“But see here,” he contended, facing the big man boldly; “you can’t chase us out this way. If you’ve got a legal right to this claim, all you have to do is to go into court and prove it and we’ll give up. But——”
“There ain’t no ‘buts’ about it!” roared the swarthy desperado, loosening the big revolver in its sheath. “I ain’t honin’ to commit no murder, but if yuh git me madded—pass me them guns, butt foremost, and then git yer traps and pile out o’ here, and do it mighty sudden, ’r I’ll blow yuh to kingdom come!”
Again little Purdick was the only one who moved. All his efforts to reach Larry’s gun without being caught at it failed. Six inches was as near as he could come to touching it. But the small one was blest with a brain that could shuttle at the rate of a mile a minute under pressure, and all the time he was reaching for the rifle, he was trying his hardest to think of some other expedient that would rid them of the intruder.
It was the desperado’s final threat that gave Purdick the bright idea—that “blow yuh to kingdom come.” The daylight was fading fast, and with it Purdick faded, backing out of the scene noiselessly and taking scrupulous care to keep himself in line with Dick and the sheltering rock pile. When he had crept to where the jack packs were lying, it seemed as if it took him an endless time to find what he wanted, and his hands were shaking so that they fumbled helplessly in the dark. Around the turn in the crevice he could hear Dick still trying to argue, with the hold-up breaking in to curse and swear and threaten all sorts of hideous things that were going to happen when he got sufficiently “madded.”
Purdick’s hurried preparations were finished at last, and with trembling fingers he struck a match and held the flame to the frayed end of what looked in the match-light to be a length of thick, blackish string. The next moment he had darted around the sheltering turn in the crevice to fling a yellow cylindrical object at the feet of the intruder—a paper-covered cylinder with a spitting, fizzing, black string hanging out of it.
“Dynamite!” he yelled, and with the yell grabbed Dick’s collar with one hand and Larry’s with the other, and in a burst of strength that would have been miles beyond him a few short weeks earlier, dragged them both headlong over the rock pile and behind it, falling flat on top of them to hold them down.
It worked. There was a deafening explosion a few seconds later, but there was no intruder in sight to be blown up by it. Instantly, Purdick leaped to his feet, caught up Larry’s rifle and ran to the cave mouth. The dooryard ledge was empty, but a great crashing in the young trees below told what had become of the man with the large threats and the small self-control in an emergency. Having escaped the dynamite, he was doing his best to get out of rifle range.
Larry was the first to speak when he and Dick joined Purdick at the cave entrance.
“We sure had it coming to us—or I did, anyway. I ‘white-eyed’ on my lookout job. I had no business to go gold-crazy just because you did, Dick.” Then to Purdick: “You bully little old fighting rat—how did you come to think of the dynamite?”