After the warm drink had been served out, and the jacks picketed for the night, there was nothing more to do, and they all turned in to let a long night’s sleep do what it would toward relieving the hunger ache and fitting them for another surge on the morrow.
It was maybe a couple of hours later that Purdick, always a light sleeper, and now particularly so when even the slightest doze-off made him dream of banquets, found himself sitting bolt upright and listening to a noise that was not unlike the never-to-be-forgotten earth-shaking thunder of the cloud-burst in the canyon. While he was trying in a bewildered half daze to determine what it was, a bright glare of light flashed among the trees, the noise deepened to a crashing clamor that brought the two others out of their blankets with a bound, and all three of them saw, at a distance of not over two hundred yards at the farthest, a long passenger-train shooting past the mouth of the little ravine in which they were camped.
“E-e-yow!” Dick yawned, as the noise scuttled away in the western distance. “Wouldn’t that pinch your ear good and hard? Here we stopped two short steps and a jig dance from the railroad track and never knew it! Listen!”
What they heard this time was the mellow shout of a locomotive whistle blown in a station signal.
“Natrolia,” said Larry. “And it can’t be more than a couple of miles away, at that! What time is it, Dick?”
Dick, being nearest the firelight, looked at his wrist watch.
“Five minutes of nine,” he announced.
Larry shook himself out of his blankets and stood up.
“I’m the biggest of the bunch—and the toughest, I guess. You two fellows lie down and take another cat-nap while I saunter into town and buy a few morsels of grub. If our whistle guess is right, I ought to be back inside of an hour.”
Of course, there was a generous protest to this, urged immediately by both of the others, but Larry argued them down. There was no need of all going when one could easily bring out provisions for a single meal, and if they should all go, they’d have to take the jacks, making the tired beasts stumble along for whatever distance it might be over the ties and ballast of a railroad track in the dark. So Larry had his way and went alone, taking the haversack.