“More bad medicine,” said Larry, struggling out of his blankets to liven up the camp-fire. “If that storm moves a little farther south, we’re likely to run square into it as we climb. Hustle us a bite to eat, Purdy, and Dick and I will saddle the jacks. We can’t get too sudden a start.”
The breakfast, what little there was of it, was eaten hurriedly; and with the faint echoes of the distant thunder coming down to them like the almost inaudible beating of a great drum, they made their way out of the camp gulch, setting a course due west by Dick’s pocket compass, and beginning the forced march.
For an hour or so it was not so difficult. Though they had thought that the scattered buttes among which they had been prospecting for the past few days were the foot-hills of the Little Hophras, they soon found that they were not, and the forenoon was half gone before they reached the true foot-hills and began the actual ascent of the range.
During this interval the storm, or a series of storms, had continued to rage among the higher steeps, and they knew, in reason, that much water must be falling on those lofty slopes. Of this they soon began to have dismaying proof in the rapid rising of the streams they had to cross from time to time; and one creek in particular—the one through whose canyon-like gorge they hoped to find a path to the upper heights—was running like a mill-race. At the mouth of the canyon, Larry called a halt.
“I don’t know about tackling this thing with all the water that is coming down through that slit, fellows,” he said doubtfully. “If it rises much higher it’ll fill the canyon from wall to wall.”
“Oh, we can make it, all right,” said Dick, always the venturesome one of the three. “It’ll be a cold day if we can’t find room for our feet and two toy-sized jacks. Heave ahead.”
Now a canyon, as everybody knows, is at first a sheer chasm worn down through the rock by the stream for which it is the outlet. But in most canyons age-long erosion and the action of frost have thrown down more or less detritus from the walls to form a sort of dump or talus on one or both sides of the waterway, so, when the stream is low enough, the canyon becomes navigable, so to speak, for a man afoot or for a sure-footed pack animal.
The small canyon which the three were now entering was no exception to the rule. At the entrance the talus on the right-hand bank of the stream was broad enough to have afforded room for a wagon road, and it so continued as far up the gorge as they could see from the portal. The danger, if there were any, could only come through a tumble into the stream which, though not as yet so very deep, roared and thundered among the boulders in its bed in a muddy torrent that would have made short work of man or beast if either were unlucky enough to fall into its clutches.
For a half-mile or so they stumbled on in single file over the sloping talus, which still stayed on their own side of the torrent, and still afforded a footway, precarious enough, in all conscience, but nevertheless practicable. It was at the third turn in the crooked pathway that Larry, who had been studiously watching the stream as they went along, stuck in another word of caution, shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the flood.
“The water’s rising every minute!” he exclaimed. “It must be raining cats and dogs up there on the higher levels. If a little cloudburst should happen along right now, we’d be trapped like so many gophers in a hole.”