On the morning following the test made upon the bit of gold quartz that Purdick had picked up, Larry, who had the watch from three o’clock to daybreak, found himself getting so sleepy in the final hour of his watch that he had to get up and stir around to keep awake.
Renewing the camp-fire so that there might be a good bed of coals for the breakfast cooking, he contrived to kill time until it was light enough to enable him to see the surrounding objects. Then, as Dick and little Purdick were still sleeping soundly, he picked up the hammer they used for breaking samples and started out for an early-morning walk, meaning to have a look at a curious rock and earth deposit he had come upon the evening before, after it was too near dark to examine it closely.
Turning to the left along the bench or ledge over which they had climbed to reach the camping place, he pushed on around the mountain until he came to the rock and earth slide that he wanted to investigate. Finding it nothing more than an interesting example of one of the prehistoric upheavals that have folded the earth’s crust into so many singular and apparently impossible combinations in the western mountain ranges, he was about to turn back when he saw, just at his feet, a curious round hole in the clay of the slide.
Now there is one good thing that prospecting for minerals does for anybody who goes at it seriously: it develops a habit of scrutinizing the whys and wherefores of things—any little thing; the habit of prying observation which is usually credited, in stories, to the detective, but which really belongs to every thoughtful student in any field. Larry stooped to examine the hole in the clay. It was a little over an inch in diameter and about two inches deep, circular at the bottom and elliptical at the top.
Squatting beside it, Larry stared at it reflectively. His first assumption was that it had been made by a bug or insect of some sort, but that conclusion was set aside when he remembered that no burrowing bug that he had ever heard of made a hole just like this. After a little, he took the tape measure from his pocket and with it described a circle three feet in diameter with the curious hole for its center. Then he got down on his hands and knees and crawled around the circle with his eyes on the ground, making two complete circuits before he was satisfied.
“Nothing doing,” he muttered, as he got upon his feet again; and then, with a slow grin: “Muttonhead!—of course there wouldn’t be, at three feet!”
Resorting to the tape again, he struck a wider circle, spacing it six feet from the hole. This time there were results—or one result, at least. At a point just beyond one side of the bigger circle there was another hole, the exact mate of the one he had first discovered; round at the bottom and elongated considerably at the top. Noting the direction of the elongation and the lining-up of the two holes, he paced off another six feet, and there, under his eyes, was a third hole.
With his lips pursed in a soundless whistle he climbed to the top of a near-by boulder and let his gaze sweep the slopes below. The morning calm was on the landscape, with no breath of air stirring to whisper in the trees. The boulder-top height commanded a view for miles in three directions, but there was nothing to be seen but the statuesque procession of buttes and valleys, mountain slopes and wooded gulches.
Preparing to go back to camp, Larry did a characteristic thing; that is to say, it was characteristic of him. One of the three holes was in a sort of plastic clay, much like that used by sculptors in modeling. Going down on his knees, he dug carefully all around the hole with his pocket-knife, lifting out a chunk of the clay about the size of a pint cup with the hole intact in the middle of it. Wrapping the lump of clay in his handkerchief, he swung away to retrace his steps to the camp in the farther gulch.
Both Purdick and Dick were up when he got back, and Purdick had breakfast nearly ready.
“Hello, you old early bird,” Dick called out. “Got a handkerchief-ful of worms already?”
Larry didn’t say what he had. Putting the handkerchief-wrapped “specimen” in the cleft of a rock, he turned in to help Purdick dish up the breakfast; and later, while they were eating, he said nothing about his curious find. But when the last flapjack was eaten, he reached for the lump of clay, unwrapped it, and showed it to the others.
“What do you make of that?” he asked.
Both Dick and Purdick examined the “specimen” closely.
“What’s the answer?” said Dick, looking up.
“That’s what I’d like to have you tell me. I found three of those holes a quarter of a mile away around the mountain. They were about six feet apart, and all alike.”
It was Purdick’s shrewd intelligence that jumped to the one inevitable conclusion. “A crutch print!” he breathed; “the crutch print!”
Larry nodded. “That was the way I doped it out.”
Without another word Purdick got up and began to circle the camp site with his nose to the ground. In the little grove of spruces to the left he found what he was looking for.
“Half a dozen of ’em over here,” he announced; “one deep one, as if the crutch had been leaned on for a good while.”
For a little time nobody said anything, and when the silence was broken, it was Dick who broke it.
“The guess we made last night—that these scamps had given up and gone away—doesn’t go,” he said soberly. “They’re still camping on our trail, and those marks over there under the spruces must have been made after we camped here last night. If we hadn’t been keeping watch, we would probably have lost our guns again.”
“Well?” said Larry.
“Meaning that you want me to say what I think we ought to do?” asked Dick.
“Something like that—yes.”
“All right; I’ll say it. I’m about fed up on this thing, and here’s my fling at it. Let’s leave Purdy here with the jacks and dunnage, while you and I go after these fellows and read the riot act to them—tell them they’ve got to quit chasing us around and spying on us or there’ll be trouble.”
Larry shook his head slowly.
“That won’t do, Dick,” he objected. “In the first place, we don’t know where to go to look for them, and in the second, they’d be three to two, and they’d just laugh at us. More than that, we can’t prove anything on them; couldn’t even in a court, unless we could bring the Natrolia storekeeper to testify that they sold him our rifles.”
“Well, we could at least give them fair warning,” Dick persisted; “tell them that we’ll shoot on sight if anybody comes messing around our camp.”
Again Larry shook his head.
“Even at that we’d have the weak end of the thing. This is all wild land, and they’ve got as good a right in any part of it as we have. No; the only thing to do is to go on as we’ve been doing. They won’t interfere with us so long as we don’t find the Golden Spider—and that’s a good bet that they’ll never interfere with us at all.”
“Everything goes,” Dick acquiesced. “But I’ll say this much: if they come monkeying around any time while I’m on watch there’ll be blood on the moon. As I say, I’m fed up. Let’s call it a back number and move on up to that ice cave. To-day’s as good a day as any to do a little exploring among the ‘pretties.’ ... Oh, chortle, if you want to!”—this to Larry. “When you go down in there and see what I saw, you’ll say it’s worth all the trouble.”
It was while they were loading the jacks that Purdick said:
“There’s one thing that we’ve sort of overlooked. If that cripple was spying and listening last night, any time before we turned in, he must have seen us run the test on that piece of gold quartz.”
“Supposing he did,” said Dick.
“It’s all right, of course—if he saw and heard everything that was done and said, heard me say that I couldn’t remember where I found the piece of quartz. But if he only saw and heard part of it.... You see what I’m getting at. We tested a piece of gold ore, and it was rich enough to make us all go bug-eyed. Gold ore, to that bunch, means the Golden Spider. Supposing he rambled off with the notion in his head that we’ve discovered the lost mine at last?”
“Humph!” Dick grunted. “In that case, I’ll probably get my shot at one or two of ’em sooner than I expected to. Got Lop-Ear cinched, Larry? All right; let’s go.”
The distance up to the ravine of the ice cave proved to be less than they thought it was and it was soon traversed. Upon reaching the site of the former camp they found that a curious change had taken place in the ravine bottom. The round hole melted by the heat of their camp-fire was very considerably enlarged, not sidewise, but lengthwise, and the ice had disappeared—thawed away completely, showing the bare rock walls of a narrow crevice on either side, though there was still a miniature torrent racing along at the bottom of the crack.
By reason of these changes it was no longer necessary to use the rope as a means of descent into the depths. At its up-mountain end the ice-freed crevice ran out in a series of rude, stair-like steps, down which it was easy to scramble. It was Dick who led the way into the cave, after they had unloaded the burros and picketed them.
“Gee! all my pretty ice stalactites are melted and gone,” he lamented; and then: “Whew! feel that current of warm air, will you? No wonder the ice has disappeared. Where do you suppose the warm wind is coming from?”
His assertion concerning the disappearance of the ice decorations was verified when they got far enough down to get a glimpse into the great chamber he had seen and tried to describe after his two companions had hauled him out of the well hole at the end of the picket rope. There was no ice to be seen anywhere, though the walls were still wet in spots as from some melting reservoir overhead.
Larry lighted a candle and began to examine the walls of the chamber, and Dick laughed.
“Once a prospector, always a prospector,” he said jokingly. “Expecting to find a bonanza down here, old scout?”
“Not quite,” Larry answered. “I was just wondering if this is a water-cut canyon—or was once, before it got filled up and covered over.”
“What else would it be?” Purdick asked.
“I’m not much of a geologist,” Larry returned, “but we all know this: that every mineral vein in the world was once just a crack in the rocks that got filled up at some later time with gangue matter and mineral-bearing stuff. It just occurred to me to wonder if this isn’t one of the cracks that failed to get filled up—in this part of it, at least.”
“You couldn’t tell,” Dick put in.
“No; not positively, of course. But I believe I’m right, just the same. This wall rock doesn’t show any trace of water-wearing. It’s as clean as if the crack had been split open only yesterday.”
Dick laughed. “Let’s make the geology a little more practical and go on. I’d like to see how far this thing extends, and what makes the warm wind.”
Their passage through the crevice was unobstructed for quite a considerable distance. Slowly the daylight from the crack-like opening in the ravine bottom receded, growing fainter and fainter until at length it disappeared entirely and they were dependent upon the candle to light their way. And still the crevice held on, going deeper and deeper into the mountain, narrowing in some places to tunnel width, and then widening out again into a spacious corridor.
They had gone possibly a quarter of a mile from the ravine entrance, though in the silence and darkness it seemed like a much greater distance, when Larry called a halt.
“Hold up a minute, fellows,” he cautioned. “We’re getting too far away from our base of supplies. After what we found out this morning, it won’t do to leave the jacks and all our belongings sticking around where anybody can pick them up and walk off with them.”
“Gee! I forgot all about that,” said Dick. “Let’s hurry back. Maybe those crooks have cleaned us out already!”
Purdick had the candle at the moment and was digging with the pick end of the geologist’s hammer at a soft streak of something in the left-hand wall.
“I wish we had another candle,” said he. “I’d like to stay here long enough to see what this is. It looks like a small vein of galena.”
“Never mind that now!” Dick exclaimed. “We can come back again, if we want to. We mustn’t leave our traps alone another minute!”
Hurrying as well as they could over the broken stone floor of the crevice, and stumbling now and again into the small torrent that was coursing through it, they won back to the daylight crack and climbed out. Their alarm had been needless. The jacks were grazing peacefully in the ravine, and the camp dunnage was lying just as they had left it.
Dick laughed rather shamefacedly.
“What is there about an underground job to make a fellow get panicky all in a minute?” he asked. “When you mentioned what might happen up here while we were all down yonder in that cellar, I could just see those three crooks digging out through the woods with every last thing we had in the world.”
“Umph!” said the practical-minded Larry. “Great thing to have a vivid imagination. Got enough of the exploring, or do you want to go back?”
“I’d like to go back,” Purdick asserted. “I more than half believe that I found a vein of mineral just as you fellows turned in the fire alarm.”
Larry was looking down at the rude flight of natural steps up which they had just clambered in getting out of the crevice.
“If you fellows think it’s worth while, I believe we can get the jacks down there,” he suggested. “If we do that, we can carry the dunnage down and load the jacks in the cave.”
“And take ’em with us?” Dick said.
“Why, yes, as far as we go—or as long as the going is possible for them. Why not?”
“There isn’t any ‘why not,’” Dick broke out, with a swift return of the exploring enthusiasm; and he and Purdick went to catch the burros.
But after the little beasts had been brought to the head of the precipitous stairway, the old adage, that one man can lead a horse to water, but twenty can’t make him drink, seemed to apply to donkeys as well as to horses. Fishbait shied and braced himself like the end man on a tug-of-war rope, and Lop-Ear, taking the cue from his file leader, did the same.
Now there certainly wasn’t, or wouldn’t appear to be, any sufficient reason for going to any great amount of trouble to get the burros down into the cave; but human beings are curious creatures, in a good many ways. Realizing fully that, in all probability, the game wasn’t at all worth the candle, the three set their heads determinedly upon getting the pack animals underground, and the more the jacks held back, the more determined they became. So, after a good deal of pulling and hauling and pushing and heaving, the little pack animals were finally got down to the comparatively level floor of the crevice, the packs—less cumbersome now because the provisions were running low—were adjusted, a couple of candles were lighted, and once more the exploring expedition—which had now become a caravan—moved forward.
Once in the depths, the burros gave no more trouble; indeed, as Dick remarked, they trudged along much as if they had been reared as mine mules. Reaching their “farthest north” of the previous exploration, they stopped long enough to let Purdick examine his galena find, which turned out to be, not galena, but a small pocket of pyrites not worth bothering with.
Beyond this point the slit in the rock narrowed again, and became quite tortuous in its course; so narrow and so crooked in places that they had some trouble in getting the loaded jacks through. The torrenting stream which had been underfoot in the first few hundred yards had now taken to disappearing and reappearing, dodging underground and then coming out again to flow for a time through a channel in the floor of the cavern. The roof of the natural tunnel, ten or twelve feet high where they had entered it, now came down in some places so low that they could reach up and touch it with their hands; touch it, and also see what it was made of.
“I don’t much like the looks of this stuff overhead,” Larry said, holding his candle up to light the low-hanging roof. “You can see what it is: nothing but loose rocks and forest rubbish that has been blown or washed in from the surface. If it should take a notion to fall down and plug this runway, we’d be strictly out of the fight.”
“You said something then,” said Dick. “Here’s hoping she doesn’t take the notion—not while we’re in here, anyway.”
Now this was a good hope, but in making it Dick failed to put enough staying power in it. At one of the tightest places in the narrow passage, where the walls were pinched together and the roof was hardly man-head high, Dick, who was tail-ender in the procession of three and was leading Lop-Ear, was brought up standing by a sudden pull on the halter from behind.
Facing around to let his candle show him what the sudden halt meant, he saw that Lop-Ear, or his pack, or both, were stuck in the passage. It didn’t seem to be a very bad stick, so he hunted up a niche to put the candle in, wrapped the hackamore strap around his hands, and braced himself for a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together.
The scheme worked all right, so far as starting the stopped rear-guard was concerned. While Dick pulled manfully, the little pack-beast dug its hoofs in, humped its back, and came through the squeeze triumphantly. But the triumph was short-lived. At the releasing of the resistance to his pull, Dick had to run backward a few steps to recover his balance. The little involuntary backward run was probably all that saved his life, as well as that of the burro. For that was the precise instant when the weak-kneed hope that Dick had offered turned loose its hold: there was a rumbling sound like a huge earth sigh, a choking rush of dust-laden air, and the tunnel roof, in the exact spot where the high-piled jack load had touched it, had fallen in and plugged the passage.
Dick yelled promptly to his companions, who had passed out of sight around the next turn in the corridor, and they both came back to see what was wanted. Dick held his candle up to show them the plugged passage.
“Humph!” said Larry; “that does settle it. We’re trapped for fair, I should say. How did it happen?”
Dick explained. “Lop-Ear was stuck and I pulled on the halter to help him through. I guess he humped himself so hard that the pack knocked against the roof and loosened it. I wonder how long it’s going to take us to dig our way out?”
Larry shook his head. “That’s a horse—or a donkey—of another color. Depends on how much of the stuff has fallen. Purdy, run on ahead to where we left Fishbait and get the pick and shovel from his pack.”
When the digging tools were brought, they attacked the plug manfully, spelling one another with the pick and shovel. A full hour of the hardest kind of work got them nowhere. Apparently there was no end to the amount of broken rock and earth mould that had fallen in; and, worse than that, they had no place to put the stuff as they dug it out. All they could do was to pile it up behind them as they dug, and that merely shifted the obstructing plug from one place to another.
“They say that curiosity killed the cat,” said Purdick, at the end of the hour of hard labor, when they sat down on the pile of débris for a breathing spell. “If I hadn’t been so curious about that pocket of pyrites and persuaded you fellows to come back into this hole——”
“Nothing like that,” Dick cut in promptly. “If there’s any blame lying around loose, it’s mine. But taking the blame doesn’t get us out of here. What do you say, Larry?”
“There doesn’t seem to be much left to say—only more of the same. We’re in here, and we’ve got to dig our way out, if it takes a month of Sundays.”
“Huh!” Dick grunted. “The grub won’t last for more than two Sundays, if it does that; and we can’t feed the jacks on bacon and canned stuff.”
“Well,” said Larry, “you tell it. What else is there to do?”
Dick didn’t tell it, but Purdick did.
“There was a warm current of air blowing through here before that stuff fell down and stopped the hole; we all noticed it. Maybe there is another way out, at the farther end of this thing.”
“Say, that sounds like a piece of sure-enough common sense,” said Larry, jumping up. “Why didn’t we think of that before? Let’s try for it, anyhow, before we wear ourselves out with any more of the digging.”
Suiting the action to the word, they clambered back over the pile of detritus they had heaped up and got the caravan in trail again. Whatever the cavern lacked in width—though now they found it wide enough in most places—it made up in length. For hours, as it seemed to them, they wandered on and on, sometimes along level passages, but oftener going down-hill.
It was far past noon when they stopped to eat a bite of cold meat and bread left over from the breakfast cooking, and still there appeared to be no end to the crevice.
“Good goodness! we must have come miles through this thing,” Dick exclaimed, munching a mouthful of the corn-bread sandwich. “If we have to go back and dig out the way we came in——”
“Here’s hoping mighty hard that we won’t have to do that,” Larry interrupted. “How’s your hope, Purdy?”
Purdick’s grin looked pale, but that was only because the candle light was poor.
“I’m still betting on that warm wind that we felt when we first came in,” he said. “That came from outdoors somewhere; it must have.”
“All right; let’s go find it,” said Larry, bolting his last mouthful; and the march into the black depths was resumed.
Not for very long, however. A few hundred feet beyond their halting place they came to an obstacle “right,” as Dick named it. In a narrow passage which led to a much larger space beyond, a huge boulder had fallen in from above, leaving only a rat-hole, so to speak, between its bulk and one side of the tunnel; a space through which they could look, with the help of the candles, but through which not even little Purdick could squeeze himself.
That brought on more talk; pretty serious talk. Dick was for turning back and making another desperate assault on the plug that Lop-Ear’s struggles had brought down, and his urgings would have prevailed had not Purdick, who was staring through the narrow slit ahead, this time without the aid of the candles, suddenly broke in.
“Say, fellows! I believe I can see something like a glimmer of daylight ahead! Come here and look!”
They all looked, putting the lighted candles well in the background. What they saw was hardly daylight; it was nothing more than a grayish sort of dusk. But they knew perfectly well that it must come from daylight somewhere.
“That answers the question for us,” said Larry definitely. “We have the hammer and drills and dynamite. We can drill and blast this rock in less time than it will take us to go all the way back and dig out through that roof slide. What do you say?”
They didn’t say, particularly. They got out the tools and fell to work. It turned out to be a most grueling job, drilling a shot hole in the big stone. There was hardly room in which to swing the hammer properly, and the one who was “striking” could keep it up for only a few minutes at a time. But the sight of the shadowy illumination beyond the obstacle kept them going, and they wouldn’t give up, didn’t give up or stop, only once for the evening meal, until they had the hole drilled well into the center of the boulder.
Next came the loading and firing, and that, too, brought on more talk. They knew that the gases liberated by the exploding dynamite would, unless there were a ventilating outlet somewhere beyond, fill the cavern and stifle them. By this time it was well on into the night, and it was Larry’s suggestion that they load the hole in readiness for firing, and leave it until morning.
“We’re too tired to chew off any more excitement to-night,” was the way he put it; so they led the jacks back to one of the larger chambers where the peek-a-boo torrent, as Dick called it, took what appeared to be its final dive underground, moved their packs, and, unrolling the blankets, turned in on the hard floor to sleep as they could.
It was half-past five in the morning when Larry’s self-tripping mental alarm clock went off, and he got up and roused his two companions.
“Time’s up,” he said. “Help me get the mules and the stuff a little farther back out of the way and we’ll shoot the moon.”
They made their preparations for the big shot with some little trepidation. Dick, who, because his father was a mine owner as well as a railroad manager, knew the most about underground mining, was the mainstay of the other two.
“We needn’t be nervous,” he said. “Half the time the miners don’t take the trouble to go back very far in a tunnel, even when they fire a whole round of blasts. What you do is to hold your mouth open and cover your ears with your hands. And with all these crookings there’s no fear of flying rocks.”
When everything was as ready as they knew how to make it, Larry took the lighted candle and went to put fire to the fuse, which they had cut long enough to give the firer plenty of time to rejoin his companions. When he came back, the hand that held the candle was shaking a little, in spite of all he could do. “She’s going,” he announced, and then they blew the candles out and cowered against the nearest rock wall in the black darkness to wait for the shock.
To all three it seemed as if the waiting interval would never end. Time, at such a crisis, moves as if it were leaden-winged. Dick had his mouth open, but he held his breath until he was about ready to burst. “Gracious!” he gasped, “did we cut that fuse a mile long?”
If either Larry or Purdick made any reply there were no ears to hear it. The fire had reached the dynamite at last. There was a sucking blast of air that seemed to be trying to tear them loose and fling them back into the rearward depths, a noise that was like a collision of worlds, and then a sickening gust of the powder fumes to warn them not to be in too much of a hurry to run forward to see what the big blast had accomplished.
They didn’t hurry. After a wait of about five minutes, Larry relighted his candle, and they waited again until the candle flame was burning brightly to show that the deadly fumes were dissipating. Then they crept forward cautiously. Around the last of the crooking turns in the passage they found a litter of broken rock, and they were almost afraid to look into the boulder nest. What if the shock had brought down the roof, and so trapped them more securely than ever?
It was Dick who got the first look. “Hooray!” he yelled. “We did it! She’s wide open—you could drive a wagon through!”
In a hush of eager expectancy they pressed forward over the pile of shattered rock. Just beyond the place where the boulder had stopped the way, the cavern made an abrupt turn to the left, and at a little distance beyond the turn they came out into the blessed daylight at the mouth of what appeared to be marvelously like a man-made tunnel.
Gasping and gulping down the fresh morning air into their gas-filled lungs, they stood for a moment in the tunnel mouth and looked around them. In the foreground there was a deep gulch, and the slope facing the tunnel and its backgrounding cliff looked singularly like a small mine dump. Purdick was staring down into the gorge as one suddenly transfixed. When he found speech it was to say, like a person talking in his sleep: “I remember now, it was right down there that I found that piece of rotten quartz—the piece with the gold in it.”
When he said that, Dick began to look around. A moment later he dragged Purdick and Larry back into the tunnel and pointed upward and outward. “Look!” he whispered, with awe in his voice.
The tunnel mouth faced east, and the sun was just rising over the opposite mountain to shine full in upon them. In the jagged upper arch of the tunnel lip, untouched, as it seemed, by the outrush of gases from the big blast, a spider’s web, a perfect wheel, was suspended, and at the hub of the wheel sat a great spider waiting for its prey. And as the rays of the morning sun fell upon the web, the body of the spider hung like a drop of molten gold in a net of silver gossamer. Dick’s voice sank to less than a whisper.
“The golden spider!” he breathed. “Good goodness, fellows—are we awake, or just dreaming!”