“I told you we’d have to come back to that ice cave,” said Dick, in the after-supper talk around the camp-fire. “I move you that we go up to-morrow and explore it. Do I hear a second to that motion?”
“Oh, if you can’t be happy until you do—of course,” said Larry. “You’re just about as likely to find the Golden Spider there as anywhere else. You’re crazy on this golden insect proposition, Dick.”
“The world owes lots of its progress to crazy people, you old stick-in-the-mud—or to people that other folks called crazy. Don’t you know that?” Dick retorted. “Besides, a spider isn’t an insect. It’s an arthropod, and has eight legs, while the insects have only six. I’m astonished that you know so little.”
“I’ll bet you ninety-nine people out of a hundred call ’em insects, anyway,” Larry maintained.
“I’m the hundredth man,” Dick boasted. “I believe in spiders, golden or otherwise. What are we going to do with our bonanza, when we find it? Have you fellows decided upon that yet?”
“When we find it!” Larry snorted. “Better say ‘if,’ and say it in capital letters, at that.”
“It wouldn’t be ours, if we should find it,” Purdick objected.
“Of course it would,” Dick asserted. “Didn’t you hear what Uncle Billy said? James Brock gave it to him, and he gave it to us. But, as far as that goes, it isn’t anybody’s mine, the way it stands now. Or rather, it belongs to anybody who may come along and relocate it. The law says that a certain amount of work must be done every year to hold a claim, and it is three years since poor old Jimmie Brock died.”
“Then those three hold-ups would have as good a legal right to it as anybody, if they should find it?” Purdick asked.
“Sure they would, if they happen to beat us to it; or if they could jump it and take it away from us before we could get it recorded in our names. That’s probably what they meant to do: run us off, and two of them hold it while the other could light out for the nearest land office and get it recorded.”