They waited several minutes in tense anxiety, for, after all, it was conceivable that, diplomacy failing, the jumper would adopt more forcible means. Then the man waved his hand.
“You’ve got to decide what you’re going to do,” he said.
Devine proceeded to urge every reason he could think of, and held him in play a little longer, until finally the jumper lost his patience.
“Oh,” he said, “you make me tired! Light out and be done with it! We’re going to pull up that post.”
Saunders thrust forward the rifle barrel so that the moonlight sparkled on it.
“Then,” he said grimly, “come right along and shift it.”
Instead of doing so, the man jumped back into the shadow, which was perhaps a very natural proceeding. Then there was oppressive silence for a few minutes. Devine, who could not hear anything, felt horribly anxious as to what their opponents might be doing. Suddenly there was a fresh rustling among the undergrowth, and Saunders thrust the rifle into his companion’s hands.
“Crawling in at the back of us! Let them see you on the opposite side!” he said.
Devine wriggled through the fern, and, though he knew that this was rash, stood up where the moonlight fell upon him, with the long barrel glinting in front of him. He fancied, though he could not be certain, that he saw a shadowy figure flit back among the trees, and in any case the rustling died away again. After that he crawled back to Saunders, for, as he admitted afterward, he did not like standing on the other side of that thicket alone.
He subsequently repeated the maneuver several times, and Saunders once or twice answered the jumpers’ warnings with a sardonic invitation to remove the post. Neither of them afterward was sure how long the horrible tension lasted, though they agreed that a very little more of it would probably have broken down their nerve; but at length a faint sound came out of the shadows down the valley. It rapidly grew louder, and when it resolved itself into such a smashing of undergrowth as might have been made by a body of men, Saunders sprang up and waved his rifle toward where he supposed the jumpers to be.