text: CHAPTER XXIII 
  
  A SLIDE DOWN THE MOUNTAIN SIDE 
  
  "My gracious, Dick! It sure is snowing some now!" 
  
  "Yes, and it is getting colder every minute." 
  
  "If we don't get out of the mountains putty quick we'll be snowed in," came from Jack Wumble. 
  
  "Did you calkerlate to git back to Dawson afore winter sot in?" inquired Ike Furner, curiously. 
  
  "Why of course!" cried Sam. 
  
  "I don't see how you are goin' to make it." 
  
  "Oh, we must get back," said Dick. "If only we could find Tom," he added, with a sigh. 
  
  It was fully an hour after they had left the campfire at the entrance to the cave of the mountain. They had walked to the chasm where they thought Tom might have had a tumble and crossed and recrossed it several times. But they had found no traces of the missing Rover boy. 
  
  "If only we knew whether he went down in that opening!" said Sam, for at least the tenth time. "Dick, do you suppose we can climb down into it?" 
  
  "Not without a rope, Sam. The sides are too steep and slippery." 
  
  Time and again they called down. But no answer came back. If Tom was down there he was either unconscious or dead. 
  
  And now it had begun to snow harder than ever. The air was so full of the white flakes that they could not see ten feet in any direction. It was a typical Alaskan snowstorm. There was a sweep to the wind that found the very marrow of their bones. 