoon, but still they neither heard nor saw anything of the men they were momently expecting to have to deal with. It was not until after they were preparing to begin work in the gold vein that Larry hit upon the probable reason for their immunity thus far.
“Here’s my guess,” he offered. “We have fairly good proof that they’ve been trailing us from day to day, and it’s been easy because we haven’t tried to cover up our tracks. Their permanent camp is probably down yonder where we saw that smoke, and some one of the three has chased out to see where we went yesterday. He’d have no trouble in tracking us up to the place where we began to burrow in the ground.”
Dick chuckled.
“No trouble up to that point, but a whole lot of it afterward. Do you think he could track us into the crevice?”