“——but we don’t have to,” calmly continued the castaway, “’cause we three was practical miners as came up here, two years ago, and we brought ’em with us.”
CHAPTER XXI.
DYNAMITING TO FREEDOM.
Ben Stubb’s welcome solution of the problem of how to escape from the valley, came as a great relief to the boys. As he had related the narrative of his years of solitude up there, their hearts had sunk as the realization, that they too might be doomed to the same fate, had invaded them. With the discovery that the prospector had dynamite and the needful apparatus for setting off a blast without injury to the man who fired it, however, their future had assumed a bright tinge, and when they went to bed that night in the rough cave that had been the outcast’s home for such a long time, their dreams of the morrow were pleasant and hopeful.
Both the Chester boys had been deeply worried at the idea of the anxiety their unexplained absence must be causing their father, and Frank bitterly blamed himself for having decided to go forward with the exploration of the tunnel before he had notified his father of their discovery.
They were up betimes and set about the ticklish business of transporting the keg of dynamite to the Serpent Chasm, where it was to be put to such effective use. It was decided that for the purpose for which they required it only a small quantity would be necessary—in fact none of them wanted to run the risk of widening the chasm by placing too heavy a charge. Ben, who was experienced in the use of explosives, figured—the force of dynamite being downward—that if the blast was fired at a depth of roughly two hundred feet down the chasm, that there would be no danger of damaging the upper edges of the abyss so as to render them impossible or to dislodge the chain on which they depended to make their way to freedom.
Before the final preparations to evacuate the valley were set about, however, Ben took steps to hide the bar gold away carefully, with the aid of the boys, who, the warm-hearted sailor insisted, were to receive a share of it as soon as they could make up an expedition to the valley, and return to carry the precious metal out to civilization.
The castaway, too, had another important mission to perform. Beneath that little grove of palms, at the wooded end of the valley already mentioned, there were two rough graves over which Ben had erected two headstones bearing simply his dead comrades’ names and the date of their deaths, carved by his knife. Alone the man who had shared their loneliness went to the spot where the dead prospectors slept their last sleep, and knelt bareheaded over the rough mounds. When he turned to the cave he was more serious than the boys had ever seen him during their brief friendship and he did not speak till everything was declared ready and it was time to lower the keg of high explosive into the shaft.
With the rawhide lariat with which he had rescued them, the keg was carefully belayed into the hole and then one by one the adventurers slid down it. It was with moist eyes the boys looked about them, as they once more trod what, but for Ben Stubbs’ timely intervention, would have been their tomb. One by one they wrung his hand warmly.
“That’s all right, shipmates,” Ben kept repeating, much embarrassed, “’twarn’t nothing at all—nothing at all—I’d have liked—” he added, with a touch of wistfulness in his voice—“for my poor dead mates to have been here, too, this day.”