“I’ve been back in the cave. I noticed that the warm wind we felt sucking through the first morning when we came in was blowing again. You don’t feel it much here at the entrance, but farther down it draws like a chimney. While I was about it, I thought I would keep on and see if we really had a back door open again, as the wind seemed to show. We haven’t. Those fellows must have dragged in a whole forest when they built that flooding dam yesterday. Most of the tree wreckage was pushed on down with the flood to one of the big chambers, and that is so chock full of it that a fice-dog couldn’t crawl through, much less a man.”
“But you say the wind blows through,” Purdick put in.
“Oh, yes; it’s open enough for that. But even if we had the axe we couldn’t hack our way through in less than half a day.”
“All right,” said Larry, setting his jaw grimly. “That means fight or die. I guess we’re.... What’s that noise?”
They all held their breath and listened. There was no mistaking the sounds that came floating to them on the indrawing draft of air. They were the measured blows of an axe and they seemed to come from somewhere up above the crevice entrance.
“They’re up over us somewhere,” Purdick said. “It sounds as if they’re cutting a tree down.”
Momentarily expecting another attack, they gathered at the cave mouth and waited, little Purdick with his rifle at the “ready.” What shape the attack would take they couldn’t remotely guess. The step-like cliff into the face of which the crevice burrowed was not very high, and on the next step above it there were trees growing; so much they had noted on the first morning of their occupancy when they had gone into the gulch for the forage and the wood. But there was every reason to believe that these trees had all been smashed and carried down into the gulch by the dynamited avalanche, as Dick pointed out.
“Not all of them,” Purdick objected. “That chopping is right above us, and it can’t be farther away than that upper ledge.”
In a very few minutes all further argument on that score had its answer in the crackling sounds made by a tree in its fall. A dark shadow swept down diagonally from above, and the next moment the cave’s mouth was blocked by a great fir standing top downward and apparently suspended upside down from the ledge above by the still unsevered remains of the chopped trunk.
“Huh!” said Larry. “Now what does that mean? They can’t use that tree for a ladder.”