A snore answered him. Jerry Utway spread his mackinaw across the least rough patch of floor he could find, stretched out his full length with feet toward the fire, and closed his weary eyes. “Nothing at all!” he murmured drowsily. In five minutes he was asleep.
CHAPTER XVI
HARE AND HOUNDS
Jake Utway stirred uneasily. Something was digging into his hip, bluntly shoving him back to consciousness. He sat up. Was it Reveille so soon? But this wasn’t Tent Ten! For a moment he stared, sticky-eyed, into a small fireplace heaped with flaky white wood-ash. In a flash it came back to him—the escape from Lenape; the moonlight march with their captive, Sherlock; the discovery of the shack in the woods—— Jake groaned softly, and stretched his cramped body.
“Anybody awake?” he asked drowsily. “Boy, but I’m stiff! This log floor—maybe I shouldn’t have slept against the grain of the wood!”
A loud sneeze at his side answered him, followed by a series of sniffles and a second sneeze. He turned and discovered Sherlock Jones, with tears in his pale eyes, rubbing his nose with a grimy handkerchief.
“Bad coad!” explained the ex-detective with another sneeze. It was plain that Sherlock was not made of the stuff of outlaw heroes. Reddened eyes, a dripping nose, and chattering teeth were the penalties of his moonlight jaunt and his night in the backwoods hut. “Very dasty coad! Say, who pud this thig over be?” Sherlock had noticed for the first time that a norfolk jacket had been carefully thrown over his body some time in the night. It was the garment worn by Burk, who had evidently tucked it about the sleeping boy as a protection against the night breezes that penetrated through the cracks in the floor of the hut. “Where’s Bister Burk? Oh, there you are. A-choo! Thags very buch, Bister Burk. You bust have been coad yourself!”
“Forget it, old man!” Burk rolled over and yawned. “Sorry you have a cold, though.” Of a sudden the man sprang up. “Where’s the other fellow?” he cried.
Jake looked about him. Jerry was not in the little room.
“Where’s your brother? Did he tell you he was going out?”
“Why, no!” said Jake. “He must be somewhere around, though. He can’t have gone far.”