To begin with, he felt the necessity of getting out of the circumscribing valley and of taking his bearings.  He wished to learn where the opening through which he had fallen was situated.  It was no difficult matter to work his way upward until he found himself up on a level with the main plateau.  There, his view, although broken and interrupted in many directions, was quite extended in others, and his eye roamed over a large extent of that broken section of the country.  He was utterly unable to recognize anything he saw, but he was confident that he was no great distance from the spot for which he was searching.  It was only through the entrance that he could hold communication with Mickey, whenever the way should be left clear for him to do so.  But he was fully mindful of the necessity for caution in every movement.

It was not to be supposed that the Apaches, having struck what might be called a gold-mine, intended to abandon it at the very time the richest of results were promised.  And so, after long deliberation, the boy decided upon the direction in which the opening lay, and he made toward a small peak from which, in case his calculations were correct, he knew he would see it.  Strange to say, his reckoning was correct in this instance; and when he stealthily made his way to the elevation and looked down over the slope, he saw the clump of bushes covering the “skylight,” not more than a hundred yards distant.

He saw something else, which was not quite so pleasant.  Six Apache warriors were guarding the same entrance.

“I wonder if they think Mickey expects to make a jump up through there!” was the thought which came to Fred, as he peered down upon the savages, and counted them over several times.  “I don’t see what they are to gain by waiting there, unless they mean to go down pretty soon.”

He could not be too careful in the vicinity of such characters, and, stretching out flat upon his face, he peeped over the top, taking the precaution first to remove his cap, and then to permit no more of his head than was indispensable to appear above the surface.  The six redskins were lounging in as many different lazy attitudes.  One seemed sound asleep, with his face turned to the ground, and looking like a warrior that had fallen from some balloon, and, striking on his stomach, lay just as he was flattened out.  Another was half-sitting and half-reclining, smoking a pipe with a very long stem.  His face was directly toward Fred, who noticed that his eyes were cast downward, as though he were gazing into the bowl of his pipe, while Fred could plainly see the ugly lips, as they parted at intervals and emitted their pulls in a fashion as indolent as that of some wealthy Turk.  A third was seated a little further off, examining his rifle, which he had probably injured in some way, and which occupied his attention to the exclusion of everything else.

The bushes surrounding the opening had been torn away, although it was difficult to conceive what the Indians expected to accomplish by such an act, as it only served to make them plainer targets to the Irishman, whenever he chose to crack away from below.