“We sure got a gilt-edged prize when we picked you off the limb, Purdy,” said Dick warmly. “Whatever else you can’t do, you sure can cook. I see where you’re elected for the whole summer—unless you get your back up and go on strike and make us two poison ourselves with our own skillet messes. Pretty tired after the hike?”
“A little,” Purdick admitted.
“All right; after we get over the Pass, we won’t push it so hard. What say, Larry?”
“There won’t be any need of pushing it,” was Larry’s rejoinder, mumbled through a mouthful of Purdick’s delicious, skillet-baked corn bread. “We’re not out to see how many miles we can do in a day.”
With supper eaten and the tin dishes washed in the crystal-clear stream, and with the last tints of the sun glow gone and the stars coming out in a black bowl of the heavens that seemed almost near enough to reach up and touch, the three rolled themselves in their blankets with their feet to the fire, Dick mumbling something about a day well spent earning a night’s repose, and falling asleep almost as soon as he had stretched himself out.
But little Purdick did not find it quite so simple. For one thing, he was too tired to go to sleep at once, and for another the unfamiliar surroundings, the black shadows of the trees, the hollow drumming of the little river among the boulders in its bed, the high-mountain silence which was otherwise unbroken, the stately procession of the stars in a sky that was like an arch of black velvet—all these things conspired to make him wakeful, and after a time he got up, dug out the mineralogy book from Larry’s pack, stirred the fire to make it give light enough to read by, and was presently deep in the mysteries of sylvanite and sphalerite and chalcopyrite, B.B. tests, acid reactions, and the like.
In a little time he began to realize that even a June night at altitude eight or nine thousand feet can be pretty chilly, so he wrapped himself in his blankets and put his back against a tree. In the new position the firelight wasn’t very good for the reading purpose, and before long he found his eyes growing heavy and finally the “Dana” slipped from his grasp and he was asleep.
This was the last he knew until he awoke with a start some time farther along in the night; came broad awake with a conviction that a noise, other than that of the brawling stream, had broken into the high-mountain silence. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked around. The fire had died down to a pile of white-ashed embers, but the starlight, as strong in the clear atmosphere of the heights as modified moonlight, enabled him to see the dim outlines of his surroundings.
While he looked and listened, the noise which had aroused him came again; a measured tapping alternating with the crunch of slow footfalls. Straining his eyes, he soon made out a shadowy figure dodging along from tree to tree and working its way cautiously toward the dying camp-fire.
Purdick’s first impulse was to call Dick and Larry; his next was to half close his eyes and pretend to be still asleep. Nearer and nearer came the tap and shuffle, until at last he was able to get a fair sight of the midnight intruder. It was a man with a crutch, and the watcher under the big fir-tree didn’t have to look twice to decide that his errand wasn’t neighborly. For now the man was down on hands and knees and was crawling up as noiselessly as a snake.