Deveril was twitching at Lynette's sleeve. He began edging away. When she came up with him he was standing; she rose and, together they hurried across the clearing, and in a few moments were in the deep dark of the embracing forest land.
"I know that country like a map!" he told her excitedly. "We were already headed that way, and on we go! Why, it was right up by Big Bear Creek that I spent a night with Bruce Standing six years ago and he robbed me of my roll!... They start in the morning; we start to-night! We'll be there when they come; there are ten thousand places to hide out; we'll have a place on a ridge where we can watch them. And they'll never have the vaguest idea that any one, you and I least of all, is ahead of them. Somehow, Lynette Brooke, our luck is with us and this whole game is going to play into our hands."
"If a little food would only play into them!... The smell of that coffee ... the meat cooking...."
"Wait! Right here, by this tree. Don't move a step, no matter what happens. I'll be back with you in two shakes."
She was almost too tired and faint from hunger to wonder at him. She saw him go, and then she sank down, her back to the big yellow pine. He went as straight as a string toward the spring; she saw him walking swiftly, though with footfalls so guarded that she could not hear him when he had gone ten steps. She knew that he was recklessly counting upon a deal of quick chatter in the dugout, secure in his own bravado that no man of the four there would at this electrically charged moment have thought of anything but gold. He disappeared in the dark; he was gone so long that she jumped up and stood staring in all directions; but at last he was back at her side, chuckling, and then she knew he had not been away ten minutes.
"I struck it with my elbow, while we were hiding down there," he told her triumphantly. "Mexicali Joe's real cache!"
He had a square tin biscuit-box in his hands. She put her hand in quickly. The box, which had been half buried in the cool earth by the spring, was half full of tins and small packages.
Fatigue fled out of them. Hurriedly they went up over the ridge, deeper and deeper into the forest land. And when, in half an hour, they came down into the dark, tree-walled bed of another ravine, they made them their small fire and tumbled out into its light their newly acquired treasure-trove—sardines, beans, tinned milk ... yes, coffee!