An hour passed. It was almost sunrise, and there was no sign of the trappers on the river. The boys grew nervous with dread and anxiety. The tree-tops began to glitter with sunlight. It was almost six o'clock.
"Could they have gone some other way?" asked Fred uneasily, staring upstream.
At that very moment Macgregor grasped his arm and pointed down the river. Two small objects had appeared round a bend, half a mile below. They were certainly canoes, making slow headway against the stiff current, but they were too far away for the boys to make them out plainly. Minute by minute they grew nearer.
"The front one's a Peterboro!" said Mac. "There's one man in it, and two in the other. I think I can see the fox cage."
Without doubt it was the trappers. The young prospectors slipped back through the thickets, almost to the upper end of the trail, and concealed themselves in the hemlocks.
"Above all things, try to get hold of their guns!" said Horace.
For a long while they waited in terrible suspense. They could not see the landing, nor at first could they hear anything, for the tumbling water of the rapids roared in their ears. After what seemed almost an hour, stumbling footsteps sounded near by on the trail, and the bow of the Peterboro hove in sight. A man was carrying it on his head; he steadied it with one hand, and in the other grasped a gun—Horace's repeating rifle.
When he was almost within arm's reach, Mac sprang and tackled him low like a football player. The trapper dropped the gun with a startled yell, and went over headlong into the hemlocks—canoe and all.
Horace leaped out to seize the gun that the man had dropped. Before he could touch it, the second trapper rushed up the trail with his rifle clubbed. Fred struck out at him with his bludgeon. The blow missed the fellow's head, and fell on his arm. Down clattered the rifle, discharging as it fell. The trapper made a frantic leap aside, and disappeared into the bushes.
As Fred snatched up the rifle, he caught a glimpse of the third trapper, the wiry half-breed, hastening up the path.