On completing his exploration Hamersley returned to his companion below.
“Hopeless!” murmured Wilder, despondingly.
“No, Walt; I don’t think so yet.”
The Kentuckian, though young, was a man of remarkable intelligence as well as courage. It needed these qualities to be a prairie merchant—one who commanded a caravan. Wilder knew him to be possessed of them—in the last of them equalling himself, in the first far exceeding him.
“You think thar’s a chance for us to get out o’ hyar?” he said, interrogatively.
“I think there is, and a likely one.”
“Good! What leads ye to think so, Frank?”
“Reach me my bowie. It’s behind you there in the cave.”
Wilder did as requested.
“It will depend a good deal upon what sort of rock this is around us. It isn’t flint, anyhow. I take it to be either lime or sandstone. If so, we needn’t stay here much longer than it would be safe to go out again among those bloodthirsty savages.”