SHORT RATIONS
After the first burst of wrathful astoundment at finding their camp
wrecked and looted, the three victims of whatever fury it was that had
visited the gorge in their absence began to count up their losses.
It was the food losses, of course, that were the most serious. Purdick,
in his capacity of camp cook, knelt to gather up what he could of the
scattered flour and corn meal, but there wasn’t very much of either
that could be salvaged. While Purdick was trying to save some of the
eatables, Larry and Dick reassembled the scattered dunnage and camp
equipment, endeavoring to make some estimate of the length and breadth
of the disaster.
“Just see here!” said Dick, picking up the mineralogy book which was
lying open and face down at some distance from the general wreck, with
a lot of the leaves partly torn out. “What would anybody but a maniac
want to treat a book like that for?”
Larry was overhauling the blankets and pack wrappings.
“You can search me,” he gritted. “I can’t tell you that――any more than
I can tell you why these blankets are all cut and slashed in holes. It
must have been either a maniac or a devil!”
“A mighty hungry devil,” Purdick put in. “There isn’t a smell of the
bacon left, and we’re shy on everything but the canned stuff.”
“I can’t imagine a man, or any bunch of men, mean enough to treat us
this way!” Dick raged. “Why, it’s simply savage!”
By this time Larry had got the Berserk Donovan temper measurably in
hand again.
“Gather up, fellows, and let’s see where we land,” he said shortly.
“The milk’s spilt and there’s no use crying over it. How about the
eats, Purdy; what have we got left?”
Purdick checked the commissary remains off on his fingers.
“A few cans of tomatoes and peaches and pressed potato chips, the can
of coffee, enough of the flour and meal to make us two or three eatings
of pan-bread, and one can of corned beef. That’s about all: and there’s
no salt and no sugar.”
“Suffering cats!” Dick exclaimed. “And we’re at least forty miles from
anywhere! Good land, Larry; don’t you suppose we could trail these
robbers when it comes daylight again and fight it out with them?”
Larry was examining the leather carrying case in which the simple
testing apparatus, the blowpipe, charcoal, and the few chemicals were
packed. The case had not been broken open, but the stout leather was
scratched and gashed as if some one had tried to cut into it with a
dull knife.
“You say ‘robbers,’ Dick,” he said thoughtfully. “I guess there was
only one robber. Look at these cuts on this case. What kind of a knife
do you suppose it was that made them?”
He passed the leather case over to his two companions. The deep scars
were roughly parallel and five in number. Dick was the first to
understand. “A bear!” he gasped, “and a whopper, at that!”
Larry nodded.
“I never heard of a grizzly being this far south. I’ve always
understood that there were only a few of them left in the United
States, and that those were away up around Yellowstone Park. But I’ll
bet the robber was a grizzly, just the same. Look at the width of that
paw!”
“And look at the eats that are gone――only you can’t look at them,”
Purdick chimed in. “He must have been empty clear down to his toes to
get away with all that stuff. Do they eat everything they can chew?”
“Mighty nearly everything――if it was a grizzly,” Dick offered.
Purdick’s eyes widened. “I’m wondering now if he’s eaten our burros,”
he said.
“Not quite that bad, I guess,” Larry qualified. “He was probably too
busy with our stuff here to pay any attention to the jacks. It’s most
likely they got scared and bolted. They could get out, easily enough,
over that broken pine.”
“In that case, our first job is to go and round ’em up, while there’s
daylight enough to track ’em,” Dick suggested. “Let’s take the guns,
this time. It’s gnawing at my bones that we might just happen to run
across Old Ephraim, and I wouldn’t mind trying to even things up a bit
with the old scoundrel.”
“Sure, we’ll take the guns,” Larry agreed. “Whereabouts are they?”
That was a question which apparently didn’t mean to get itself
answered――not in any hurry, at least. The guns had been wrapped in the
packs; they were all three sure of that. But now they were nowhere to
be found; and since one discovery leads to others of a like nature,
they were not long in finding out that the cartridge belts had
disappeared with the rifles.
“That looks pretty bad,” said Larry, after they had searched all around
the flat boulder upon which the packs had been left in the morning. “A
bear wouldn’t steal three Winchesters and all the ammunition we had.”
“What’s the answer?” Dick demanded anxiously.
“Sort it out for yourself,” said Larry. “The bear couldn’t have taken
them――that’s all.”
“But if some man or men were here, why wasn’t something else taken?”
“Perhaps the man――or men――didn’t think there was anything else left
worth carrying off,” Larry said; and then he repeated: “It looks pretty
bad, fellows; looks as if somebody wanted to disarm us.”
Purdick’s jaw dropped.
“There’s only one bunch that might want to make sure we couldn’t fight
back――those three hold-ups,” he thrust in. “Do you suppose they’ve
followed us away in here?”
“We can suppose anything we like,” Larry answered. “There’s sure room
enough. But let’s see if we can find those jacks. That’s the first
thing to do. I only hope the gun-stealers haven’t run them off――stolen
them, too.”
In the absence of any real weapons the three armed themselves as they
could, Larry taking the axe, Purdick the geologist’s hammer, and Dick,
knocking the pick from its handle, took the handle for a club. Just
beyond the felled pine they picked up the burros’ tracks, and were
somewhat relieved when they found, from the distance between the
hoofprints showing the length of the stride, that the little animals
had left the gulch on a “dead” run.
“It was a bear-scared runaway, and not a man-steal,” Larry announced
confidently, when they had measured the length of the strides, “and if
that guess is right, we’ll find them before long. They wouldn’t run
very far. That’s one good thing about a jack; he isn’t a panicky beast,
whatever else he may be.”
This comforting conclusion had its fulfilment before they had followed
the burro tracks very far up the valley of which their camp gulch was
an offshoot. The two burros were found quietly grazing in a little
patch of short-grass, and when they were herded, it was no trouble to
drive them back, though they did exhibit some signs of alarm when they
were urged over the broken tree and into the small gulch.
“I guess the bear scent is still here――for them,” Dick suggested.
“I shouldn’t wonder if we had to hobble them to keep them in here
overnight.”
Back at the scene of the wreck, they made a fire, and little Purdick
prepared to do what he could toward getting a supper out of the
remnants. It turned out to be a Barmecidal feast――if that means that it
lacked the chief essential of a camp meal――which is quantity. Though
they were all as hungry as they had a right to be after the day of hard
tramping and searching, they ate sparingly, knowing that they were
likely to be hungrier still before they could hope to reach any base of
supplies.
It was a pretty silent meal, taking it all around. In a single day
their plans for the remainder of the summer had been knocked into a
cocked hat, so to speak. As they had prefigured things, they had meant
to work around to the small mining-camp of Shotgun in the southern
Hophras by the latter third of July; to renew their supplies there;
and to spend the remainder of the vacation in exploring the eastern
hogbacks and slopes of the Little Hophras. But that was impossible now.
“Shotgun’s at least sixty miles from here,” Larry said, measuring the
distance on the Government map which he had spread out on one of the
slashed blankets, “and we can hardly hope to make any such hike as that
on what little grub we have left.”
“No,” Dick assented promptly. “But what else can we do?”
Larry was tracing a line straight to the west from their assumed
position on the map.
“It is less than thirty-five miles from here to Natrolia on the
railroad――in a direct line,” he said.
“Yes; but Natrolia――and the railroad――are on the other side of the
range!” Dick protested.
“Well,” Larry offered; “it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other;
sixty-odd miles over and among these little mountains――with no trail to
follow, or half that distance over one big mountain――also with no trail
that we know anything about.”
“I’m as green as grass, now that you’ve got me away from the streets
and sidewalks,” Purdick put in, “but I should say it’s a question of
the time either hike will take. How about that? We’ve grub enough,
such as it is, for a couple of days, or maybe three, if we go on short
commons.”
“It’s a guess, either way,” Larry admitted. “We’ve been dawdling along
so that we don’t really know what we could make on a sure-enough forced
march.”
“What is the best day’s distance we have covered, this far?” It was
Purdick who wanted to know, and Dick answered him.
“Not over seventeen or eighteen miles, at the most, I should say.”
Purdick nodded. “Say we can make twenty, by pushing the jacks a bit,
and keep it up for three days. That would take us to this Shotgun
place, or within a few hours’ march of it. Let me look over these
canned remnants again,” and he suited the action to the word.
“Well?” queried Larry, when Purdick had made his estimate.
“Bad medicine,” was the verdict. “There’s enough of the stuff to go
round if we spread it thin, but we can’t march very hard on tomatoes
and peaches and dried potato chips. There’s one little can of corned
beef, but that will give us only a taste apiece for one meal. And as
to the flour and corn-meal, you can see where we stand when I tell you
that I used half of what I could scrape up for our suppers to-night.”
Larry was shaking his head again. “I’m afraid it’s the short cut over
the mountain for ours. It’s just as you say, Purdy; we can’t march very
far on half-rations. Let’s see what we can get out of this Survey map
for information about routes and altitudes.”
For some little time they pored studiously over the excellent map.
There were no trails marked in the direction in which they would be
forced to go to reach Natrolia, and no passes in the range named as
such. All they could do was to go by the altitude contour lines, and
the lowest marking they could find that was anywhere near in the
direct line was something over 9,000 feet. Since the altitude of their
camp was about 6,000 feet, that meant a climb of more than 3,000 feet
straight up through a trackless wilderness, and a descent of the same
or a greater distance on the other side of the range.
“Looks pretty tough, fellows,” said Dick, after they had made the
map tell them all it could, “but I guess we’re in for it. I vote for
Natrolia.”
“I guess I do, too,” Larry agreed, though not with any great amount of
enthusiasm.
Little Purdick grinned. “I’m in the hands of my friends,” he said. “If
you two say we’ve got to climb the ladder, I’m with you as long as I
last.” And then, as they were preparing to turn in early so as to get
an early start: “Any danger of that grizzly coming back in the night,
do you reckon?”
Larry laughed. “I guess not; not if he’s eaten all you say he has. If
he comes, we’ll do like the darkey did with the mule――twis’ his tail.
You can roll in between Dick and me, Purdy. That’ll give him something
to chew on before he gets to you.”
It was after they had made up the fire for the night, and were
burrowing in the torn blankets, that Purdick said: “Seems to me we’re
dismissing this business of the hold-ups a lot too easily. If those
fellows are going to follow us around all summer, we’ll never know what
minute is going to be the next. Now that they’ve got our war stuff,
what’s to prevent them from dropping down on us any old time and taking
the maps away from us?”
“Just one little thing,” Larry answered. “If they think we know where
the Golden Spider is――and if you heard their talk straight that night
in Lost Canyon, that’s what they do think――they’ll wait and let us find
it for them. They’ve taken the guns to make sure that we can’t put up a
fight when the time comes.”
“Huh!” said Dick; “if they’ve been following us for three weeks and
haven’t yet found out that we’re not looking for any Golden Spider,
they haven’t much sense; I’ll say that much for them.”
“Do you suppose they came here before the bear had torn us up, or
afterward?” Purdick asked.
“That is something we’ll probably never know. Better forget it and go
by-by. If we haven’t a hard day ahead of us to-morrow, I’ll miss my
guess. Good-night.” This from Larry, and he set the good example by
turning over and going to sleep.
When they roused up at daybreak the next morning they found that the
weather, which during the three weeks of tramping and camping had been
as perfect as mountain summer weather can be, had changed remarkably
during the night. The sky was overcast, and among the higher peaks of
the Little Hophras a storm was raging.
“More bad medicine,” said Larry, struggling out of his blankets to
liven up the camp-fire. “If that storm moves a little farther south,
we’re likely to run square into it as we climb. Hustle us a bite to
eat, Purdy, and Dick and I will saddle the jacks. We can’t get too
sudden a start.”
The breakfast, what little there was of it, was eaten hurriedly; and
with the faint echoes of the distant thunder coming down to them like
the almost inaudible beating of a great drum, they made their way out
of the camp gulch, setting a course due west by Dick’s pocket compass,
and beginning the forced march.
For an hour or so it was not so difficult. Though they had thought that
the scattered buttes among which they had been prospecting for the past
few days were the foot-hills of the Little Hophras, they soon found
that they were not, and the forenoon was half gone before they reached
the true foot-hills and began the actual ascent of the range.
During this interval the storm, or a series of storms, had continued to
rage among the higher steeps, and they knew, in reason, that much water
must be falling on those lofty slopes. Of this they soon began to have
dismaying proof in the rapid rising of the streams they had to cross
from time to time; and one creek in particular――the one through whose
canyon-like gorge they hoped to find a path to the upper heights――was
running like a mill-race. At the mouth of the canyon, Larry called a
halt.
“I don’t know about tackling this thing with all the water that is
coming down through that slit, fellows,” he said doubtfully. “If it
rises much higher it’ll fill the canyon from wall to wall.”
“Oh, we can make it, all right,” said Dick, always the venturesome one
of the three. “It’ll be a cold day if we can’t find room for our feet
and two toy-sized jacks. Heave ahead.”
Now a canyon, as everybody knows, is at first a sheer chasm worn down
through the rock by the stream for which it is the outlet. But in most
canyons age-long erosion and the action of frost have thrown down more
or less detritus from the walls to form a sort of dump or talus on
one or both sides of the waterway, so, when the stream is low enough,
the canyon becomes navigable, so to speak, for a man afoot or for a
sure-footed pack animal.
The small canyon which the three were now entering was no exception
to the rule. At the entrance the talus on the right-hand bank of the
stream was broad enough to have afforded room for a wagon road, and it
so continued as far up the gorge as they could see from the portal.
The danger, if there were any, could only come through a tumble into
the stream which, though not as yet so very deep, roared and thundered
among the boulders in its bed in a muddy torrent that would have made
short work of man or beast if either were unlucky enough to fall into
its clutches.
For a half-mile or so they stumbled on in single file over the sloping
talus, which still stayed on their own side of the torrent, and
still afforded a footway, precarious enough, in all conscience, but
nevertheless practicable. It was at the third turn in the crooked
pathway that Larry, who had been studiously watching the stream as they
went along, stuck in another word of caution, shouting to make himself
heard above the noise of the flood.
“The water’s rising every minute!” he exclaimed. “It must be raining
cats and dogs up there on the higher levels. If a little cloudburst
should happen along right now, we’d be trapped like so many gophers in
a hole.”
“It sure does begin to look that way,” Dick called back. “Let’s push
on faster and see if we can’t find a place to hang up until the creek
begins to fall a bit. It can’t rain up yonder forever.”
Accordingly, they tried the pushing expedient, and kept it up until
they came within a hair’s breadth of losing one of the jacks. The
little animal――it happened to be the rearmost one of the two――stepped
on a loose stone, slipped, scrambled frantically to regain its footing,
and ended by falling heavily on its side with its feet fairly in the
rising torrent. Dick, who was next in the Indian-file procession,
“motivated” instantly, as a psychologist would say. With a quick leap
he sprang upon the fallen burro’s head and got a death grip on its
hackamore leading halter. Larry and Purdick closed in quickly, and a
three-man lift got the laden animal upon its feet again. But it was a
close call.
“That settles it,” Larry commented, after the little adventure had been
made to end without disaster. “We can’t hurry the jacks in such going
as this. If we do we’ll lose both of ’em.”
“I guess you’re right,” Dick conceded; “as right as the rain that’s
bringing this creek up so fast.” And thereupon they began to feel their
way more circumspectly.
But care isn’t the only thing that is necessary in taking a hazard; a
little foresight is sometimes a lot more needful. It was unquestionable
now that the torrent was mounting fast; getting bigger by leaps and
bounds. And as it rose, the talus pathway grew narrower and narrower,
until at last the Indian-file procession was squeezing itself flat
against the right-hand rock wall to keep out of the water. When this
came about, even Dick began to lose his nerve.
“We’d better turn back and get out of this!” he called over his
shoulder to Larry, who was bringing up the rear. “We’ll never get past
that next shoulder――never in this world!”
It did look dubious――more than dubious. Just ahead of them the canyon
made a sharp elbow turn around a jutting cliff, and the stream, forced
almost to reverse itself in the acute angle, was tearing the talus
away in huge mouthfuls as it surged back from its plunge against the
opposite cliff. As they stopped to look ahead, it became evident that
in a very few minutes there wouldn’t be any talus left. But when they
looked the other way, down the perilous path over which they had just
come, they saw at once that their retreat was wholly cut off. In one
place behind them the shelving slope had been entirely washed away and
there was no footing left.
“We’ve got to make that turn ahead!” Larry yelled, and, squeezing
himself past Dick, Purdick and the trembling jacks, he took the lead,
dragging manfully at Fishbait’s halter, and shouting at the others to
come on.
It was touch and go. As they approached the elbow turn the loose-piled,
rocky débris under foot seemed to be dissolving into soft mush, and
little Purdick, who was now at the tail end of things, went in almost
to the tops of his lace boots. To make matters worse, the air was
suddenly filled with a hoarse, murmuring roar that was deeper and more
terrifying than the thunder of the augmented torrent. Purdick didn’t
know what it was, but the other two did. Dick dropped back and pushed
Purdick into the second place.
“Keep going!” he panted. “There’s a cloud-burst flood coming down the
canyon, and if we can’t turn that corner and find standing room beyond
it, we’re goners!”
Fortunately――how fortunately they were soon to realize――the corner was
turned successfully, and on the upper side of the jutting cliff there
was not only safer footing: there was a small side gulch coming down
steeply into the main canyon. Up this gulch to higher ground they urged
the stumbling burros, and even as they did it, the murmuring roar grew
louder and the solid earth seemed to be trembling under their feet.
Shouting, pulling, hauling and working like maniacs, they pushed and
dragged the two pack animals up to the very head of the little side
gulch, and they barely had done it when a wall of water, mountain high,
it seemed to them, and black with débris and forest wreckage, came
sweeping down the main gorge, rolling great boulders, hogshead size,
before it as if they were pebbles. And with the terrifying flood, as
if borne on its crest, came a dank wind that sucked up into the small
side gulch as it passed, chilling the three who were bracing themselves
to hold the burros――and their own footing――like the breath from an ice
cavern.
Like a good many of nature’s cataclysms, a cloud-burst flood does
not last forever. While they were still shivering from the effect of
the passing blast, the deafening roar withdrew into the down-canyon
distances, and in a few minutes the waters began to subside.
“A little of that goes a long way, especially when a fellow hasn’t had
much breakfast to start out with,” said Larry with grim humor. Then:
“I hope we’re all of us as thankful as we ought to be. If that flood
had caught us anywhere between here and the mouth of the canyon, we
wouldn’t have known what hit us――at least, not one half-second after it
did hit us.”
“But Great Cats!” gasped little Purdick, whose teeth were still
chattering, “we’ll never get out of here, as it is! You know, well
enough, that that flood hasn’t left us anything to walk on, either
up-stream or down!”
“Wait,” Larry said; and even as he spoke the water began to sink away
as if by magic. In an incredibly short time the torrent had subsided,
not only to its former level, but much below it――so much below it that,
lacking a trail-path bank, the stream bed itself offered a practicable
trail.
“It’s all to the good, I guess,” said Purdick, “only I’m not just used
to seeing things happen this way. Back in my native land the rivers
don’t scare you to death one minute and skip out of sight the next.
Let’s go.”
It was high noon and past when they won out into the upper region of
thunder storms and cloud-bursts, and by that time the skies had cleared
and there was nothing but a trickling rill here and there to tell of
the late deluge. As nearly as they could judge, they had about fifteen
hundred feet more of elevation to make before they could cross the
range, and after a cold lunch of canned tomatoes and the remains of the
pan-bread that Purdick had baked at breakfast-time, they attacked the
final ascent.
On this part of the climb they were obliged to become pathfinders in
grim earnest. There was no sign of a trail, and again and again they
found themselves in a _cul de sac_; up against cliffy heights that no
mountain goat could climb, much less a loaded pack animal. Luckily
they had no snow of any consequence to contend with. The three added
weeks of summer sunshine had taken it all save the deep drifts in
the gulches, and these were melting rapidly. But the zig-zagging and
exploring, the tramping up and down and back and forth in the effort
to find a practicable trail to the summit, tried them to the utmost.
It was after nightfall when they finally topped the range, and they
could see nothing of what lay before them for the next day. But as to
that they were too tired to care. Purdick made coffee over an alcohol
candle, and they opened two of the four cans of peaches, agreeing to
save the potato chips and the corned beef for a greater emergency.
Eating in silence because they were too weary and exhausted to talk,
they nearly fell asleep over the meagre meal; and as soon as it was
swallowed, they rolled themselves in their blankets under the lee of
the only big rock they could find on the bleak mountain top, and were
asleep in much less time than it takes to tell it.
It was perhaps just as well for their peace of mind that all three of
them were much too tired to dream dreams or see visions. Or to travel
in their astral bodies, as the old necromancers used to say a dreamer
did. Because, in that case, they might have seen, at no great distance
to the north of where they had made their hazardous and heart-breaking
ascent of the mountain, a perfectly good trail leading up and over and
down to the railroad town of Natrolia on the other side.
Also, they might have seen, camping in an outpost grove of the timber
beside this good trail, and only a little way from the summit of the
pass over which it led, three men, one of whom was poking up the coals
of the camp-fire with the end of a crutch, to the better cooking of a
panful of bacon slices, saying, as he poked: “It’s all right, I tell
yuh! They’ll make f’r the Shotgun camp after more grub, and we can
stock up at Natrolia and beat ’em back to the Buttes by two good days,
at least. Yuh can’t lose me in this neck o’ woods, Tom Dowling. If
yuh wasn’t solid bone from the neck up, yuh’d have found that out long
ago. Artill’ry? Nix, they won’t load up with no more shootin’-irons at
Shotgun. ’At’s one thing old man Shanklin at the Shotgun Mine don’t let
nobody sell on his reservation.”