“No tricks, now, boys.”
He was a sharp fellow, if he was a bad one.
As soon as that match burned out he struck another and another, until the appearance of daylight before us—for the cave turned out to be merely a natural tunnel—rendered such precautions no longer necessary.
Emerging again from beneath the arched roof, we found ourselves in a second dry watercourse, enclosed like the other by high perpendicular walls. Evidently the springs which fed the pool were strong enough to send the water down this way also when the snow-banks were melting on the mountains in the early summer. Along this deep cleft we made our way for half an hour, going sharply down-hill all the time, until, at a point where the rocks came more than usually close together, we were stopped by an unexpected barrier,—a set of bars such as form the entrance of a corral. As soon as Percy saw these bars he whispered to me, “The horse-thieves’ hiding-place.”
I had no doubt that Percy was right, especially as we saw beyond the barrier, on a natural shelf some six feet from the ground, a stone-built fortification large enough to hold a dozen men, loopholed for rifles, and so placed as to command the steep slope we had just descended.
Passing the bars, which Bates let down and Squeaky set up again, we turned a corner to find that the passage suddenly terminated, and that we had come into the upper end of a very remarkable little valley, in the bottom of which several horses were feeding,—the stolen horses, we had no doubt.
But it was the valley rather than the horses which claimed our attention. It must have been, I believe, the crater of an ancient volcano,—there are many of them in that country,—which in the course of thousands of years had been nearly filled up by the débris falling from the surrounding peaks. The bottom of the valley consisted of a beautiful smooth meadow, some two miles long by a mile in width. Around this meadow were high banks composed of earth and fragments of stone, thickly covered with pine-trees, while behind the trees, encircling the whole valley, was a wall of rock from fifty to a hundred feet high. As far as we could see, the wall was without a break, excepting only that at its northern, or right-hand, end it was split from top to bottom; the split forming a narrow gap through which a voluminous stream went boiling and foaming over the stones. The stream was much larger than one would expect from the limited size of the valley, but we observed that at least six little waterfalls—and how many more we did not know—came pouring over the edge of the valley-wall, having their sources in the mountains which on every side rose high above the rim of the wall itself.
To all appearance there was no way in or out of the horse-thieves’ hiding-place save through the passage by which we had come down, unless, possibly, one might pass down the gorge where the stream ran out.
That the elevation of the old crater was pretty considerable was evident from the fact that, though the slopes below the wall were well wooded, the mountains above were bare, or nearly so, a few stunted, twisted trees growing here and there among the rocks showing plainly enough that we were but a short distance below timber-line.
As soon as we had descended through the fringe of trees which bordered the grass-land, we descried upon the opposite side of the valley a little, roughly built cabin, standing with its back to the wall and its face toward us; a wretched little hovel, with a stumpy stone chimney and a doorway without any door. Behind the cabin rose a fine peak from whose sides there had fallen so large a heap of loose rocks as to make it appear that at that one point perhaps it might be possible to climb out of the valley. Percy quietly called my attention to the fact as we rode across the meadow.