Thinking it over afterward, Purdick could never tell why he didn’t immediately raise an alarm. A yell would have awakened his sleeping camp-mates, and would probably have sent the intruder flying. But instead of flinging off his blanket and shouting to Larry and Dick, little Purdick merely tried to give a better imitation of a sleeping sentinel and let the crippled man come on.
What happened after that was wholly unexplainable to the watcher under the fir-tree. Creeping silently into the diminished circle of firelight, the cripple possessed himself first of Larry’s pack and then of Dick’s, going through them rapidly but painstakingly, as if in search of something. Next, Purdick saw his own pack going through the same process. Like a suddenly illuminating flash of lightning, the explanation blazed into Purdick’s brain. The cripple was the man who had come into Mr. Starbuck’s office just as they were about to leave. He had overheard the talk of the Golden Spider, the lost gold mine, and he was searching for old Jimmie Brock’s map!
CHAPTER II
THE FROZEN TRAIL
When Purdick realized that the rummaging cripple was not only a camp thief, but most probably a desperado of sorts, he saw where he had made a capital mistake in not arousing his two companions while it could have been done with safety. It was too late now. The man was within arm’s reach of the two sleeping figures, and he was armed; at least, he was using a vicious-looking hunting-knife to cut the pack lashings.
Purdick held his breath. The little pencil sketch made by the old prospector had been put into the envelope containing the Survey maps; and the envelope, as Purdick knew, had been placed between the leaves of the mineralogy book for safe-keeping and carriage. The book was lying beside him, just where it had slipped out of his hands when he had fallen asleep. Would the thief see the book and look in it?
It seemed useless to hope that he wouldn’t. With the curious perversity with which inanimate things appear to be endowed at times, the camp-fire blazed up and a resiny twig made a candle of itself, illuminating the camp area like a small searchlight. Purdick made sure that the crippled scoundrel couldn’t miss seeing the book lying in plain sight; the book and the end of the map-holding envelope sticking out of it; and again he held his breath.
That, in itself, was unnerving enough, but the sight he got of the cripple’s face was even more so. He hadn’t noticed the man’s face particularly when the cripple had hobbled into and out of Mr. Starbuck’s office in Brewster, but now he saw that it was a perfect mask of sly and ferocious villainy, and he had a swift and terrifying conviction that the thief would use his knife murderously if any of his victims showed signs of awakening.
With that conviction half paralyzing him, Purdick’s heart fairly stopped beating when he saw Dick Maxwell stretch his arms over his head and yawn as if he were about to wake up. Instantly the man quit rummaging and caught up his knife. Little Purdick had never felt so helpless in all his life. In propping himself against the tree he had wrapped his blankets around him so tightly that he couldn’t get out of them without a struggle. None the less, he was drawing his feet up to be ready for the struggle when Dick rolled over on his side, gave a snort, and was apparently fast asleep again. The peril was over, for the moment, at least, and Purdick’s stopped heart began to thump furiously, hammering so hard that he wondered why the thief didn’t hear it and spring at him.