The suspicious quiet held out until late in the evening, up to the moment when Dick and Purdick were preparing fresh sand beds on the floor of the cave mouth, while Larry sat with his gun between his knees at the edge of the newly made avalanche gash. Then, out of the darkness either to the right or left, Larry could not tell which, came a harsh voice saying: “Hey! Youse fellies in th’ hole!”
“All right,” Larry called out, bringing his gun up to the “ready.” “Spit it out. What have you got to say?”
“Just what my pardner said last night!” rasped the voice. “Ye’re to take yer traps and clear out o’ that mine!”
Purdick and Dick were listening with Larry, and Purdick whispered: “It’s the cripple—‘Twisty,’ they called him—that’s talking. I’d know his voice anywhere.”
“Why should we clear out?” Larry asked. “It’s our discovery. You didn’t know anything about this place until you heard us at work in here.”
“That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. We’re old Jim Brock’s pardners, and the mine belongs to us!”
“You needn’t take the trouble to hand out that line of talk,” Larry flung back. “One of your partners gave us that fairy tale last night. We know all about you fellows. You’ve been following us around all summer because you didn’t know where James Brock’s abandoned mine was, and you thought we did know. We didn’t know, any more than you did; but now that we’ve found it, we’re going to keep it.”
There was a short silence to follow this, and Purdick whispered again: “Whereabouts is he?”
Larry whispered back: “I don’t know, but I think he’s around to the left where we climbed up and down yesterday morning.”
“Keep back a little,” Purdick warned. “If he gets you in range, he’ll shoot, just as like as not.”