“More of the same,” gritted Larry the stubborn. “We’re not dead yet. Get back on the sentry job, Dick, and Purdy and I will shovel this stuff out of the way and get ready for another go at the drilling. We won’t stop to do any more sorting just now.”
Carrying out this programme, it was only a short time until the cheerful ping-ping of the hammer upon steel began to sound again in the vein tunnel, and, as before, the work noises stopped the firing from below. Dick was chuckling triumphantly when, at the end of his half-hour, he went up into the tunnel to swap jobs with Purdick.
“You’ve got the combination on ’em, Larry,” he remarked. “Letting them know that they’re not stopping us, I mean. They’ll have to think up something different, now.”
If they were thinking, the determined mine “jumpers” seemed to be taking it leisurely. The afternoon passed without any more warlike demonstrations, and by the time the growing dusk was beginning to thicken in the gulch the drillers had another round of blasts ready to be fired the first thing the next morning.
“Have they given it up and gone away, do you suppose?” Purdick asked, after the supper had been dished up and they were eating with appetites untouched by the exciting happenings of the day.
“Nothing like that,” Larry asserted. “They’ll hit us again—don’t make any mistake about that.”
“What will they try next?” Dick wanted to know.
“Huh!” said Larry. “If I knew I’d be hustling around to get ready for it.”
“Seems to me it’s leaning our way yet,” Dick offered. “They’ve found they can’t scare us out, or shoot us out, or avalanche us out, and, as I said this morning, they can’t rush us when there are only three of them, and one of the three a cripple. For that matter, they’ve made the rushing business harder now than it was before. With our door-yard gone, the only way for them to charge would be right up the smashed-out slope, and it would take a lot of nerve to do that when they know that there are three rifles here at the top.”
“There is one way, if they only think of it,” Purdick offered. “They can starve us out in a few days. Maybe that is what they’ve made up their minds to do now. They don’t seem to be doing anything else.”