“Don’t you see we’re standing on granite? You could hardly break it with dynamite—and we haven’t even a wooden crowbar, to say nothing of a pick. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’ll starve to death. I guess the only thing we can do is to sit down an’ wait till morning,” announced Hal gloomily as he finished his inspection. “I wonder what time it is.”
Byron looked at his watch and announced that it was nearly midnight. Then Hal continued:
“I don’t see that we can do anything before daylight. Let’s all huddle up close together and go to sleep.”
This seemed to be the most sensible thing to do. The summer nights in Colorado are cool, and the boys found it necessary to huddle together in order to keep warm. Of course, they did not go to sleep at once. There were several reasons why it was difficult for them to drift off into slumber. First, they were in trouble, serious trouble; second, their bed was very hard; third, the place was wild, and the noises were strange. Then the moon arose, giving the scene a most lonesome appearance.
But at last all consciousness left the strange camp, and the next thing the boys knew it was morning.
Hal awoke first. He suddenly found himself wondering at the hardness of his bed; then, like a flash, the truth came back to him. Quietly he arose, gazed a moment at his sleeping companions and then turned toward the blocked exit. Another examination of the roof-opening of the cave proved that he had judged rightly. Certainly there was no possibility of their escaping this way without a pick or other steel tool.
Next he turned his attention toward the passage from which the heavy bowlder had been rolled. It seemed almost as if this way must have been cut by the hand of man. It ran with considerable upward incline between the bulk of the mountain and a huge rocky bluff.
Leaving his companions still asleep, Hal started up this pass, which ran a hundred feet through almost solid rock. Underfoot it was rough, with rocky projections and bowlders, but the boy passed over it rapidly until he reached the end. Here he found himself at the foot of a wooded slope, not so very steep, that ran upward for several hundred feet.
“Why, I believe we could climb the mountain from this point,” he exclaimed half-aloud.
“There’s a ledge up there that runs right over the Mummy, and there’s another slope over that and then some rocks. It doesn’t look nearly so steep up here. I’m going back and wake the fellows.”