XXV
HOW UNCANOOLA TRAPPED THE GREAT BEAR
'Twas Richard Jennifer who first broke the noontide silence of the mountain top, voicing the query which was thrusting sharp at all of us.
"Now how in the name of all the fiends did they make shift to burrow from yonder bag-bottom into this?" he would say.
"Ez I allow, that's jest what the good Lord fotched us here for—to find out," was Yeates's rejoinder. "Do you and the chief, Cap'n John, circumambylate this here pitfall yon way, whilst Cap'n Dick and I go t'other way 'round. By time we've made the circuit and j'ined company again, I reckon we'll know for sartain whether 'r no they climm' the mounting to get in."
So when we had breathed us a little the circuiting was begun, Ephraim Yeates and Jennifer going toward the lower end of the sink, and the Catawba and I in the opposite direction.
Since we must examine closely every rift and crevice in the boundary cliff, it was a most tedious undertaking; and I do remember how my great trooper boots, sun-drying on my feet, made every step a wincing agony. They say an army goes upon its belly, but an old campaigner will tell you that you can march a soldier till he be too thin to cast a shadow if only he hath ease of his footgear.
Taking it all in all, it proved a slow business, this looping of the sunken valley; and when we had worked around to the eastern cliff and to a meeting point with the old hunter and Richard Jennifer, the sun was level in our faces and the day was waning.
Coming together again, we made haste to compare notes. There was little enough to add to the common fund of information, and the mystery of the lost trail remained a mystery. True, we, the Indian and I, had found a ravine at the extreme upper end of the valley through which, we thought, a sure-footed horse might be led at a pinch, up or down; but this ravine had not been used by the powder train, and apart from it there was no practicable horse path leading down from the plateau.
As for the hunter and Richard, they had made a discovery which might stand for what it was worth. At its lower extremity the sunken valley was separated from the great gorge without only by a ridge which was no more than a huge dam; and this diking ridge was evidently tunneled by the stream, since the latter had no visible outlet.
Inasmuch as the most favorable point of espial upon the camp below was the cliff whence we had first looked down into the sink, we harked back thither, passing around the lower end of the valley and along the barrier ridge. Plan we had none as yet, for the preliminary to any attempt at a rescue must be some better knowledge of the way into and out of Falconnet's cunningly chosen stronghold. True, we might win in and out again by the ravine which the chief and I had explored at the upper end, and Dick was for trying this when the night should give us the curtain of darkness for a shield. But the old hunter would hold this forlorn hope in reserve as a last resort.