While the cripple was poking around with his crutch his two accomplices came up. One of them—not the black-whiskered one who had been scared off by Purdick’s dynamite bomb, but the other—walked over to where the disabled burro was lying, and, after a momentary inspection of the poor beast, drew his pistol and shot it. Then he walked out to where the other one was grazing, picked up the trailing halter, and led the little animal back into the woods.
Shortly afterward, this third man joined the other two who were searching the flood wreck. Dick, watching them through the field-glass, saw them turn up a pair of blankets, a saucepan, the aluminum camp kettle, and one of the lost rifles.
Purdick fingered the lock of his gun. “I hope they won’t keep us waiting too long,” he said softly.
“They won’t,” Dick returned, keeping the three in the field of the glass. “The big one has quit digging and he’s looking up here. Now he’s getting his gun....” Then, suddenly: “Duck—both of you!”
The warning didn’t come an instant too soon. On the heels of it a rifle barked in the gulch, and a bullet sang through the crevice opening to spatter itself on the roof over their heads.
“That’s a try-out,” said Larry. “They’re puzzled because they can’t find our bodies, and they think maybe a shot or two will make us show up if we’re still here. Don’t shoot, Purdy”—to the small one who was flat on his face and was trying to get a rest over the cliff lip. “Let’s wait until we have to.”
The waiting proved to be a weary business for three fellows who were both wet and hungry, and had little prospect of relieving either discomfort short of defeating the three depredators and possibly forcing them to replace, out of their own stores, what they had destroyed; a result to which not even Dick, the most imaginative of the three, could look forward with any hope of its accomplishment. At the best, they could only hope to keep the spoilers at bay for a time; and they all knew that the time wouldn’t be very long if they had to go without food.
After the trial shot which brought no reply from the high-lying crevice, two of the men in the gulch resumed their search in the flood wreckage, while the third, the black-bearded one, went off down stream. It was a full hour after sunrise—and the sun, shining fairly into the eastward-facing crevice, was doing something to relieve the chill of the three sodden watchers—when Blackbeard reappeared, leading the burro laden with tools and camp dunnage.
“Now we get it,” said Dick. “They’re coming up to take possession. I wonder how they’ll work it. They can’t make that burro climb up here. It’s too steep.”
But the three men seemed to know what they were about. First they drove the laden pack animal as far up the avalanche path as it could go, flogging it upward until the poor beast was slipping and falling at every other step. This brought them within easy range, and in a hasty consultation carried on in whispers, the three defenders of the Golden Spider decided that they dare not wait any longer. As matters stood, Purdick might have marked them down and either killed or crippled all three before they could reach cover, but they wouldn’t take that much of an advantage even of men who were no better than midnight assassins.