"Come up to the camp," the masculine voice said, presently. "I'll turn the boy over to you, but you can't go back to your cabin to-night."
"Are you going to keep me here against my will?" asked the trembling old voice.
"You have seen and heard too much," was the almost brutal rejoinder.
There was a rattle of pebbles as footsteps moved along the rocky surface of the slope. From above came the shrill cry of a child.
"I don't know of any better time to move up and take a peep at the camp of the man who crossed the sea to steal a child," Ned mused. "I wish Frank and Dode would come, but if they don't I'll have to take chances on going alone."
Keeping those in front of him as guides, Ned crept along the slope. More than once a loose pebble rolled with a great noise from under his feet, but those ahead seemed to pay no attention to these evidences of pursuit.
When, perhaps, two hundred paces up the slope the sounds above the boy ceased. The night was still, save for the rustling and creeping of the creatures of the air and the forest. For a long time not a sound indicative of the presence of human life was heard, then a woman's cry of fright came from above.
Ned was about to hasten forward when a voice came to his ears from the darkness.
"We can't permit either of them to leave!" the low, well-modulated voice he had heard before that night said. "Even if we get away with the prince, their stories would ruin us. There is no knowing how soon the gabblings of the old woman might reach the ears of the adherents of the prince."
"Then you propose—"