“Plenty soon you find um out, Pa-e-has-ka,” murmured Wah-coo-tah.
After leaving the wide part of the passage, the bore narrowed to its original dimensions, and the floor took the form of a slope.
“We’re climbing!” exclaimed Dell.
“This secret shaft is an incline,” returned the scout. “It’s clear, now, how the horses got down here. I’m beginning to understand, too, how it was that Lawless and his men disappeared so mysteriously that time we thought we had chased them out of the cañon. All they did, then, was to ride to the top of this incline and hide themselves away in the underground workings of the Forty Thieves.”
It was a long climb they had to the top of the subterranean slope; but after a while they saw a glow of daylight ahead of them. The glow brightened and brightened, until they came out of the inclined shaft and stood upon a brush-grown shelf jutting out from the cañon wall. Here the scout put down his burden, and all of them rested and filled their lungs with the pure outdoor air.
“I never expected to get out of that hole alive,” said the scout. “If I had known more about the mine than I did, I should not have been so brash about going into it; but who’d ever have expected to find such a layout of secret passages and inclined shafts? Lawless did a good deal of dead work hunting for that lost vein.”
“If we only knew where Nomad and Wild Bill were,” said Dell, “I should feel easier in my mind.”
The scout’s brow clouded.
“Of course Lawless and his men took them along when they left the mine.” The scout turned to Wah-coo-tah. “Where would Lawless be apt to go from here, Wah-coo-tah?” he asked.
“Mebbyso to Medicine Bluff,” the girl answered.