Politics made strange bedfellows, Seymour had heard. Well, he stood ready to testify that police duty in the Argonaut Valley brought one to strange beds, too. His first night in a jail bunk; his second in a Siwash mausoleum! And on both occasions, nothing softer than his hat for a pillow!
But the murmur of the rushing creek and the soughing of the firs invited sleep; he yielded to the lullaby.
A crash like thunder awoke him at one time in the night, but he found the sky clear on looking out. Not until a second report came could he locate the source—the glacier in which the creek had its source. The green monster was sloughing off its ice. There came variations in the alarm whenever new crevasses were split with a terrific, smashing noise.
The worst start of the night, however, came in a sense of falling and landing with a thump that shook every bone in his body. That he had fallen and landed, not dreamed the sensations, became clear when he found himself on the ground and looking up at the hut. He had rolled out of "bed."
Seymour was up the next morning with the klootchmen, and they arose with the sun. Before the Indian camp was thoroughly awake, he had slipped out of the burying ground and gained the cover of the timber fringe along the south wall of the gulch.
From what he could see now of the formation, he determined that Glacier Creek was not as inaccessible as reputed. There were other possible entrances, at least one of which appeared less hazardous than that by which he had come. In the past, the natural entrance to the cañon had always been open and no one had ever found it necessary to work out another.
Refreshing himself at a spring upon which he had stumbled, he turned first to an investigation of the cañon a quarter of a mile below. So nearly did the wings of the rocky spur meet that there was scarcely a hundred feet between walls at the narrowest point. Through this gap, Glacier Creek poured without hindrance. Along the opposite wall ran a wagon-width trail.
At a point about halfway through the cañon stood two tents, the canvas of which still was white. Doubtless this was the camp of the guards and, perhaps, that of the promoters of the steal. Just now he was satisfied with placing this camp; close investigation could wait until he learned what "richer than gold" was being gleaned up the gulch.
Slowly he worked up the stream, keeping back from the bank and well screened by the brush. Breakfast was over at the camp near which he had spent the night. Twenty Indians, men and women, were at work picking and shoveling in a near-by bench and wheeling loaded barrows to a long wooden sluice box into which a small stream of water had been diverted. The onlooker was puzzled that they were working with such seeming good-will. In fact, he had never seen natives so industrious. Nowhere was any whip-armed master visible.
A blast from upstream did not concern him greatly, as he thought the glacier was cutting daylight capers. But when other reverberations crashed out at regular intervals, he felt certain that dynamite was being exploded. This would explain why the Siwashes were able to work so freely in the frozen gravel and gave color to Bart's report that the claims were being "stripped."