There was no answer to this fling, and Turner, lifting Bruce by the shoulders, dragged him into the adjoining room, the only remaining room of the cabin, with the exception of the garret.
When he had done this, he hunted up a piece of rope, with which he securely tied Browning’s hands and feet. Then he deliberately relighted his pipe, took down a long rifle from its rack, and, seating himself in the doorway in a rude, hickory-bottomed chair, he rested the rifle across his knees, and stared moodily off over the ridges, on which the moonlight now fell with silvery radiance.
CHAPTER VI—NELL RETURNS A KINDNESS
In the little room where Sam Turner had dragged him, Bruce came back at last to the land of sentient things. The moonlight, streaming through a crack in the chinked wall, fell on his white face. His head was racked with splitting pains, and a dull ache made itself unpleasantly felt in his shoulder.
When he sought to move his hands and feet, he found that they were tied. Then memory awakened, and he stared about at the cabin walls, trying to determine where he was, and just what had befallen him.
A heavy snore drew his attention, and he beheld the form of a man stretched across the doorway of his room. There was a rifle by the man’s side, and he had evidently placed himself there to guard against any attempt at escape.
All this was startling enough to Bruce Browning.
“And Merriwell! I was not able to get to him to warn him of his danger! I wonder what has befallen him?”
Almost his first clear thought was of Frank, and the peril which he believed threatened his friend.
He would have groaned aloud in the very agony of mental torture, if a wholesome fear had not restrained him.