It was after nightfall when they finally topped the range, and they could see nothing of what lay before them for the next day. But as to that they were too tired to care. Purdick made coffee over an alcohol candle, and they opened two of the four cans of peaches, agreeing to save the potato chips and the corned beef for a greater emergency. Eating in silence because they were too weary and exhausted to talk, they nearly fell asleep over the meagre meal; and as soon as it was swallowed, they rolled themselves in their blankets under the lee of the only big rock they could find on the bleak mountain top, and were asleep in much less time than it takes to tell it.
It was perhaps just as well for their peace of mind that all three of them were much too tired to dream dreams or see visions. Or to travel in their astral bodies, as the old necromancers used to say a dreamer did. Because, in that case, they might have seen, at no great distance to the north of where they had made their hazardous and heart-breaking ascent of the mountain, a perfectly good trail leading up and over and down to the railroad town of Natrolia on the other side.
Also, they might have seen, camping in an outpost grove of the timber beside this good trail, and only a little way from the summit of the pass over which it led, three men, one of whom was poking up the coals of the camp-fire with the end of a crutch, to the better cooking of a panful of bacon slices, saying, as he poked: “It’s all right, I tell yuh! They’ll make f’r the Shotgun camp after more grub, and we can stock up at Natrolia and beat ’em back to the Buttes by two good days, at least. Yuh can’t lose me in this neck o’ woods, Tom Dowling. If yuh wasn’t solid bone from the neck up, yuh’d have found that out long ago. Artill’ry? Nix, they won’t load up with no more shootin’-irons at Shotgun. ’At’s one thing old man Shanklin at the Shotgun Mine don’t let nobody sell on his reservation.”
CHAPTER VII
TOMATOES AND PEACHES
Pretty stiff from their forced march and the chill of the night spent on the cold mountain top without fire, the three castaways—for so they were now calling themselves—were up with the dawn. Now that they had daylight to show them their surroundings, they saw that by going a little farther along the mountain to the left they might have camped in timber and had wood for a fire.
“More spilt milk,” Dick lamented when he saw how they had missed what little comfort they might have had. “I guess we are more or less tenderfoots yet.” And then he went over to the clump of dwarfed trees and gathered some wood for the coffee fire, coffee being the only thing they had to cook.
Inasmuch as they were by this time pretty well starved out on a diet of tomatoes and peaches, they agreed to call this breakfast on the mountain top the emergency they had been economizing for; so Purdick opened the can of corned beef and served it with potato chips. Fortified by a breakfast which was at least stimulating in quality, even if it did lack something in quantity, they prepared for the descent of the western slope.
From the western brow of the mountain they had a magnificent view of the world at large, as Dick phrased it: mountains and plains, and then more mountains and plains, stretching away almost to infinity and backgrounded in the dim distance by the serrated range of the San Miguels. But it was the immediate foreground that interested them most. At the foot of the peak upon which they were standing there was a range of hogback hills, looking, from their height, no larger than a plow-turned furrow in the landscape; and just beyond the hogback, on the edge of a bare plain that was exactly the color of well-tanned buckskin, lay the little cattle-shipping station of Natrolia, a collection of odd-shaped dots, with one round dot larger than the rest which they took to be the railroad water tank.
“There she is,” said Dick. “If we only had an aeroplane, or even a bunch of gliders, it wouldn’t take us very long to coast down there. It looks as if a good gun ought to be able to drop a bullet on that water tank from here.”