On this particular night it was Dick’s turn to take the first watch up to midnight, and after Larry and Purdick were asleep he put some pitchwood on the fire and got out the mineralogy book, meaning to kill some of the waking time by reading. Most naturally, after the test they had just made, he turned to the various sections on gold and gold testing, and was soon so deeply interested as to forget what he was sitting up for, to become completely oblivious to his surroundings.
It was perhaps for this cause that he failed to hear a slight rustling in a clump of young spruces on the opposite side of the fire; failed, also, to see a shadowy figure hopping away into the night—the figure of a man walking with the aid of a crutch. If he had heard and seen, and had known that the vanishing spy had been a listening witness to all that had been said and done at the camp-fire, it is safe to say that nothing less than manacles and a gag would have kept him from leaping up and giving the alarm.
CHAPTER IX
THE SPIDER’S WEB
On the morning following the test made upon the bit of gold quartz that Purdick had picked up, Larry, who had the watch from three o’clock to daybreak, found himself getting so sleepy in the final hour of his watch that he had to get up and stir around to keep awake.
Renewing the camp-fire so that there might be a good bed of coals for the breakfast cooking, he contrived to kill time until it was light enough to enable him to see the surrounding objects. Then, as Dick and little Purdick were still sleeping soundly, he picked up the hammer they used for breaking samples and started out for an early-morning walk, meaning to have a look at a curious rock and earth deposit he had come upon the evening before, after it was too near dark to examine it closely.
Turning to the left along the bench or ledge over which they had climbed to reach the camping place, he pushed on around the mountain until he came to the rock and earth slide that he wanted to investigate. Finding it nothing more than an interesting example of one of the prehistoric upheavals that have folded the earth’s crust into so many singular and apparently impossible combinations in the western mountain ranges, he was about to turn back when he saw, just at his feet, a curious round hole in the clay of the slide.
Now there is one good thing that prospecting for minerals does for anybody who goes at it seriously: it develops a habit of scrutinizing the whys and wherefores of things—any little thing; the habit of prying observation which is usually credited, in stories, to the detective, but which really belongs to every thoughtful student in any field. Larry stooped to examine the hole in the clay. It was a little over an inch in diameter and about two inches deep, circular at the bottom and elliptical at the top.
Squatting beside it, Larry stared at it reflectively. His first assumption was that it had been made by a bug or insect of some sort, but that conclusion was set aside when he remembered that no burrowing bug that he had ever heard of made a hole just like this. After a little, he took the tape measure from his pocket and with it described a circle three feet in diameter with the curious hole for its center. Then he got down on his hands and knees and crawled around the circle with his eyes on the ground, making two complete circuits before he was satisfied.
“Nothing doing,” he muttered, as he got upon his feet again; and then, with a slow grin: “Muttonhead!—of course there wouldn’t be, at three feet!”