Jeek made no reply to the boys. Instead, they heard him giving instructions to Snadder and Blinky. The instructions were for these two to go back to the Jeek camp, get plenty to eat, and hurry back to this place to hold guard a while longer. Then he gave his attention to the boys in the hole.
“You kids might think you’re mighty wise, but you ain’t. If you had been you wouldn’t have come here. So, that’s that. Now, I say you’re going to pay for that dog or you’re going to stay here longer than you want. And you needn’t get any fancy ideas in your head that you’re going to escape, because you ain’t.”
The boys kept silence after Jeek had spoken, the others waiting for their leader, Frank, to carry on any negotiations.
“And, what’s more,” Jeek went on after a moment of waiting, “you’re not going to get nothing to eat nor nothing to drink until you’ve changed your bull-headed minds. Just put that down in your little notebook!”
CHAPTER XIX
CAPTURING THE CAPTORS
All was quiet above them in the cabin for a few seconds, except for the shuffling of feet to evidence the movement of the two crooks, Jeek and Fallon, toward the door.
“They’ll stay there without a bit to eat until they rot, or they’ll pay for that dog,” Jeek’s angry words came to the boys as the door was reached. Then they heard the slamming of the door and even heard the latch fall into place.
“All of which means,” said Frank, “that we’ve got to find a way of getting out of here as soon as we can.”
The boys were huddled close together at the bottom of the hole, but all of them knew well enough that ten feet was as nothing, for they had practiced often enough at wall-scaling to lift one man out of this place in a minute.
Talking in very low tones of voice, fearing lest they might be heard outside the cabin by Jeek, they laid their plans for scaling, waiting for several minutes in the hope that Jeek and Fallon might get well out of hearing.