Ten minutes he lay there, and then he rose slowly and cautiously from the bunk and crept to the door which had been left open, and peered out.
The fires were still blazing merrily, and many of the men were gathered around them. Some of the men were playing cards, and the others were engaged in various ways. At all events, they one and all seemed to have forgotten his existence, and that was what he chiefly desired.
Nick knew in which cabin Patsy was a prisoner. He could see it from the doorway where he was standing, almost opposite him at the other side of the valley. The distance in feet from his own position was about the distance of a city block—two hundred feet.
The old silver watch, the size of a turnip, which Turner had carried forty years or more, was in his pocket, and by the light of the stars Nick managed to see the time—ten o'clock.
"There is no time like the present," he mused to himself, while he hesitated in the doorway. "If I wait until all is quiet, I will stand all the more chance of being discovered; and, besides, it won't be long until Handsome returns here, and after he has come and crawled into his bunk it will be next to impossible for me to get out of here without rousing him—unless I should drug him, and that will not do at all. Handsome is altogether too fly for that. He would know that he had been drugged.
"Now, if it wasn't for these white whiskers, I could creep around the edge of the bottom of the cliff to the cabin where Patsy is, without being noticed; and I dare not take them off——"
He stopped there. There was absolutely no use in conjecturing upon the "ifs" of the question, and so, after another moment, during which he studied the lay of the land intently, he slipped noiselessly out at the door and around behind the cabin, and from there crept on his hands and knees to the bottom of the cliffs. And there he discovered what he had been unable to see in the imperfect light. The grass there was quite tall, where it had not been trampled by the feet of the motley crew that infested the place, and he found that by lying at full length and pulling himself slowly along on his stomach he would be able to conceal himself almost entirely from view.
Nick made that half circle of the small valley, crawling in that way, and entirely without being discovered; and in that manner he arrived directly in the rear of the cabin where Patsy was a prisoner.
But here a new difficulty confronted him. There was a guard in front of the door, and that guard, strangely enough, was Cremation Mike.
The cabin in which Patsy was a prisoner was built of roughly hewn logs, the crevices and chinks being stopped with mud and clay. The ground beneath it was hard—rocky, in fact; so there was no possibility of digging under the logs without tools to do it, and even then it would have taken too much time to accomplish it.