Alone in the little room, the boy trimmed the fire, put on more coal, removed a scorched pan of cakes from the electric stove, and then sat down to listen and wait. He was by far too anxious and excited to partake of the feast he had prepared for all three.
The wind lifted directly and howled more dismally around the boat, tearing at the window sash and rattling the door as if with human hands. Then Case turned off the electric light, switched out the cooking fire, drew a chair covered with a coat in front of the coal stove, so that the live coals and the flames might not show through the crevices about the openings, and sat silent and, if the exact truth must be told, not a little afraid.
The boy would have bravely faced almost any peril that came to him openly and in the light of day, but this sitting alone, in the darkness, with the wind storming like mad through the pass, more than five thousand feet above tidewater, was a little too much. He wanted action. He found himself unable to sit there alone and wait. Clay and Alex seemed to be away a long time.
Finally he armed himself again and went out, softly closing the door behind him in order that any lurking person might not know that he was abroad. He shivered a moment in the cold wind and then crouched down under one of the windows.
Once he thought he heard a call from the east, but the wind hissed in his ears so insistently that he could not be sure that it was a human voice he heard. He strained his eyes down the pass in the hope of seeing Clay’s electric torch, but the darkness was not broken.
“They might at least give me a signal!” he mused.
But no signal came, and the lonely boy huddled closer to the side of the motor boat and waited and listened. According to the schedule made out in Chicago, he should now be on the deck of a floating boat, instead of on the deck of a craft stuck up like a house on wheels on the planks of a platform car.
Instead of sitting there in the wind at the very summit of the Rocky mountains, he should have been viewing the never-failing panorama of the Columbia river, somewhere below Donald, fifty or more miles to the west. Besides being lonely, there was in the heart of the boy a feeling of apprehension which he could not shake off.
There surely must be something wrong down the pass, he believed. Captain Joe would follow the tracks left by Alex and Clay would follow the dog. This should have brought the searcher to some disclosure long before. He had decided to leave the boat and follow on down the trail when a sound at the side of the car attracted his attention.
It seemed to the listener that some one was climbing up on the platform, moving stealthily, still clumsily enough to be heard above the rush of the wind. The boy sat perfectly still, ready with his electric flashlight and his automatic revolver.