Whatever had been done with Blaisdell and his target-holder, it is certain that no alarm was ever answered more promptly than that given by the descending boulder. Instantly the big camp began to buzz like a nest of disturbed hornets. With a final leap the bounding stone crashed into a cement shed, sending a gray cloud of the “Portland” skyward much as if a charge of dynamite had been exploded under it. And now men came running from all directions, some of them with guns.
Luckily for the two scouts, the foresting on this part of the mountain side was fairly dense. At the crack of a rifle and the whine of a bullet from below, they forgot their weariness and ducked and ran diagonally up the slope. At the first chance they had to look back, they saw some half-dozen of the armed men coming on in hot pursuit. And a scant five hundred yards or so was all the start they had.
“Hold your wind, and for pity’s sake don’t stumble!” Larry gasped. “Here’s where we’ve got to dig for it! Those fellows never will believe that we didn’t roll that stone on purpose!”
For the first few breath-cutting minutes their capture seemed fairly inevitable. Their pursuers were fresh, while they, themselves, were almost in the last ditch of fatigue, so far as a foot-race was concerned. Once, indeed, they raced upon the raw edge of the catastrophe. A thinly wooded bit of ground that they were forced to cross gave one of the pursuers a chance to come within gunshot range and they both heard his shouted, “Stop, or I’ll fire!” a command which was quickly followed by the report of a gun. But the man’s aim—if he had really taken any—was bad, and a last-gasp spurt carried the fugitives once more into the welcome shelter of the denser wooding.
From that on, with aching muscles protesting agonizingly at every step, they slowly distanced their pursuers, leading the chase up and on, higher and farther into the heavy timber on the approach to the bald heights where no timber grew. Not until the dusk was rising from the gulches could they be certain that they had shaken off the pursuit; and it was then that Dickie Maxwell threw himself on his back under the trees, white, spent and gasping.
“I’m all in, Larry!” he panted. “I couldn’t make another mile if my life depended on it! Go on, if you can find the way in the dark, and leave me. The news doesn’t need two mouths to tell it.”
But Larry wasn’t built that way. Stiff and sore as he was himself, he knelt over the spent one, massaging and kneading the stiffened muscles and giving Dick a trainer’s manhandling that made him cry out under the very roughness of it.
“Oh, gee!—let up!” pleaded the squirming sufferer. “I’ll try it another whirl if you’ll quit. I’d rather ache and go on than to be beaten to death and take it lying down!”
With the shades of night creeping ghost-like through the solemn forest they hit the invisible trail again; heading westward and ever westward, rolling down steep hillsides into deep gulches, and crawling painfully up the corresponding steep on the other side, stumbling blindly over fallen trees and rocks; going on and on after their feet and legs were so numb and stiff that they could hardly be sure they had any, and with their eyes, for which they had small use in the darkness, leaden heavy with sleep.