"I'll have some meat for us," he muttered. "We shan't starve now!"
CHAPTER XXVII
THE BLACK POOL
"What are you going to do, Andy?" asked Jack, as he watched the old hunter.
"What am I going to do? Why, I'm going to blast out some of this meat, that's what I'm going to do! I heard you boys talking about elephants and other things being preserved for centuries in a cake of ice, and, if that's true, why won't the meat in this petrified city be preserved just as well? It's always below freezing here, and that's cold enough."
"But the meat has turned to stone," objected Mark.
"Only the outside part of it, to my thinking," answered Andy. "I believe that inside these lumps of rock we'll find good, fresh meat!"
"But how are you going to get it?" asked Jack.
"Just as I told you—blast it out with some of the powder from my cartridges. I used to be a miner before I turned hunter, and when we wanted gold we used to fire a charge in some rocks. Now we want meat, and I'm going to do the same thing. I'll put some powder underneath this block of stone that looks as if it was a chunk of roast beef, and we'll see what happens. It's lucky I saved some of my cartridges."
While he was talking the old hunter had taken some of the powder and put it back in one of the paper shells. Then, making a fuse by twisting some powder grains in a piece of paper he happened to have in his pocket, he inserted it in the improvised bomb, using some dirt and small stones with which to tamp down the charge. He discovered a crack in the big stone, which they hoped would prove to be a chunk of roast beef, and Andy put the cartridge in that.