“It won’t be easy,” warned Dick.
“I know that. It makes me all the more anxious to succeed. I’m not very apt to forget this experience for a long time. If the factor really is up to some underhanded work—and the actions of Brennan and McCallum have indicated that pretty plainly—I, for one, intend to get to the bottom of it.”
“That’s the spirit,” applauded Dick. “We’ll show him. We’ll go till we drop. If anything happens to one of us, the other two must carry on.”
They paused at that and shook hands all around. Then they went on more grimly and doggedly. All night they tramped. When the early morning sun blazed a new trail across the blue field of the sky, they made a second camp, started another fire with flint and steel and devoured hungrily, almost ravenously, the six trout which Dick had the good fortune to catch in a deep, quiet pool near the shore of the river.
In catching the trout, Dick had used clams for bait. Watching him, the operation had given Sandy an idea. He set out along the shore, returning at the end of an hour with thirty large clams, which he placed in a hole he had scooped out in the sand.
“When we’ve had a few hours sleep,” he told Dick and Toma proudly, “I’ll roast these fellows in the hot ashes and we’ll have a change of diet.”
“Not a bad idea,” Dick rejoined. “I’m almost hungry enough to eat them right now.”
They slept longer than they had intended. It was late afternoon when they awoke. The warm sun, beating down upon their tired bodies, had kept them as warm and comfortable as if they had been wrapped in blankets. So refreshed were they when they had clambered up from their couches of white sand that Toma was moved to remark:
“Not bad idea to sleep daytime an’ travel night. At night fellow sleep by campfire with no blankets get cold. No rest good.”
“True,” agreed Dick. “We’ll do most of our travelling at night. Wish I knew what time it was. Too bad the water spoiled Sandy’s watch. By the look of that sun, I’d say it was about three o’clock in the afternoon.”