"When are you going?" he asked.
"To-morrow," answered Sandy promptly. "We’ll start then, but we’ll have to shovel through. You’ll have t’ lead Weimer, won’t ye?"
Ross swallowed twice before he answered. "Yes, I suppose so."
"We’ll help ye." Sandy’s tones were good-natured and soothing. He seemed suddenly to have lost all regret at the disappearance of his store of dynamite. "We’ll break open the trail, and then we can rope ourselves together around the shoulder. That’s safer."
"All right," Ross heard himself say in an unnatural voice. He could not in an instant adjust himself to this radical uprooting of his plans.
"It’ll be a ticklish job," Sandy continued, "t’ break through around the shoulder without bringin’ down the hull side of old Crosby on us, includin’ a few rocks; but every day now we put it off is so much the worse."
He turned to go. "Then we’ll pick ye up in the mornin’; will we?"
"Why–I suppose so," returned Ross. "There doesn’t seem to be anything else to do."
"Better not load up much," warned Sandy; "and don’t give Uncle Jake a load at all. All we’re goin’ to try to pack over is a little venison."
Then Sandy disappeared, and Ross suddenly recovered from his mental numbness. It was the sting of anger which aroused him. So confused and disappointed had he been, and so well had Sandy played his part, that the true solution of the theft did not dawn on the boy until the other’s departure. Then he stopped short on the downward trail and uttered an exclamation, his hands clinching inside his mittens, and his eyes narrowing and flashing.