CHAPTER XIII The King Philip Mine
I think it is safe to say that Dick and I were at that moment the two most astonished boys in the State of Colorado.
Where had the man sprung from? And how had he disappeared again? There must be, of course, some opening in the rock which we had failed to notice; a circumstance easily explained by the fact that we had not gone far enough up the basin, and by the added fact that our attention had been fixed upon the opposite wall.
Then, again, though the identity of the man could hardly be doubted, why should he take offence, as he seemed to do, at being addressed as "The Badger"?
This was a question to which we could not find an answer; and, indeed, for the moment we postponed any attempt to do so, for our attention was too much taken up by the action of the water, which, continuing to rise with great rapidity, forced us to retreat higher and higher up the dam.
For about half an hour it thus continued to rise, until there must have been at least fifteen feet of it in the basin, by the end of which time we noticed a sudden diminution in the amount coming over the fall. A few minutes later the flow had ceased altogether, when the water in the pool at once began to subside again, though far less rapidly than it had risen.
Our first impulse after our narrow escape from drowning had been to run to the other end of the dam and get back forthwith to our horses, but this we had found to be rather too risky an undertaking to attempt, for the water, coming out from under the dam, was rushing down the bed of the cañon, seething and foaming between the obstructing boulders in such a fashion that we decided that discretion would be a good deal the better part of valor—that it would be an act of wisdom to wait a bit.
Moreover, when the flood, leaping from the cliff, had bowled us over in such unceremonious style, we had had our rifles in our hands, and as those indispensable weapons were at that moment lying under fifteen feet of water, there was nothing for it but to wait till the pool drained off if we wished to recover them.
As there was no telling how long we might have to wait, and as we were both wet through and very cold—Dick being besides still shaky from his recent buffeting—I collected a lot of dead wood and started a roaring fire, before whose cheerful blaze our clothes soon dried out and our spirits rose again to their normal level.