In the reaction which was bound to follow a shock like that, Purdick closed his eyes, and tried vainly for a few moments to fight down the sickening dizziness that was threatening to blot him out. When he looked again, the man had seemingly given up the search for the map. Cautiously, with his knife between his teeth, and one arm thrust through his crutch to drag it along, he was gathering up the three rifles and making off with them.
Once more little Purdick fought down a frantic impulse to yell out to the two sleepers. Without the guns they would be helpless. But he knew that the cripple wasn’t alone in the canyon; that somewhere, and probably near at hand, were the two men who had ridden out of Nophi with him. It was only the thought that the other two might be near enough to hear his yell and open fire on the camp that enabled Purdick to keep still at this crisis. But he had to bite his tongue to do it.
While the crippled marauder was crawling away, dragging the three guns and his crutch, and making hard work of it, Purdick’s resolve was swiftly taken. Noiselessly he disentangled himself from the impeding blankets, never losing sight for an instant of the crawling figure working its way toward the lower narrowing of the park-like opening. Never had the little fellow so bitterly resented the fate that had made him undersized and, in a certain sense, a physical weakling. With Larry’s strength, or even Dick’s, he could have landed upon the back of the creeping thief and made him drop the rifles.
He had just about made up his mind to try it, anyhow, when a diversion came. Seen dimly by the flickering light of the blazing twig, the cripple was stopping beside a great boulder which had some time fallen from the cliffs on the opposite side of the little river and rolled across to the intervale level. Little Purdick prayed for a better light, and got it—just for an illuminating instant; just long enough to let him see that the man was poking the three guns under an overhanging lip of the great rock to hide them.
This was better; much better; and as the departing thief lifted himself upon his one serviceable foot and his crutch to continue on his way down the canyon, Purdick darted quickly into the shadow of the firs and prepared to follow.
The pursuit did not take him very far. Less than a quarter of a mile below the camp site there was another opening in the canyon, with a little side gulch leading off to the left. In the mouth of this gulch Purdick saw the glow of a camp-fire, and he could dimly make out the figures of two men sitting beside it. While he looked, the cripple hobbled down the trail ahead of him and joined the two at the fire. Here, so Purdick determined, was his chance to find out what the desperadoes purposed doing, so he called up all the Indian-stalking stories he had ever read and crept down upon the camp in the gulch.
Luckily, he didn’t have to be Indian-silent in making his approach. Woodcraft was only a dictionary word to him, as yet, and twigs would snap and stones roll under his feet, in spite of all he could do. But the brawling stream, along the edge of which he was making his way, swallowed up all the clumsy noises, and in a few minutes he had climbed to a little thicket of low-growing fir saplings on the gulch side, from the shelter of which he could both see and hear, and could look down at a sharp angle into the very heart of the small camp-fire and upon the men surrounding it.
As he came within listening range, the crippled spy was just finishing his report.
“No, I didn’t find th’ map; I just took a chance at that,” he was saying. “One o’ them’s likely got it in his pocket. What I wanted was the guns, an’ I got ’em. Not that a bunch o’ boys like them would put up a fight; but without th’ artillery, they can’t, d’ye see?”