FINDERS KEEPERS
At the summons for which they had been looking――and hadn’t looked
judiciously enough――the three Golden Spiders, kneeling beside the
partly sorted pile of ore and broken stone, were taken at a tremendous
disadvantage. Larry’s rifle was the only one within reach, and this had
been put down while he was handling the piece of rich ore that Dick had
thrust at him.
The intruder, a heavily built man with a swarthy face, ragged black
mustaches and a beard that looked as if it might be a month past its
last shave, had apparently come well prepared to enforce the notice
to quit. He carried a rifle in the crook of his arm, and there was a
formidable-looking pistol sagging in its holster on his right hip.
Dick was the first to get upon his feet, and what he said was no
measure at all of the scare that was gripping him inside.
“You say this is your mine? I g-guess you’ll have to prove that before
you can run us off,” he blurted out.
“Prove nothin’!” retorted the invader with an ugly rasp in his voice.
“Me and my pardners was pardners with old Jim Brock when he worked the
’sessment on this here claim. You fellers pack up and git out whilst
yuh can do it with whole skins. Git a move, I say!”
Up to this point little Purdick was the only one who was doing any
moving. Being behind Dick and Larry, and also having the pile of
shot-down rock for partial concealment, he was trying by slow inchings
to get hold of Larry’s gun. He knew it would probably be quick suicide
for Larry to turn around and try to pick it up, but he thought that
he――Purdick――might be able to get it if Dick would only go on arguing
with the big hold-up and so gain a little time. Dick didn’t disappoint
him. Arguing was the thing Dickie Maxwell did best.
“But see here,” he contended, facing the big man boldly; “you can’t
chase us out this way. If you’ve got a legal right to this claim, all
you have to do is to go into court and prove it and we’ll give up.
But――――”
“There ain’t no ‘buts’ about it!” roared the swarthy desperado,
loosening the big revolver in its sheath. “I ain’t honin’ to commit no
murder, but if yuh git me madded――pass me them guns, butt foremost, and
then git yer traps and pile out o’ here, and do it mighty sudden, ’r
I’ll blow yuh to kingdom come!”
Again little Purdick was the only one who moved. All his efforts to
reach Larry’s gun without being caught at it failed. Six inches was
as near as he could come to touching it. But the small one was blest
with a brain that could shuttle at the rate of a mile a minute under
pressure, and all the time he was reaching for the rifle, he was trying
his hardest to think of some other expedient that would rid them of the
intruder.
It was the desperado’s final threat that gave Purdick the bright
idea――that “blow yuh to kingdom come.” The daylight was fading fast,
and with it Purdick faded, backing out of the scene noiselessly and
taking scrupulous care to keep himself in line with Dick and the
sheltering rock pile. When he had crept to where the jack packs were
lying, it seemed as if it took him an endless time to find what he
wanted, and his hands were shaking so that they fumbled helplessly
in the dark. Around the turn in the crevice he could hear Dick still
trying to argue, with the hold-up breaking in to curse and swear and
threaten all sorts of hideous things that were going to happen when he
got sufficiently “madded.”
Purdick’s hurried preparations were finished at last, and with
trembling fingers he struck a match and held the flame to the frayed
end of what looked in the match-light to be a length of thick, blackish
string. The next moment he had darted around the sheltering turn in
the crevice to fling a yellow cylindrical object at the feet of the
intruder――a paper-covered cylinder with a spitting, fizzing, black
string hanging out of it.
“_Dynamite!_” he yelled, and with the yell grabbed Dick’s collar with
one hand and Larry’s with the other, and in a burst of strength that
would have been miles beyond him a few short weeks earlier, dragged
them both headlong over the rock pile and behind it, falling flat on
top of them to hold them down.
It worked. There was a deafening explosion a few seconds later, but
there was no intruder in sight to be blown up by it. Instantly, Purdick
leaped to his feet, caught up Larry’s rifle and ran to the cave mouth.
The dooryard ledge was empty, but a great crashing in the young trees
below told what had become of the man with the large threats and the
small self-control in an emergency. Having escaped the dynamite, he was
doing his best to get out of rifle range.
Larry was the first to speak when he and Dick joined Purdick at the
cave entrance.
“We sure had it coming to us――or I did, anyway. I ‘white-eyed’ on my
lookout job. I had no business to go gold-crazy just because you did,
Dick.” Then to Purdick: “You bully little old fighting rat――how did you
come to think of the dynamite?”
“He put it into my head by saying what he did about blowing us all up
if we didn’t get out. But I had an awful time fixing the cartridge in
the dark. I was scared stiff for fear I’d leave too much of the stuff
in the paper and kill us all.”
“Then you didn’t use a whole stick?” Dick asked.
“Good land――no! I guess we wouldn’t be here if I had. I took it all out
but just a little, and filled the paper up with sand to make it look
like a whole stick. I thought probably that just the look of it would
crack his nerve, and it did.”
“Well,” said Larry, with a hunch of his broad shoulders, “we know where
we’re ‘at’ now, at least. We’ve got to stick and fight it out, after
this, whether we want to or not.”
“You bet we’ll stick,” Dick asserted; and then: “The cold nerve of
that outfit! Just plain hold-ups, as we’ve been saying they were. Now
there’s this about it: we can’t afford to be chicken-hearted with
toughs like they are. I more than half believe they’d shoot, and shoot
to kill, if they thought that was the only way to get rid of us.”
“All right,” Purdick put in quietly. “We can shoot, too, if we have to.
You fellows go in and go on with the ore sorting. I’ll be doorman for a
while.”
Since it was now nearly evening, with little daylight in the crevice,
Dick lighted a candle and the ore sorting was continued. Purdick sat
down with his rifle between his knees and got what satisfaction he
could out of a reversed and very beautiful sunset. The sun had gone
behind the great range at his back, and the gulch and its tributary
ravines were slowly filling with a rising tide of dusky blue that was
like a mist, only in the high altitudes it isn’t a mist; it is just
pure color. But it was only in the shadow that the colors were subdued.
In the upper air the sunlight was still streaming in a gorgeous flood,
crimsoning the few high clouds and setting the distant peaks of the
eastern Hophras aglow with a pinkish fire.
Full of hardship as his life had been, Purdick had a keen sense of the
beautiful in nature, and again and again he had to remind himself that
he was doing guard duty, and that the siege of the Golden Spider had
now fairly begun. What would be the next move on the part of the three
men who were trying to steal the mine? Would they try force again? Or
would they――――
Purdick grew very thoughtful when the alternative suggested itself.
If the would-be robbers had been spying thoroughly enough, they must
know that the cave was not provisioned for a long siege; that in a few
days at farthest hunger would do what their first attempt at force had
failed to do. Then there were the burros. They could live for a little
while on the grass that was stored in the cave, and after that they
could starve for a few days longer. But the end must come shortly, even
for the tough little animals.
Little Purdick was in the midst of these ominous cogitations when he
saw a red flash down among the trees in the gulch bottom to the left,
something smacked like a pair of clapped hands a few feet over his
head, and on the heels of that came the rattling echoes of a rifle
shot. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised his rifle, aimed it at
the spot where he had seen the flash, and fired. At the double crack of
the guns, distant and near, Dick and Larry came running.
“What was it, Purdy?” Dick demanded.
“Nothing much. Somebody down there took a crack at me, and I handed it
back.”
“Did you hit him?” Larry wanted to know.
“I couldn’t tell, of course. I fired at the place where I saw the
flash. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to let them know that we’re on
the job. Stand back a little. They may shoot again.”
They waited in silence for a time, but there were no more shots. After
a time a reddish glow appearing among the trees far down the gulch told
them that the raiders’ supper camp-fire had been lighted.
“I guess that ends it for a while, anyway,” Larry commented. “They’ll
hardly try to rush us in the dark.”
“That may be,” Dick allowed. “Just the same there mustn’t be any more
cat-napping on sentry post for us. They mean business. They’ve spent a
whole summer chasing us all over the lot, and they’re not going to let
go now, with the big prize fairly in sight.”
After supper, which was eaten at the mouth of the cave where they could
keep watch, they made their dispositions for the night. There was a
bed of dry wash sand back in the cavern, and they shovelled enough
of this out to the entrance corridor to pad the bare rock floor for
a makeshift bed. Purdick took the first watch, and when he called
Dick a little before midnight, there was nothing to report. Dick, the
easy-going, comfort-loving member of the trio, found it pretty hard
work keeping awake, with no fire and not much chance to stir around,
but he managed to stick it out until three o’clock, when he roused
Larry.
“Nothing doing,” he said in low tones so as not to waken Purdick. “I
could see the glow of their fire a little when I first came on, but
that’s gone down now. I don’t believe we’re going to hear anything more
from them before daylight.”
His prediction proved true. Larry sat through the long hours of
early-morning darkness and heard nothing, saw nothing until the
breaking dawn showed him a column of smoke rising above the distant
pocket gulch to the left. Larry thought he was safe to go back into the
cave and start the breakfast fire, and he did it, though he would not
risk leaving his post long enough to go after the coffee water which
could only be obtained by carrying it from the disappearing stream
beyond the place where they had blasted the big boulder.
The crackling of the fire roused Purdick, and he sat up, rubbing the
sleep out of his eyes.
“Anything startling?” he asked.
Larry shook his head. “Nothing yet. They’re getting breakfast, I
suppose. Their fire’s going, anyhow.”
Purdick unwound himself from his blankets.
“Good example they’re setting us. We’ll do likewise.” And he got up to
go after the water and fry the bacon.
They ate as they did the night before, sitting at the cavern mouth
where they could see the gulch in both directions. Immediately after
breakfast the ore sorting was resumed, with Purdick on watch under a
new spider web which had been spun during the night. For an hour or
more Dick and Larry pawed over the heap of broken rock, picking out the
brown vein matter and piling it on one side, and leaving the barren
rock to be shovelled out to the entrance and over the edge of the
dooryard cliff.
It was not until they began getting rid of the rock that hostilities
opened up. Purdick, who was still on watch, had neither seen nor
heard anything moving in the gulch below, but as Larry ran the first
shovelful of stone out to the dumping edge, a rifle clanged somewhere
in the woods and a bullet spatted against the cliff a foot or so from
the cave mouth. Purdick was ready, but there was nothing to shoot at.
A gun flash doesn’t show in the daylight, and the powder in a modern
high-powered rifle cartridge doesn’t make much smoke; not enough so
that a single discharge is visible at any great distance.
“So that’s the game, is it?” Larry growled, ducking to cover before a
second shot could be fired. “We’re not to be allowed to go out on our
own doorstep. All right; here’s the answer,” and, standing in the cave
passage where he couldn’t be seen from the gulch, he got rid of the
spoil by pitching it, a shovelful at a time, into the depths below.
The dooryard ledge was only about ten feet wide, and the shovel throw
across it was comparatively easy.
With the working ground cleared, the drilling for another series of
blasts was begun, the routine of the previous day being followed;
that is, half-hour shifts all around, with two of them striking and
drill-holding in the tunnel heading and the other on watch. Larry had
the first half-hour at the cave mouth, and during that time a number of
shots were fired from the gulch. They did no harm. The upward angle was
so great that the few bullets well enough aimed to enter the crevice
did nothing worse than to knock a splinter of stone from the roof now
and then. At first, these leaden invitations to quit were a good bit
unnerving, but they soon learned that the way to let the enemy know
that he wasn’t accomplishing anything was to keep the _ping-ping_ of
the striking hammer going steadily, and in a short time the useless
bombardment stopped.
By noon they were ready to fire another round of blasts in the tunnel,
and they did it, retreating as before into the depths of the cave, in
the confident assurance that the sputtering fuses would be a sufficient
protection against an invasion for the few minutes they would have
to leave the cave mouth unguarded. The roar of the blasts followed
quickly, and after the gas had been given time to dissipate itself, the
sorting process began again, this time with Dick doing guard duty.
“I don’t see but what we can keep this thing up indefinitely, as long
as our grub lasts,” Dick said, as he took his place as sentry. “This
old cave is as safe as a fort. They can’t possibly rush us, so long as
we keep watch and are ready for them.”
“It’s a matter of brains,” Larry offered. “They’re a poor lot if they
can’t think up something better than anything they’ve tried yet.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before they all heard what
sounded like the rumble of a distant explosion.
“What was that?” Purdick demanded, and as he spoke the answer came,
first in an avalanche of earth and small stones rattling down from
above upon their “dooryard” ledge, and an instant later in the
thunderous fall of a huge boulder that, striking fairly upon the ledge,
bit a huge scallop out of it exactly in front of the cave entrance as
it went grinding and crashing on into the gulch, mowing down big trees
in its path as if they were dry weed stalks.
At the first rattling warning, Dick had thrown himself back into the
crevice, and it was well that he did so, for the impact of the mighty
projectile upon the ledge was like the explosion of an enormous shell,
sending flying fragments of stone in all directions.
“Speaking of brains,” Dick gasped, when he could get his breath, “I
guess they’ve got a few right along with ’em. Gorry! They must have
shot a whole mountain down on us! Our dooryard’s gone, clear up to the
hilt!”
Dick’s announcement was no exaggeration. Where there had been a
step-like ledge and a straight drop from the edge of it, there was now
a great gash and a steep slope running quite up to the cave mouth. And
the protection which the projecting ledge had given them from rifle
fire from below was gone. A good marksman in the gulch could now shoot
directly into the crevice, still at a high angle, to be sure, but not
so high but that the bullets could penetrate for a dozen feet or more
before they would hit the roof.
While the avalanche aftermath of little stones and earth was still
clattering down from the cliff brink above, the bombardment was
renewed. Every few minutes, at the crack of a gun in the gulch, a
whining missile would come through the exposed crevice mouth to hit the
roof and scatter stone splinters and bits of hot lead all about the
place.
“Well,” said Dick, after they had quickly withdrawn out of the line of
fire, “what next?”
“More of the same,” gritted Larry the stubborn. “We’re not dead yet.
Get back on the sentry job, Dick, and Purdy and I will shovel this
stuff out of the way and get ready for another go at the drilling. We
won’t stop to do any more sorting just now.”
Carrying out this programme, it was only a short time until the
cheerful _ping-ping_ of the hammer upon steel began to sound again in
the vein tunnel, and, as before, the work noises stopped the firing
from below. Dick was chuckling triumphantly when, at the end of his
half-hour, he went up into the tunnel to swap jobs with Purdick.
“You’ve got the combination on ’em, Larry,” he remarked. “Letting them
know that they’re not stopping us, I mean. They’ll have to think up
something different, now.”
If they were thinking, the determined mine “jumpers” seemed to be
taking it leisurely. The afternoon passed without any more warlike
demonstrations, and by the time the growing dusk was beginning to
thicken in the gulch the drillers had another round of blasts ready to
be fired the first thing the next morning.
“Have they given it up and gone away, do you suppose?” Purdick asked,
after the supper had been dished up and they were eating with
appetites untouched by the exciting happenings of the day.
“Nothing like that,” Larry asserted. “They’ll hit us again――don’t make
any mistake about that.”
“What will they try next?” Dick wanted to know.
“Huh!” said Larry. “If I knew I’d be hustling around to get ready for
it.”
“Seems to me it’s leaning our way yet,” Dick offered. “They’ve found
they can’t scare us out, or shoot us out, or avalanche us out, and, as
I said this morning, they can’t rush us when there are only three of
them, and one of the three a cripple. For that matter, they’ve made
the rushing business harder now than it was before. With our door-yard
gone, the only way for them to charge would be right up the smashed-out
slope, and it would take a lot of nerve to do that when they know that
there are three rifles here at the top.”
“There is one way, if they only think of it,” Purdick offered. “They
can starve us out in a few days. Maybe that is what they’ve made up
their minds to do now. They don’t seem to be doing anything else.”
The suspicious quiet held out until late in the evening, up to the
moment when Dick and Purdick were preparing fresh sand beds on the
floor of the cave mouth, while Larry sat with his gun between his knees
at the edge of the newly made avalanche gash. Then, out of the darkness
either to the right or left, Larry could not tell which, came a harsh
voice saying: “Hey! Youse fellies in th’ hole!”
“All right,” Larry called out, bringing his gun up to the “ready.”
“Spit it out. What have you got to say?”
“Just what my pardner said last night!” rasped the voice. “Ye’re to
take yer traps and clear out o’ that mine!”
Purdick and Dick were listening with Larry, and Purdick whispered:
“It’s the cripple――‘Twisty,’ they called him――that’s talking. I’d know
his voice anywhere.”
“Why should we clear out?” Larry asked. “It’s our discovery. You didn’t
know anything about this place until you heard us at work in here.”
“That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. We’re old Jim Brock’s pardners,
and the mine belongs to us!”
“You needn’t take the trouble to hand out that line of talk,” Larry
flung back. “One of your partners gave us that fairy tale last night.
We know all about you fellows. You’ve been following us around all
summer because you didn’t know where James Brock’s abandoned mine was,
and you thought we did know. We didn’t know, any more than you did; but
now that we’ve found it, we’re going to keep it.”
There was a short silence to follow this, and Purdick whispered again:
“Whereabouts is he?”
Larry whispered back: “I don’t know, but I think he’s around to the
left where we climbed up and down yesterday morning.”
“Keep back a little,” Purdick warned. “If he gets you in range, he’ll
shoot, just as like as not.”
At the end of the little silence the raucous voice began again.
“Ye’ll not keep it long――not any longer than it’ll take the sheriff to
get in here fr’m Natrolia.”
“Huh!” Larry snorted. “The sheriff hasn’t got anything to do with us!”
“Yuh’ll see when he gets here. Ye’re jumpin’ our mine.”
“Nothing doing,” said Larry. “I don’t know where you are, but wherever
it is, you can stay there and talk foolishness all night if you want
to. It won’t get you anywhere, though.”
Another silence, and then:
“Listen: ye’re nothin’ but a bunch o’ kids, and ye don’t know what
ye’re up ag’inst. You don’t want to make this a fight for blood,
because if ye do, there’s only the one way it can end. Ye’re in there,
and if we give the word, yuh’ll never come out alive.”
It was here that Dick, who seldom consented to be a permanent listener
in any conversation, chipped in.
“Lots of good it’ll do you to kill us off!” he snapped back. “You talk
as if there wouldn’t be any hereafter to this thing! James Brock gave
this mine to my Uncle Billy Starbuck, and you know it because you
listened in that morning in Brewster and heard Uncle Billy telling us
about it. Suppose you do turn in and murder us: how long do you think
it would be before half of Brewster’d be over here looking for you
three fellows with a rope?”
“We’re takin’ chances on that,” was the short reply. “And listen――here’s
the last word. You get out o’ that hole, and do it before mornin’, if
yuh ever want to see Brewster ag’in. D’yuh get that?”
“We hear what you say,” Larry answered.
“Well, here’s my affidavy!” yapped the voice in the darkness, and a
rifle cracked and a bullet whizzed past the cave mouth so near that
Larry said he felt the wind of it――as he probably did.
“Give me elbow room!” grated little Purdick, pressing forward with his
gun, and leaning out past Larry. But the would-be assassin was too wary
to betray his whereabouts, and though they waited breathlessly for many
minutes with all their five senses concentrated in the listening nerve,
they were not able to catch the slightest sound to betray the manner or
direction of his retreat.
“Well,” said Larry, at the end of the breathless interval, “that fellow
said that we didn’t know what we were up against, but I guess we do. I
don’t believe he was bluffing, though maybe he was.”
“Not on your life!” Dick exclaimed. “The gold vein may pinch out in the
next ten feet, or it may be worth a million dollars. Nobody can tell,
of course; but on a chance like that, a bunch of desperate men wouldn’t
stop a minute at wiping the three of us out to get hold of it. And I’m
not so sure they couldn’t do it and get away with it. We haven’t seen
another living soul between the two ranges all summer――except my old
Daddy Longbeard away over yonder under Mule-Ear Pass――and if our folks
should turn out search parties, they might look for a year without
getting any trace of us.”
Larry was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Does that mean that you
think we ought to back-track while we can, Dick?”
“Not a bit of it!” was the stout-hearted rejoinder. “At least, not for
me. How about you, Purdy?”
Once again the small one surprised his two camp-mates.
“I was just going to say that if you two want to hike out and bring
help, I’ll stay and do my best to hold on until you can get back.”
“That settles it,” said Larry briefly. “We all stay. Now you two turn
in and grab off your forty winks. I’m batter up for the first watch.”
Like the night before, this one passed quietly. During Larry’s watch
the heavens were clear almost up to midnight, but when he called
Purdick the stars were beginning to disappear and there was a muttering
of thunder in the air. The rain came later and continued in gusty
showers until well on toward morning; and at an early hour, when
Purdick came back from watering the burros in the inner recesses of the
cave, he brought news.
“The creek is away high,” he reported; “twice the quantity of water
coming down that there was yesterday. You can hear it fighting its way
through those underground channels ever so far back.”
“It’s the run-off from the rain,” Larry offered, and letting it go at
that, he asked Dick if anything had shown up during his watch.
“Little something,” said Dick. “They have moved off somewhere――the
hold-ups. A few minutes after dawn I saw something stirring down by
their camp and I got the field-glass. Two of them were crossing the
gulch to climb the mountain. They were leading a burro, but there
didn’t seem to be anything on the pack saddle but a couple of picks and
shovels.”
“Umph! I wonder what that means?” Larry grunted. But as there was no
answer that any of them could think of, this incident, like that of the
rising water in the cave torrent, had to be left unexplained.
This day, as they all agreed after it was over and they were eating
supper at the cave’s mouth, was one that deserved to be marked with
a red letter. There had been no interruptions whatever: not the
least sign of their late harriers. Hour after hour the watch had been
scrupulously maintained at the cave entrance, but for anything that
could be seen or heard, they might have supposed themselves to be the
only human beings in all the upheaved world of mountains and valleys.
Then, too, the work had gone splendidly in the tunnel. They had fired
two rounds of blasts, carrying the heading in several feet farther, and
the vein still showed no signs of “pinching out.” And the ore continued
to look as good as it had at first.
Having put in a hard day’s work, they made early preparations for
turning in, and by eight o’clock Purdick, who had the first watch, was
sitting at his post and listening to the deep breathing of his two
companions who were already asleep. It was not until some little time
after he had settled himself to his watch that he missed the gurgling
murmur of the imprisoned torrent, which they had been hearing off and
on all day; and when he did miss it, it suddenly occurred to him that
they had all been too tired to remember to lead the burros back into
the cave for their evening watering.
Keeping this in mind to the end of his watch, he spoke of it when he
roused Dick at midnight. Dick offered to take the burros back, but
Purdick said no; that it was as much his oversight as anybody’s, and
he would do it. He was back again in a very short time, and, as once
before, he brought news.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said to Dick, speaking softly so as
not to disturb Larry, “but the creek’s gone dry――dry as a bone. Nothing
left but a few pools in the hollows, and the jacks drank them dry.”
“That’s queer,” said Dick. “What do you suppose made it do that?”
“I can’t begin to imagine. The only thing I could think of was that
maybe the rain flood had made the creek find another underground
channel somewhere.”
“That’s bad,” Dick commented. “Without water we can’t last any time at
all. But we can’t do anything about it until morning. You turn in and
get your snooze.”
For a sentry seat at the cave mouth they had placed a flat rock, and,
padding the seat with his blankets, Dick settled himself for his
watch, with his feet tucked up under him and his rifle lying across
his lap. It was some little time after Purdick’s regular breathing was
threatening to develop into a snore that Dick heard a curious sound
like the ticking of a clock. At first he thought it was an insect, the
bug commonly known as the “death watch.” Yet it didn’t seem just like
that, either. “Sounds more like water dripping from a leaky faucet,” he
muttered to himself; and just then the two sleepers lying a few feet
away on their sand bed began to stir uneasily, and Larry sat up to say,
“Here――what’s the matter? This sand’s all wet!”
The startled exclamation woke Purdick and he began to struggle out
of his blanket. “Pity’s sake!” he grumbled. “Is it raining away back
in this far?” And then explosively: “Say, fellows――Dick! Larry! the
water’s an inch deep all over this place!”
Dick, the only one of the three who was fully awake and alert, was the
first to take the real alarm.
“The creek’s doing something to us!” he cried out. “Don’t you hear
that roar? It’s a flood! And it’s coming this way! Run for it!” Then
remembering suddenly that, with the door-yard ledge gone, flight out of
the cave in the darkness could mean nothing but a neck-breaking plunge
into the gulch below: “The tunnel heading――that’s the highest place
there is! Climb for it!”