“Dodge back!” suddenly snapped Ned, as he seized hold of Jimmy and half-pulled him along; while Harry and Jack, although they did not understand what it was all about, made haste to tumble pellmell in the direction the scout master was dragging the fourth chum.
A gun cracked and chips of stone flew up very close to their feet. This was quite enough to tell the others what sort of danger menaced them. It doubtless acted as a spur to hasten their departure from the open, for in another moment they were to be seen huddled under a shelf of rock, each fellow eagerly handling his rifle as though ready to give a good account of himself.
“Was it just one man made us skip out like all that?” Jimmy wanted to know, for he was proud, and the thought would have come back to him many times later on, to cause heartburnings and keen regrets.
“No, there was a bunch of them there,” Ned informed them. “I recognized Ally Sloper, Coyote Smith and Lefty Louie. There was another big man along, a regular giant, with a bushy head of hair and the look of a terror!”
“Wow! I wonder now if that wasn’t Amos’s awful dad?” Jimmy exclaimed.
“But what are we going to do about it, Ned?” Harry wanted to know. “Here we are, caught in a little rat-trap, seems like. If we start to run out of this canyon, how do we know what they’ll do? They’ve shot once already and, perhaps, stand ready to give us a volley. This is a bad job, seems to me. See what your everlasting teasing of Ned gets us into, Jimmy.”
“Well, we ain’t all dead yet, are we?” the other naively wanted to know, “and our guns ought to shoot just as straight as the ones they handle, which I reckon now are only the kind punchers carry, and no good at a distance. Chirk up, Harry, and listen to what Ned’s goin’ to say.”
Instead of speaking Ned crept cautiously forward a little ways, and when he returned again, reported that so far as he could see the men on the ledge had disappeared.
“But that’s not saying they’re gone, is it?” asked Jack.
“I’m afraid not,” replied the scout master. “You see, they command the passage from up there on that ledge. If we try and go out, they can drop rocks down and give us a volley from their guns, while we wouldn’t be able to sight them.”