Mrs. Pottle's declaration had on Bob the effect of a tonic. He smiled as he saw the lady grasp her unfailing stand-by—her umbrella.
"I don't think it would have been so easy," he said. "I hope you will give me another chance. We have got on up to the present better than I dared to hope; we need not talk of surrender just yet."
"Besides, auntie," said Ethel, "you wouldn't go when Mr. Fawcett gave you the choice, and it isn't fair now that—"
"There now, that'll do. I am outvoted. I will stay as long as there is any tea, but when all the tea is gone I shall take that as a warning from Providence, and then, Mr. Fawcett, I shall give myself up, and plead with the Russians for your life."
With Ah-Sam's assistance Bob collected the loose rocks within the cleft and made a rough barrier across the narrowest part of the cavern. Then he returned to his post and slept, leaving the Chinaman on guard.
After a distasteful breakfast of mule's flesh and tea, Bob again made his way through the cavern. Counting his paces, he found that it was about one hundred and fifty yards in length. Just before the farther opening it narrowed considerably, so that there was little more than room for two men to pass through abreast. At the mouth it emerged on the side of a sheer hill-face nearly two hundred feet above the ground. Standing just within the cleft, Bob was to a large extent sheltered from view from the open by a jagged spur jutting out from the cliff, a piece of rock that had apparently offered greater resistance to denudation than the surrounding surface. He approached the edge of the precipice, and throwing himself on his face, peered over.
The first object that caught his eye, wedged in between two rocks near the foot of the precipice, was the body of a large brown bear. It was almost with a gasp of relief that Bob realized that the object of his chase was not a human being. In a flash he remembered the bear which he had seen squatting at the side of the gully when he passed the entrance a few days before.
"What an ass I was not to remember it!" he thought.
Then he blamed himself for allowing the ladies to take up their quarters in the cleft; before he had thoroughly explored it. The bear had evidently used it for his winter's sleeping-place, and had been alarmed at the disturbance of his domain. He now lay stone dead, having fallen sheer for about sixty feet and then rebounded from a slope on to the rocks beneath.
Looking up, Bob saw that the weather-carved cliff stretched for at least three hundred feet above him. On his left he observed that the hill-face bent round; beyond its outline he saw an extent of undulating country bounded by snow-capped hills. He wondered what was round the corner; the mouth of the gully must of course be in that direction, and not far away. He remembered that the general trend of the cavern had been towards the left; it must form one side of an irregular triangle, of which the gully and the hill-face were the other sides.