BULL PEAK AND THE CRAWLING SHALE
“I’m sure calling this stuff just about the limit, aren’t you, Larry?
Look at that stake you drove a few minutes ago――it’s half drowned
already!”
On this particular morning Dick and Larry had been given a new job,
namely, reëstablishing grade stakes ahead of the graders. Ordinarily,
there would have been no need for this duplication of the work of the
locating engineers; but the ground over which they were toilsomely
making their way was anything but ordinary. It was a steep canyon
slope composed of the most unstable material that is ever found in the
Pandora box of the great Continental Divide; a smooth, sharply inclined
plane of crawling shale pouring down like a broad river from the
heights above in bits from the size of a fingernail to that of a silver
half-dollar, and each bit as sleek and slippery as a watermelon seed.
Across this slope the right-of-way of the Nevada Short Line led, and
it was interposing a very considerable barrier to the work. With every
slightest disturbance the shale river would slither and slide, creeping
slowly, to be sure, but with overwhelming persistence, burying the
stakes of the survey, and affording no stable foothold for man or
beast, or for the tripod of the surveying instrument.
“How we are ever going to dig a notch for our track through this stuff
is more than I can tell,” Dick went on, once more trying to find a
place where the transit would stand still long enough to enable him
to get a sight through the telescope. “If anybody should ask, I’d say
we’re up against it for fair, this time.”
It certainly looked that way. The shale slide was peculiar enough to be
remarkable even in a region where singular geological formations were
the rule rather than the exception. For the greater part of its length
the canyon of the Tourmaline, up which the two railroads were racing,
each straining every nerve to be the first to reach the newly opened
gold district at the headwaters of the river, was a water-cut channel
through the mountains with beetling cliffs or steep wooded slopes
for its boundaries. But at this particular point some prehistoric
convulsion of nature had opened a half-mile gap in the south wall, and
through this broad gap, coming down from the high shoulder of Bull
Peak, poured the vast river of disintegrated shale.
As yet, the Short Line grading force was barely at the beginning of
its battle with the shale. The track had been pushed up to the western
edge of the crawling cataract, and from its “take-off” on the final
pair of rails a huge steam shovel was gnawing its way into the creeping
obstruction. Beside the main track a short spur had been laid to
accommodate a string of dump-cars which the great shovel was filling, a
single scoop to the car-load.
“They’re not making an inch of headway down there, so far as I can
see,” said Larry, indicating the busy steam shovel. “For every cubic
yard they take out, another one slides in.”
Dick Maxwell glanced up at the slope on the opposite side of the gorge,
where a high, trail-like line marked the path of the rival railroad.
“Those Overland Central engineers knew what they were about when
they located their line away up there among the rocks,” he asserted.
“They’re going to beat us, Larry. It’ll take us a month of Sundays to
get across this river of snake scales――and then some.” Then, with a
backward glance toward the stake they had just driven: “See there; what
did I tell you!――that stake is buried, plumb out of sight!”
It was plainly apparent that the short surveying stakes they were using
were no good at all in the shale, so they pushed on up-stream to the
nearest river-fringing aspen grove, and with their belt axes cut longer
ones. In driving these they found no bottom to the slippery mass; also,
they remarked that every blow of the driving ax-head started fresh
shale rivulets which wriggled and crept and crawled, and threatened
never to come to rest.
It was early in the July day when they began the job of resetting the
grade stakes across the short half-mile of the slide, and they had
been hard at it all day, when with the sun dipping behind the western
mountain, they came wading back to the temporary camp pitched just
below the scene of the steam shovel digging. And for the day’s work of
the big shovel there was little to show save a slight depression in the
shale within the immediate swing of its steam-driven arm.
After supper there was a council of war held around the camp fire in
front of the engineers’ tent, at which the two boys were interested
listeners. After having made a careful examination of the new obstacle,
the chief of construction had summoned his three assistants to discuss
the best means of attacking it.
“It’s my notion that bulkheading is the only thing,” summed up
Goldrick, who had been directing the steam-shovel operations during
the day. “We’re not going to get anywhere at all unless we put in a
retaining wall of some sort. The stuff slides in faster than we can
take it out, and when it starts there doesn’t seem to be any end to it.
The entire surface of the shale gets in motion as far up the slope as
you can see.”
In this opinion, Jones and Hathaway, the other assistants, concurred,
and after the matter had been thoroughly threshed out, the chief issued
his orders.
“All right, Goldrick; bulkhead it if you have to. Time is the main
object, rather than expense, just now. The O. C. is coming on fast with
its track-laying, and if we’re delayed here very long, it’s a lost race
for us. The pile-driver is at Pine Gulch. Better wire to-night and get
it, and your bulkheading material, on the way. The thing to be done is
to get across this place quickly. Drive it for every man in your gang
and every pound of steam you can carry. I’m going down to Red Butte
in the morning, but I’ll try to be back by Thursday. It’s up to you,
Goldrick, shove it!”
For some time after they had gone to bed the two boys lay awake,
talking about the new obstacle which was handicapping their force in
the great race for the Little Ophir sweepstakes.
“If it isn’t one thing it’s another,” said Dick Maxwell gloomily.
“First the O. C. tries to steal our right-of-way; then it floods us
out and shoots rocks at us. And now, when we’ve earned a little more
room to work in, here comes this avalanche of snake scales that we
can’t cross. If anybody should ask me, _I’d_ say we’re hoodooed!”
“Oh, no; nothing like that,” was the quiet answer from the opposite cot
“That’s just one of the things that makes the engineering fight the
greatest game in the world. You’re always up against something that
yells for the best there is in you to beat it.”
Silence for a few minutes, and then Dick said:
“Haven’t dug up another of your bright ideas――about this shale
business, have you?”
“Not the ghost of one,” Larry laughed. “It’s a lot too big for me.”
“Will Mr. Goldrick’s bulkhead notion work out?”
“I sure hope it will. I don’t see anything else to try.”
“But you don’t believe it will work?”
“I’ve just been thinking,” was the doubtful reply. “You know how the
stuff acted to-day when we were tramping back and forth over it; every
little move made it slide just that much worse. I’ve been wondering if
the jounce of the pile-driver isn’t going to keep it moving all the
time. I wanted to say something about that while the talk was going
on, only it wasn’t exactly a cub’s ‘put-in.’ Besides, I didn’t have
anything better to suggest.”
“Well, you just let the little old think-mill keep on grinding,”
Dick――respecting his chum’s powers of invention but still making a
good-natured joke of them――chuckled mockingly. “If you can wrestle
out the answer to the shale slide, maybe the company will fire Mr.
Ackerman and give you his job.” And with that he turned over and went
to sleep.
For quite some time after Dick’s regular breathing proved that he was
making up for the day’s hard work, Larry lay awake with his hands
clasped under his head, staring up into the darkness and grilling
over the problem that was his to solve only because he was trying to
learn all that he could in this, the most exciting as well as the most
exhilarating summer vacation he had ever spent.
The general manager’s telegram congratulating him upon his success in
helping to extricate the buried tunnel force at Tunnel Number Two――he
was promising himself that in the years to come, after he had really
made a success of himself, he would have that telegram framed and hung
up where he could always see it――was a tremendous honor; but in a way
it carried a lot of responsibility――or rather imposed a lot.
He had had a bit of the same sort of experience in school, where he
had early set a pretty high mark as a “math. shark.” Having the mark,
he had found that he had to live up to it, and he now had a sort of
lurking suspicion that he was in for the same kind of a struggle. Mr.
Maxwell had said he was making good, and he would be expected to go on
making good. But this shale slide, which seemed to be puzzling even the
competent and experienced engineers, was miles beyond any “boy” effort,
and Larry was sensible enough to appreciate that. But yet――and yet
again――――
While he was lying there in the soft summer-night darkness grappling
with the stubborn puzzle the sounds of the work battle driven by the
night shift sorted themselves out for him; the rattle-and-clank and
rapid-fire exhausts of the big steam shovel, the grumble of its swing
aside, the slump and bang of its bucket-bottom as it dumped its burden
into a car of the spoil train, followed by the slow gruntings of the
train locomotive as it pushed another car up to receive the next
shovelful. Punctuating the regular sequence of these near-by noises
came the thunder of blast explosions, distance-softened; these, as
Larry knew, being on the Overland Central grade, either above or below
the camp.
He fell asleep at last, for his day’s work had been no less strenuous
than Dick’s, but even in his dreams he was still figuring on the
problem, which promptly proceeded to tangle itself inextricably with
the shovel clamor and the distant muttering thunder of the blasting,
and to become, in the dream wrestle, a part and parcel of the noises.
Turning out to an early breakfast, the two boys found the day shift
already at work. Hastening up the track to see what the night shift
had accomplished, they had a shock of discouragement. True, the big
shovel hog had rooted its way a few feet farther into the slide, but
apparently the disturbance it had set up in the surface of the shale
had spread far and wide. The row of five-foot grade stakes they had
driven the day before was now showing only a few inches of the top
of the stakes, and another movement of the slide would bury them
completely out of sight.
“Great Peter!” Dick exclaimed, with a little gasp, “if it’s going to
do that every night, we’ll be rooting away at it for the next hundred
years! Why, good goodness! there’s a full yard more of it around those
stakes than there was when we drove them!”
As he spoke, the day men were preparing to haul the shovel out to make
room for the pile-driver which had been brought up from Pine Gulch in
the night. Presently the exchange was made, the guide-frame of the
driver was raised, and the driving of the bulkhead posts was begun.
At once the trouble that Larry had suggested in the talk with Dick
developed. Each concussion of the heavy driver hammer falling upon the
pile head brought down more of the shale, and in a very short time the
small excavation so laboriously made by the shovel digging had entirely
disappeared.
By noon a dozen of the piles had been driven, under conditions that
were almost prohibitory, and men with hand shovels were working
carefully to open a trench for the placing of the bulkhead planks
behind the posts; digging cautiously and carefully so as not to bring
down any more of the slippery deluge. By nightfall a creeping advance
of some seventy-five feet or such a matter had been made; and when the
night shift went on, the pile-driver had been moved ahead to begin
another lap in the slow journey.
While they were eating supper in the camp mess tent Larry made a few
figures on a bit of paper torn from his pocket note-book. When he
finished he was shaking his head despairingly.
“That won’t do, Dick,” he said. “At a hundred and fifty feet of
progress for a twenty-four-hour day we can count upon being held up
here for a solid month. That means that the O. C. will beat us into
Little Ophir, hands down.”
“And still you haven’t lassoed your bright idea?” Dick grinned across
the table at him.
“Aw; you make me sort of tired with your everlasting jokes,” returned
the maker of estimates; but, as on the night before, he went to bed
soberly thoughtful.
The next morning there was more disappointment in store. The night
shift, pressing the pile-driving, had had bad luck. Along in the small
hours there had been an earthquake――at least, so the driver foreman
averred――and immediately following it the slide had begun to crawl
as a whole, continuing in motion for the remainder of the night. As
a result, the bulkhead, and the pile-driver itself, had been slowly
buried; and when the two boys got on the ground the steam shovel had
been put in again to dig its companion machine out of the shale grave.
Reporting to Goldrick for duty, Larry and Dick were told that they
might have the day off. There was nothing to be done until the
pile-driver could be dug out, and there was no use in setting up grade
stakes only to have them buried as fast as they were driven.
“Well, what shall we do with our holiday?” Dick asked, after they had
strolled back to camp. “Mr. Bob Goldrick seems a whole lot peeved this
morning――for which you can’t blame him a little bit――and I guess he
doesn’t want us around under foot.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Larry, falling back upon a phrase which was
growing to be a habit with him. “I believe I’d like to see where this
slide starts――where it’s all coming from, I mean.”
“Gee!” Dick interposed; “that would mean climbing Bull Peak!”
“Well, what of it? We’ve got the day for it, if we want to take it.”
“All right,” said Dick with a little sigh which meant that he knew full
well what he was in for on a day’s hike with the stubborn one who never
turned back until he had accomplished his purpose. “Anything you say.
But we’re going to need a balloon or an aeroplane before we ever see
the top of old Bull.”
Limiting themselves to a single haversack in which to carry a noon-day
lunch; to the haversack and Dick’s field-glass; they struck out without
telling anybody where they were going. Since it was impossible to make
the climb on the canyon-facing side of the mountain, they made a long
detour, zigzagging back and forth through the forests on the western
slope of the peak, and stopping now and then as they gained altitude to
catch their breath and to admire the magnificent view which opened out
in wider and still wider spreadings as they ascended.
At noon they had reached the timber line, which, at this point, was as
abruptly marked as if the bald heights above it had been cleared by
human hands. As they had prefigured and planned to do, they came out
of the forest well to the westward of the slide head; but now they had
only to circle the peak, without climbing any higher.
After eating the luncheon which the camp cook had put up for them they
began the circling. A mile or more of it brought them to a narrow
terrace or bench, with the higher heights, in the gulches of which some
of last year’s snow still remained, stretching away above them.
It was in this circumnavigating process that they came upon a thing to
prove that they were not the first climbers to scale the rugged heights
of Bull Peak. The proof was a broken clay tobacco pipe, black from
much use, and it was Dick who saw it and picked it up.
“One of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘footprints’,” he laughed. “Where there is a
pipe, there must have been a man to smoke it. Puzzle picture: find the
man. Who was he, and what was he doing away up here?”
“You tell me that, if you can,” said Larry. Then: “Great minds run in
the same ruts, you know. Maybe he was like us――some fellow who wanted
to see where the shale slide starts from. Which brings on more talk: we
ought to be getting somewhere near the thing by this time. Let’s hike
to the top of that cliff and see if it won’t give us a better lookout.”
Climbing to the summit of a crag a little farther around to the
eastward, they presently found themselves directly above that which
they had come to see. Spreading downward from the foot of the cliff
ran the mile-long slide; and at the bottom of it, so far away that the
big machine looked like a child’s toy, they could make out the steam
shovel, the alternating bursts of steam from its exhaust pipe serving
to identify it.
Further investigation showed them the cause of the slide. The cliff
upon which they were standing had for its underpinning a vast bed of
the shale which had doubtless been disintegrating and shelling off
under the action of the weather for centuries in the past.
“Heavens to Betsy!” Dick exclaimed, peering down at the huge shale
ledge, “there’s enough of it there to keep us digging our right-of-way
for the next hundred years!”
“There sure is, if we don’t come up here and stop it,” Larry put in.
“Stop it? Why, man alive, what are you raving about? How are you going
to stop a snake-scale flood like that?”
Larry did not reply. He had borrowed Dick’s field-glass and was
intently scrutinizing the surface of the slide. Getting no answer from
his companion, Dick broke out impatiently.
“What are you looking at?”
“I was just wondering what made those big dents in the surface down
there: you can see them without the glass――down by that big rock that
makes a sort of island in the slide――over a little to the left of the
rock.”
Dick followed directions and saw.
“Sort of funny,” he remarked. “Looks as if there’d been a slip there;
or rather three or four of them.”
Larry buttoned his coat.
“I’m going to swing down yonder and get a little closer peek at those
places. Want to risk it with me?”
“Surest thing you ever heard of,” was the instant rejoinder; and
together they made a roundabout and rather hazardous descent of the
cliff and so came at its shale-bed foot.
In the momentary halt Larry looked the outcropping mass of shale over
with an appraisive eye.
“Yep,” he said, as if he were letting his thought slip into spoken
words without realizing it, “I believe it can be done.”
“Believe what can be done?” Dick demanded.
“Stopping the sun-dance of the snake-scales,” Larry responded shortly;
but he did not explain what he meant as they eased themselves down to
the big rock which marked the location of the curious dents in the
shale surface.
The “dents” grew in size as they approached them; so much, indeed, as
to become good-sized hollows when they looked down upon them from the
top of the island boulder. Out of one of them a thin rivulet of the
shale was trickling, and they could trace its creeping, crawling course
a long way down the slope. Suddenly Larry said: “Take off your coat,
Dick,” and he set the example by quickly stripping his own. “Now your
belt,” and again he set the example in his own person.
Dickie Maxwell obeyed, but not without question.
“Now what on top of earth is biting you this time?” he queried.
“I’ll show you in a minute,” Larry replied.
With workmanlike deftness he hooked the two belts together by their
buckles and then knotted the free end of each to a sleeve of a coat.
The result was a clumsy substitute for a life-line long enough to reach
from the summit of the island rock to a point some distance out in the
shale stream.
“Now, then; hang on and anchor me,” was the next order; and when Dick
had made a snubbing post of himself, Larry went over the edge of the
rock and by keeping hold of the makeshift life-line worked his way
cautiously out to one of the depressions. There he stooped, picked up
something, and then came back as he had gone, edging himself along in
a way to disturb the sliding stuff as little as possible, and taking a
hand from Dick to help him climb back to the top of the boulder-island.
[Illustration: Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his
way out to one of the depressions]
“Good goodness! I should think you might tell a fellow!” Dick fumed.
But all Larry had to show for the little acrobatic stunt was a small
scrap of yellow wrapping paper that looked as if it had been soaked in
grease.
“Shucks!” snorted the anchor-man, “was that all you went down after?”
Larry held out the scrap of paper.
“All?――don’t you see what this is, Dick?”
Dick took the bit of paper and examined it.
“Whew!” he breathed; “I guess I do! It’s――it’s part of the cover of a
dynamite cartridge!”
This admission brought on still more talk, and a lot of it, at that.
“Now we know what brought down Jim Haskins’s ‘earthquake’ last night,”
Dick summed up. “Somebody stuck a few dynamite cartridges into this
stuff up here and fired ’em. _And the dynamite did just what it was
meant to do!_”
Larry made no comment upon the very evident piece of lawless sabotage
or the manner of its accomplishment. His brain was busy with something
more important.
“They say curiosity killed the cat, but this is one time when it is
going to save the cat’s life,” he announced, struggling into his coat.
“If we hadn’t climbed up here out of sheer fool curiosity――――”
“‘We’!” Dick protested; “you, you mean. I’d never have thought of it in
a thousand years!”
“Never mind who thought of it first: we’re here, both of us, and we
know what’s been done, and what will, most likely, be done again. It’s
our job to find out who’s doing it, and to spike his gun for him. That
old clay pipe you found is the clue. Let’s get busy and follow it up.”
Accordingly, they made the long circuit again and went back to the
place where the pipe had been found, where they became trailers,
working about in widening circles until, well along toward evening,
they made the hoped-for discovery.
At the foot of a low cliff, only a few hundred yards from the head of
the shale slide they saw a weather-worn army tent pitched under the
cliff shelter, and a shallow, tunnel-like opening in the cliff itself
which appeared to be either a prospect hole or a mine. In front of the
tent there was a small camp fire, and over the fire two rough-looking
men were cooking their evening meal.
At the sight Larry grabbed Dick and dragged him back behind a
concealing shoulder of the rock.
“We’ve got ’em!” he whispered. “We’ve covered the ground well enough to
be sure that there isn’t anybody else on this whole mountain side.”
“But we can’t be sure that they’re the ones that are doing the
dynamiting,” Dick put in.
“We are going to be sure of it before we quit,” said Larry grimly; “and
it’s going to cost us something, at that.”
The cost was the loss of a supper, and a vigil that tried them both to
the limit. Creeping cautiously away from the vicinity of the tent and
the mine opening, they worked their way back to the top of the cliff
overlooking the slide. There they stretched themselves out on the brink
to begin their vigil. Slowly the darkness crept up from the distant
canyon, rising like a murky tide to the clearer heights, and one by
one the stars came out to blaze in the black bowl of the heavens larger
and nearer than either of the watchers had ever seen them before.
With the coming of night a cold wind swept down from the snow-gulch
heights behind and above them, and they were soon turning up their coat
collars and shivering. At their altitude, which, they estimated, could
not be less than ten thousand feet, the July nights are cold with a
penetrating chill that not even the dry air can temper.
“M-m-my g-gracious!” mumbled Dick, trying to hold his chattering teeth
still long enough to get the words out, “th-this is something f-fierce,
I’ll tell the wo-world! I’d give a d-dollar if I could get up and run
around in ci-circles for a lil-little while. Whoosh! but it’s cold!”
“Shut up!” Larry growled. “If they should be coming they might hear
you. Keep those rattling teeth of yours quiet. They make more noise
than an automobile gear.”
“But I’m cold!” Dick protested.
“So am I, but I’m not beefing about it. It’s all in the day’s work.”
As nearly as they could judge it was about two hours after they began
to freeze solid when the starlight showed them two figures making their
way silently along the foot of the cliff, and, a little later, creeping
down the edge of the slide to the island boulder. What the two figures
did was, of course, invisible from the cliff top; but after a wait of
perhaps fifteen minutes two dull explosions, followed by a hissing
sound as of a thousand suddenly disturbed snakes, told them that
another assisted avalanche of the crawling shale was on its way down
toward the twinkling electrics marking the night shift’s attack on the
stubborn obstacle.
“Quick, now!” Larry gritted. “They’re coming up, and we must make sure
that they’re the same two we saw cooking their supper at that mine
hole!”
The trailing of the pair, since the boys were reasonably certain of the
route they would take, was hazardous only because of the darkness and
the need for doing it noiselessly. None the less, the thing was done,
and done right. Not for a single moment did they lose sight of the
dodging figures until they saw them enter the tent at the mine mouth.
“The job’s done,” was Larry’s comment, when the weathered tent began to
glow with the light of a candle to advertise its occupancy. “Now for
the long down-hill hike in the dark.”
That, in itself, was a stiffish undertaking, eating up time most
voraciously, as all mountain climbers caught out after nightfall in the
Rockies will be willing to testify. The detour they were obliged to
make could not have measured less than four wearisome miles, and what
with feeling their way and having to head gulches and scramble down
precipices in blackness that was almost Egyptian, it was fully midnight
before they reached camp.
As it turned out, the slowly crawling dynamited avalanche had beaten
them only by a half-hour or so; and as they tramped in, hungry
and muscle-sore, the chief engineer, Goldrick, and Jones, the
second assistant, were just returning from the scene of the latest
overwhelming; a shale flood that had once more buried the pile-driver
and the steam shovel.
Most naturally it didn’t take the boys long to tell their story, and at
its close the chief’s comment was brief and to the point.
“It is another O. C. trick to delay us,” he asserted. “I didn’t think
that Orrin Grissby, their chief, would get down to anything as mean and
criminal as that! Those two men are doubtless on his pay-roll, and they
are pretending to be working a mine as a blind, in case anybody should
happen to run across them up yonder.”
“Well,” said Jones, who was a young man with a square jaw and the cold
gray eye of a fighter, “do we take it lying down?”
“Not by any manner of means!” snapped the chief. “You pick out a half
dozen of your huskies that you can depend on and go up after those sham
miners. If these boys found their way down in the dark, you can find
your way up. Bring those fellows in and we’ll swear out a warrant for
them. They’ll go to jail, if there’s any law left in the Timanyoni!”
Being a young man of swift action and few words, Jones quickly
disappeared to put the order into effect. It was then that young
Goldrick spoke up.
“That stops one of the exciting causes; but I suppose we’ll always be
having trouble with this slide, from what the boys say. That shale
cliff up there will keep on shedding from now till doomsday.”
It was just here that Dick Maxwell, tired and sleepy as he was, put in
another word.
“Larry, here, says it can be stopped,” he said, “but he didn’t tell me
how.”
“What is that?” asked the chief quickly. “Another idea of yours,
Donovan?”
Larry flushed a bit under the pallor of his weariness.
“It’s nothing that anybody wouldn’t have thought of, if they had seen
what we did,” he explained modestly. “There is a big ledge of the shale
at the top of the slide, as Dick has told you, and I guess it’s been
weathering and crumbling for hundreds of years. What I thought of was
this: if we could get up there some way with men and material and a
cement-gun, a coating of cement could be shot all over the face of the
ledge and so sort of seal it up and keep it from weathering any more.”
The grave-eyed chief exchanged glances with Goldrick. Then he said:
“I thought you were a machinist’s helper, and the like, Larry,
before you came on this job. What do you know about cement work and
cement-guns?”
Larry flushed again.
“It just happened,” he stammered. “Last summer, when the Brewster
Electric Power and Light Company had trouble with that crumbling rock
above their dam, I went out there one day and saw them shooting a new
surface on it with a cement-gun. And the surface has stood and kept it
from crumbling any more.”
Again there was a little silence in the chief’s tent. At the end of it
Mr. Ackerman said:
“I guess you boys are pretty hungry――going without your supper. Trot
down to the cook shack and get outside of anything you can find
ready-made.”
After they were gone he turned to Goldrick with a slow smile.
“It’s interesting, Goldrick, to notice what odd things jump up in the
woods when you haven’t your gun along,” he remarked. “When Mr. Maxwell
told me he was going to load these two youngsters on me for the
summer――and in this hot fight which I knew well enough was coming――I
came mighty near asking him not to. It is rather lucky for us that I
didn’t, don’t you think?”
“Rather,” said Goldrick; “I’m saying it, and but for that red-headed
boy I might not be here to say it.”
“Yes,” the chief nodded; “that tunnel business was fine. But now
to-day; I grant you that it was nothing but sheer boy-curiosity that
took those two fellows up on Bull Peak; but there you are――none of the
rest of us had the boy-curiosity. And that Donovan lad, with his, ‘it
just happened’: if he doesn’t make good all the way along, it won’t be
because he doesn’t keep his eyes open and his wits on edge. There are
times when he seems years older than he claims to be.”
It was at this precise moment that Larry, out in the cook shack, had
just pried open a can of baked beans for Dick and another for himself.
And what he was saying sufficiently proved his right and title still to
be called a boy.
“Gee-whoosh, Dick!――did you ever taste anything so good as these beans
in all your born days? My land! I believe I could eat until I’m like
the toad-frog that wanted to swell himself up and be as big as an ox!”