“Fill it with snow,” said his uncle.
Dumplin’ had drunk up all his supply, too, so both of them hunted out a snow-bank, dug down to clean snow, and began to stuff it into their canteens. “Gosh! where does it all go to!” Dumplin’ remarked, after three or four minutes.
“Takes a lot of snow to make a little water,” Bennie answered. “Mine’s full—full o’ snow. Now let her melt!”
Presently, after he had eaten his raisins, he took a pull at the canteen, and got about one good swig of water.
“Let’s be going down,” said he.
“Just so you can get a drink?” asked Spider.
“Marvelous, Watson, marvelous,” Bennie laughed. “Why haven’t they given you a job on the detective force?”
But the rest, by now, had emptied their canteens, too, and everybody was thirsty, so down they started. It was easy going down. When the slope was smooth, they set in their stocks as far ahead as they could reach, and then took a long vault, down past them, pulled them out, and repeated. In one hour they had covered the ground it took them five on the ascent.
It was only a shade after two o’clock when they reached their cache, so they shouldered their luggage and hiked on down the valley, away from the lake, for nearly five miles, till they reached a region of grass and flowers and heavy timber, where the Sand Creek had cut down a deep cañon in the volcanic soil and lava, but the strangest cañon you ever saw, because some of the lava was harder than the rest, and the water hadn’t cut this, but left it sticking up all through the gorge, in great, round, water-worn pinnacles. Imagine hundreds of Bunker Hill monuments, round instead of square-cornered, erected helter-skelter at the bottom of a wild cañon, and you have a picture of the pinnacles. Here, near the brink, in sheltered woods, they made their second night’s bivouac.
And this time Bennie woke up only once in the night, and had to be shaken awake in the morning.