“He put it into my head by saying what he did about blowing us all up if we didn’t get out. But I had an awful time fixing the cartridge in the dark. I was scared stiff for fear I’d leave too much of the stuff in the paper and kill us all.”
“Then you didn’t use a whole stick?” Dick asked.
“Good land—no! I guess we wouldn’t be here if I had. I took it all out but just a little, and filled the paper up with sand to make it look like a whole stick. I thought probably that just the look of it would crack his nerve, and it did.”
“Well,” said Larry, with a hunch of his broad shoulders, “we know where we’re ‘at’ now, at least. We’ve got to stick and fight it out, after this, whether we want to or not.”
“You bet we’ll stick,” Dick asserted; and then: “The cold nerve of that outfit! Just plain hold-ups, as we’ve been saying they were. Now there’s this about it: we can’t afford to be chicken-hearted with toughs like they are. I more than half believe they’d shoot, and shoot to kill, if they thought that was the only way to get rid of us.”
“All right,” Purdick put in quietly. “We can shoot, too, if we have to. You fellows go in and go on with the ore sorting. I’ll be doorman for a while.”
Since it was now nearly evening, with little daylight in the crevice, Dick lighted a candle and the ore sorting was continued. Purdick sat down with his rifle between his knees and got what satisfaction he could out of a reversed and very beautiful sunset. The sun had gone behind the great range at his back, and the gulch and its tributary ravines were slowly filling with a rising tide of dusky blue that was like a mist, only in the high altitudes it isn’t a mist; it is just pure color. But it was only in the shadow that the colors were subdued. In the upper air the sunlight was still streaming in a gorgeous flood, crimsoning the few high clouds and setting the distant peaks of the eastern Hophras aglow with a pinkish fire.
Full of hardship as his life had been, Purdick had a keen sense of the beautiful in nature, and again and again he had to remind himself that he was doing guard duty, and that the siege of the Golden Spider had now fairly begun. What would be the next move on the part of the three men who were trying to steal the mine? Would they try force again? Or would they——
Purdick grew very thoughtful when the alternative suggested itself. If the would-be robbers had been spying thoroughly enough, they must know that the cave was not provisioned for a long siege; that in a few days at farthest hunger would do what their first attempt at force had failed to do. Then there were the burros. They could live for a little while on the grass that was stored in the cave, and after that they could starve for a few days longer. But the end must come shortly, even for the tough little animals.