The boys talked for some moments, sitting on the hard, white sand at the side of the machines. They had collected quite a quantity of dry driftwood, and were now waiting for Jimmie to return from his excursion in search of a safe and convenient cook-room.
“Look here, Ben,” Carl said in a moment, “we don’t want to go away and leave the machines, not even for a minute, not even if we are in a lonely spot, but some one ought to go and look for Jimmie. You know there’s a lot of places a boy might fall into in these mountain caverns!”
“All right,” Ben said, rising from the ground, “I’ll go and wake Kit. He was so sleepy when I brought the _Bertha_ down that I lifted him out of the seat and laid him away against a wall! I don’t think he ever knew when I took him off the machine. I’ll give him a searchlight and send him to look after Jimmie.”
“Where did you put him?” asked Carl, “I’ll go and wake him up.”
“On a bed of nice hard, white sand close to the south wall,” replied Ben. “There’s an old coat which I had to wrap around my shoulders in the higher altitudes under his head. Bring that along, too; we’ll need it later.”
Carl went away whistling with his hands in his pockets, taking great breaths of fresh mountain air into his lungs, and believing that he was about the happiest boy on the face of the earth. It was all so different from the crowded streets of New York! In a moment Ben heard him calling.
“You must have mislaid him!” the boy said. “Here’s the coat, but the kid isn’t here! It looks like there’d been a scrap here on the sand. Perhaps a mountain lion carried him off.”
Ben sprang to his feet and rushed out to Carl.
When the old hag glanced cautiously about the disreputable apartment, Havens began to hope that the bribe of twenty thousand dollars which he had offered her might secure his release. It seemed to him that the old woman was strongly tempted to accept the money.
“You can do it easy enough,” the young millionaire said, as the woman helped herself to a drink of liquor and restored the bottle to a pocket. “You can get me out of here without danger to yourself, and then you can disappear with the money. No one will ever know.”
Havens had been born and reared in New York. Well he knew the law of club and fang which governed the underworld on the East Side. He knew that death follows betrayal as surely as night follows day. He understood that the old woman was taking long chances in even considering his release.