“Why didn’t you follow the line to the end?” he asked, with a chuckle. “Then you would have come to the life saver.”
“I was so rattled for a moment that I did not think of that,” was the reply. “How did you come to be here?”
“I followed you,” replied the boy.
“And you have been lying out there in the thicket all the time I have been in the house?”
“Why, yes, of course.”
“Well, you did a good job,” Ned said, taking the boy by the hand. “The cowboy stunt you have been practicing so long came into good use at last.”
It was now getting quite dark, and lights showed in the house. From where the boys stood they could not see the lighted front windows, but only the reflections on the slope in front of the structure.
“I knew it would prove handy in time,” grinned Jimmie. “I caught this gazabo on the fly, eh?”
“I can’t understand how you managed it, in this thicket,” Ned said.
“There’s a clear space there where he leaped at you,” Jimmie said. “I saw him rising to spring and dropped it over his head, like a bag over a blind pig. What you goin’ to do with him, now you’ve got him?”