“I was just going to say that if you two want to hike out and bring help, I’ll stay and do my best to hold on until you can get back.”
“That settles it,” said Larry briefly. “We all stay. Now you two turn in and grab off your forty winks. I’m batter up for the first watch.”
Like the night before, this one passed quietly. During Larry’s watch the heavens were clear almost up to midnight, but when he called Purdick the stars were beginning to disappear and there was a muttering of thunder in the air. The rain came later and continued in gusty showers until well on toward morning; and at an early hour, when Purdick came back from watering the burros in the inner recesses of the cave, he brought news.
“The creek is away high,” he reported; “twice the quantity of water coming down that there was yesterday. You can hear it fighting its way through those underground channels ever so far back.”
“It’s the run-off from the rain,” Larry offered, and letting it go at that, he asked Dick if anything had shown up during his watch.
“Little something,” said Dick. “They have moved off somewhere—the hold-ups. A few minutes after dawn I saw something stirring down by their camp and I got the field-glass. Two of them were crossing the gulch to climb the mountain. They were leading a burro, but there didn’t seem to be anything on the pack saddle but a couple of picks and shovels.”
“Umph! I wonder what that means?” Larry grunted. But as there was no answer that any of them could think of, this incident, like that of the rising water in the cave torrent, had to be left unexplained.
This day, as they all agreed after it was over and they were eating supper at the cave’s mouth, was one that deserved to be marked with a red letter. There had been no interruptions whatever: not the least sign of their late harriers. Hour after hour the watch had been scrupulously maintained at the cave entrance, but for anything that could be seen or heard, they might have supposed themselves to be the only human beings in all the upheaved world of mountains and valleys.
Then, too, the work had gone splendidly in the tunnel. They had fired two rounds of blasts, carrying the heading in several feet farther, and the vein still showed no signs of “pinching out.” And the ore continued to look as good as it had at first.