Acting upon this eminently sensible suggestion, they built a fire in another place, gathered enough wood to keep it going through the remainder of the night, and after they had talked a little while, Dick and Larry turned in and Purdick resumed his watch. According to their agreement, Purdick roused Dick at midnight and took his own turn at the blankets, and at three o’clock Dick called Larry.
At daybreak the two who had slept through the last of the night watches turned out to find Larry already cooking breakfast.
“Haven’t been down in the hole to take a bath, have you?” asked Dick, rubbing his eyes open.
“Not yet,” Larry grinned. “Thought I’d let one of you fellows try it first. I lowered the bucket and got the coffee water out of it, though. Help yourselves, if you want to wash up.”
Dick let the bucket down and brought it up brimming. “Pour for me, Purdy, and then I’ll return the compliment,” he said; and as Purdick took the bucket and gave him the first slosh: “Gee-whizzikins-whillikins! Talk about your liquid ice! Whoop-ee! but that’s cold!”
“Sure it’s cold,” said Larry with another grin. “Didn’t expect it to be hot, did you—out of an ice well?”
While they were at breakfast they speculated a good bit on the peculiarity of an ice cavern being there in the bed of the little ravine in the heart of summer, and Dick was all for exploring it. So, after the meal, a boatswain’s chair was rigged at the end of the picket rope, and Larry and Purdick lowered the curious one into the well, taking a turn around a convenient tree for a snubbing hitch. When Dick was hauled out he had a fairy tale to tell.
“It’s the most wonderful thing you ever saw!” he declared. “There’s a cave down there big enough to drive a truck through, and it goes right on down the mountain somewhere. As far as you can see, it’s lined with ice in the most beautiful crystal formations, dazzling, blinding white, just from the little light it gets from up here. We ought to take a day or so off and explore it.”
Larry shook his head.
“It’s a side-issue,” he said firmly, “and we mustn’t forget that we are under pay. There are those two tungsten prospects and the vanadium claim, on all of which we’ve got to do the discovery work required by law before we can record and hold them. After we’ve done that we can come back here, if you want to, and take a look at your ice cave. But business comes first.”