The lad was in the very act of leaving the ravine, when his step was arrested by a sound too distinct to be mistaken. It was not imagination this time, and he paused to identify it. The sound was faint and of the nature of a jarring or murmur. He suspected that it was caused by horses' hoofs, and he listened but a few minutes when he became certain that such was the fact.
“There must be a big lot of them,” he thought, as he listened to the sound growing plainer and plainer every minute. “I wonder if Lone Wolf and his men have not done what they started to do and are going round home again?”
Judging from the clamping hoofs, such might have been the case. At all events, there was every reason for believing that a party of horsemen were in the ravine and that they were headed in his direction.
Fred made up his mind to wait where he was until they passed by. He had no fear of being seen, when the opportunity for hiding was all that could be desired, and, lying flat upon his face, he awaited the result.
Nearer and nearer came the tramp, tramp, the noise of hoofs mingling in a dull thud that sounded oddly in the stillness of the night to the watching and listening lad.
“Here they come,” he muttered, before he saw them; but the words were hardly out of his mouth when a shadowy figure came into view, instantly followed by a score of others, all mingling and blending in one indistinguishable mass.
The forms of animals and riders were plainly discernible, but they came in too promiscuous fashion to be counted, and they were gone almost as soon as they were seen. Fred was confident that thirty warriors galloped by him in the stillness of the night.
“I believe it was Lone Wolf and some of his men,” he muttered, as he clambered down from his place among the rocks. Having been thoroughly awakened by what he had seen, he determined to walk an hour or more longer, for he felt that the best time for him to journey was during the protecting darkness of night.
“There ain't anybody to make me get up early,” he reasoned, “and when I go to sleep I can stick to it as long as I want to. It seems to me that if I walk all I can tonight, and keep at it the most of tomorrow, I ought to be somewhere near the place where we came in among these mountains. Then a day or two's tramping over the back trail will take me pretty nearly to New Boston—that is, if nobody gobbles me up. I've got a rough road before me, but God has guided me thus far, and I'll trust him clean through. I've had some wonderful escapes to tell about—”
He was too wide awake and too much on the alert to forget precisely where he was, or to fail to take in whatever should occur of an alarming nature. That which now startled him and suddenly cut short his musings was the sound of a horse's hoofs, close behind him.