“Let’s be doing,” Larry broke in; and he and Purdick went into James Brock’s tunnel and began drilling the holes for the first round of blasts, while Dick, with his rifle across his knees, took the first guard watch, sitting at the crevice mouth and looking down into the gulch through which any intruder must approach.
As the short shifts were planned, each one of the three had an hour on and a half-hour off, the watcher taking the place of one of the two in the heading at the end of each thirty minutes. Nothing happened during Dick’s half-hour at the cave mouth. The faint smoke wreath that had been distinguishable in the early morning over the little ravine farther down the gulch had disappeared, and the stillness of the mountain immensities brooded over the scene. Carefully and at frequent intervals Dick swept the surroundings with the field-glass, but there was nothing to indicate that there was a human being, or, indeed, any living thing, within miles of his sentry-box on the face of the broken cliff.
At the end of one shift all around they knocked off for dinner. The fire had been kept going, and Purdick made up and cooked enough pan-bread to last for a couple of days.
“That’s because we’ve got to go light on our wood pile,” he said. “It’s too much hard work to get the stuff up here.” Then to Larry, who had had the last half-hour at the cave’s mouth: “Anything stirring outside?”
“Nothing. We might be the only people between the two ranges of the Hophras, so far as any sign of life in the gulch goes.”
“But we know pretty well we’re not,” Dick put in, making himself a sandwich of bacon and hot pan-bread. “I’ve been figuring and calculating on about how long it would take a man to climb from the gulch to the place where we ducked into the cave, find out all there is to be found out there, and get back. What do you say, Larry?”
Larry laughed. “Anybody’s guess is as good as mine. But that doesn’t cut any figure. If their camp is down yonder where we saw that smoke this morning, and there is anybody left in it, our first round of blasts will give us away. They can’t miss hearing the dynamite at that distance.”
“What will they do?” Dick asked.
“You tell—if you know,” Larry returned.