For when they came to look, they found that many things were missing. The entire stock of bacon was gone, the flour and meal sacks had been torn open and their holdings spilled and trampled into the ground, the few boxes of hard biscuits they had been saving against a bread emergency had been broken open and rifled, the salt lay in the ashes of the camp-fire, the sugar was gone, and the cotton sack in which it had been carried looked as if it had been ground through a sausage mill; in short, all the food supplies they had, excepting only those that were in tight tin cans, had been either stolen or destroyed.
“Well!—of all the blithering earthquakes!” Dick gasped. “Who or what under the sun would do a thing like this to us?”
Larry did not speak. His eyes were blazing, and he seemed to be holding his breath. Deep down inside of him the Donovan temper, a wild, Berserk rage that had given him no end of trouble in his boyhood, was struggling to get the upper hand. But little Purdick was still able to talk.
“And even this isn’t the worst of it!” he said. “The burros are gone!”
CHAPTER VI
SHORT RATIONS
After the first burst of wrathful astoundment at finding their camp wrecked and looted, the three victims of whatever fury it was that had visited the gorge in their absence began to count up their losses.
It was the food losses, of course, that were the most serious. Purdick, in his capacity of camp cook, knelt to gather up what he could of the scattered flour and corn meal, but there wasn’t very much of either that could be salvaged. While Purdick was trying to save some of the eatables, Larry and Dick reassembled the scattered dunnage and camp equipment, endeavoring to make some estimate of the length and breadth of the disaster.
“Just see here!” said Dick, picking up the mineralogy book which was lying open and face down at some distance from the general wreck, with a lot of the leaves partly torn out. “What would anybody but a maniac want to treat a book like that for?”
Larry was overhauling the blankets and pack wrappings.