The floor consisted of halves of tree trunks, flat above and rounded on the under side. Eagerly Ross and Leslie raised the central plank and both cried out simultaneously, for the dynamite filled the space beneath up to the level of the floor. "And to think!" muttered Ross, "that I have not thought of this before--didn't think of it when I saw Sandy peering up here." Leslie sat back on his heels and mopped his face. "Pretty cute of 'em to think of a thing like this," he conceded. "I should have taken the sticks as far away as I could have carried them had I been doing it, and considered that the farther I went the better for my plans." "It's Sandy," declared Ross. "Steele has told me a dozen times that he's the brains of the clan." It did not take the trio long to restore the dynamite to its box, for Ross, going down to the cabin, led a delighted Weimer through the sunshine up to the tool house, and Weimer willingly devoted his great strength to the task. "And," insisted Leslie when their task was completed, "now for putting the shot that shall tell Miners' Camp that we're livelier than ever over here." As long as the trail was closed and the McKenzies could not return, the boys reasoned, it would be a lark to inform them in this way of the failure of their project. "Even if they have gone on to Cody," suggested Ross, "Bill Travers might get the news to 'em by way of the stages." "But you see," ruefully from Leslie, "probably there's no one except themselves that knows of our plight. They may not have told any one of the theft of the sticks." "Well, we'll set off a blast that will tell every one that they're found, anyway!" retorted Ross. "And we'll do it in the morning before the storm comes on," for the brilliancy of the sunlight had long been dimmed by heavy banks of clouds rolling in from the northwest. Weimer entered into the project with the abandon of a child, and it was he who suggested the location of the "shot." "Nicht on Crosby," he said shaking his head. "Dot might upset dot tunnel. Put it mit Soapweed Ledge und see vat comes." The boys did not ask what Weimer meant. Anything they did not understand they laid to his "Dutch lingo," but they immediately adopted the suggestion concerning Soapweed Ledge, and in the morning carried enough sticks across the valley to plant a respectable "mine," as Ross called it, beneath one of the huge rocks which jutted out from the side of the mountain that bounded the valley on the north. This mountain rose four thousand feet above Meadow Creek, its head lost in the snow clouds that now threatened to submerge the valley. On the face of the mountain lay a great body of snow, especially heavy above the timber-line, which here, because of the great elevation of the valley itself, was only a few hundred feet above the base of any mountain.