“Gee, Larry, but that was a close one!” sighed little Purdick, after the clinking hoofbeats had died away into silence. Then: “I guess I’ll have to have something done to my old heart. It makes altogether too much noise when there’s anything due to happen. Why, if that big thief had been listening half as sharply as he was looking, he could have heard it as plain as a trap-drum! What do we do next?”
Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was still only the middle of the forenoon.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “We’ll have to go back to the pass by the trail, and the middle of the day is going to be the worst time to hit the snow. The wet pack will be as slippery as grease, and we’ll be pretty sure to get snow-blind with the noon glare. Suppose we go back in the woods a piece and bed down and catch up on a little of the sleep that we lost last night. How does that strike you?”
“It strikes me right where I live,” said Purdick, yawning in the mere anticipation of a rest halt. “I suppose there is no danger of those rascals coming back?”
“Not the least in the world. What they’ll do if they really mean business—as I’m much afraid they do—will be to go down to Nophi and outfit the same as we have for a trip over the range. It’s perfectly plain that they believe they have a sure pointer on the whereabouts of the Golden Spider through us, and, as I told Dick, I don’t believe we’ve seen the last of them. But that’s a future. Let’s hunt us a hole and turn in.”
The hole-hunting was a short process. A few hundred yards above their former camping place they found a little dell under the trees where the fallen needles of many seasons lay a foot deep. There is no better wilderness bed when the fir needles are dry, and within a very few minutes after they had stretched out on the fragrant, springy carpet, each with his locked hands under his head for a pillow, they were asleep.
During his year in college, Larry had often said that he had an alarm clock in his head, proving the assertion by his ability to wake up at any given hour in the night merely by fixing that hour in his mind before going to sleep. Upon this day-nap occasion in the Lost Canyon wood he set the alarm for three o’clock, and, true to his boast, it lacked but a few minutes of three when he sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked around sleepily to try to make out where he was and how he came to be there.
It all came back in a moment, and he reached over to shake Purdick, who was still sleeping like a log.
“Wake up, Purdy,” he said. “Time to eat a bite o’ pie.”