“Then——”
“We’ll tell you everything later. In the meantime, you can come along with us and take your chance like the rest. But if you make one move to give us away——” His unspoken words carried a threat that Sherlock did not dare ignore.
“I’ll come!” Young Detective Jones was feeling better already. After all, if he could not expose a desperate criminal, the next most exciting thing was joining that criminal’s band in an effort to baffle the forces of the law. “Here, Jerry, take your mackinaw. I feel warm enough.”
“Then let’s get going again,” urged Jake, rising. “We can’t stay here all night; we’ll get too stiff to move if we sit down any longer.”
Again they took the weary trail. Their steps now were slower; it took more effort for them to keep up a ringing, mile-eating stride. Down in his heart, the impatient Burk knew that he could not keep up the pace many hours longer; his brief rest at Lenape had not been enough to make up for the many days of starvation and exposure he had undergone. His prison life, too, had taken from him his old endurance; he was no longer the steel-muscled hunter he had been a year ago. And he realized that the twins, for several nights, had taken considerably less than their usual ration of sleep; their nightly forays had fatigued them, as he could tell by their actions, and no doubt the attendant excitement had also told upon them. One cannot live in an atmosphere of mysterious incidents and midnight captures without paying for them in physical strain. And Sherlock, the least hardy of them all, had been trussed up tightly for half a day, and was in no condition to endure the demands of a long hike in the dark.
Left—right—left! The quartette, strung along the trail in Indian file, lifted their feet more leadenly as one endless mile followed another. The moon was right overhead now; they were a long way from Lenape, marching somewhere on the flank of the mountains. Only the sound of their footsteps attended them, except now and then the rasping hunting-cry of an owl, that nocturnal marauder, and once, up the ridge, the short bark of a fox. Several times they crossed the beds of swift hill-streams, and once they floundered about in a spreading thicket of rhododendrons for some minutes before Jerry, in the lead, found the trail again.
Sherlock Jones felt that he could not go another step. He was shivering with the cold; if only they would stop this eternal, steady plodding, mile after mile, and light a fire! Left—right—— He wondered if the twins had brought any food on this mad trip; he could see that they were hampered neither by provisions nor blankets—travelling light, as Jerry had said. What would they eat? When would they stop? Were they going to keep on this way for a thousand years, forever, putting one foot in front of the other, with never a word—— A tear trickled down Sherlock’s grimy cheek. He kept on.
The strain of the past few days was putting its mark upon the twins. At last Jerry paused in a little clear space beside a brook. Jake marched past him, stumbled over a fallen branch, and almost fell. He turned his face to them, white in the moonlight, and muttered drowsily, “Guess I was asleep! I’ve heard of fellows falling asleep on their feet, but this is the first time it ever happened to me! Where are we?”
The rest of the party halted. “I calculate we’ve done about twelve miles since we left your camp,” said Burk. “If we’ve kept straight south, we should be a good distance away. I think you’ve been heading right, because we’ve kept to the side of the mountain all the time. Wallistown ought to be in striking distance, over that way; but I think we should try to keep to the hills—too dangerous to get closer to town. Now, I can see that you chaps are pretty well fagged out. You’ve stood the march like soldiers, and not a word of complaint; but it’s clear to me we can’t get any farther to-night. We’ll have to lay up until to-morrow evening. Naturally I want to get to Canoe Mountain as soon as possible, but it won’t do to start our trip with too big a jump. If we went much farther to-night, we’d bite off more than we could chew—we’d be sore and laid up with blisters and aches, and in no shape to put up a good race. I’m the least tired of any of us. What do you say if I push ahead and try to locate a place to stop?”
The twins agreed; Sherlock had no breath to spare for talk. Burk took a hitch in his corduroys, waved his hand, and springing across the brook, vanished beyond, up the trail.