"Have you talked to your father about it?"
"I told him what we'd seen the other time and he looked kind of amused, or as if he didn't want to be bothered about the thing; though that may not have been it, either. Unless he tells you right out, you can never figure on what he's thinking. Anyway, I'll say nothing more to him unless there's some particular reason."
Harry was afterward sorry that he had arrived at this decision, and, for that matter, so was his father, but it was the next morning before this came about. In the meanwhile the boys went back to the ranch, and soon afterward retired to rest in the room they now shared. Frank went to sleep at once, and it was some time later when, awaking suddenly, he fancied that Harry had left his bed, which was fixed against the opposite wall. A faint light from outside crept into the room, and Frank made out a black figure standing by the open window. Slipping softly to the floor he moved toward it and Harry raised his hand warningly when he joined him.
"What are you doing here?" Frank inquired.
"Well," answered Harry, "since you ask me, I don't quite know, but I fancied I heard somebody about the ranch. Keep still and listen."
He spoke in a low and rather strained voice, and Frank, who was uneasily impressed by it, leaned out of the window. There was a moon somewhere in the sky, but it was obscured by clouds, and only a dim, uncertain light filtered down. It showed the great black firs which rose, a rampart of impenetrable darkness, beyond the rather less shadowy clearing, across part of which the fruit trees stretched. Then ran back, in regular rows, little clumps of deeper obscurity which presently grew blurred and faded into one another. The wind had apparently dropped again, for it was impressively still.
"I can't hear anything," whispered Frank.
"I'm not sure that I did," rejoined Harry. "It may be that seeing that schooner put the thing into my head, but we'll wait a little now that we're up."
For a couple of minutes they waited in silence. Then Harry suddenly gripped his companion's arm.
"Look!" he whispered. "Across the clearing—yonder!"