CHAPTER XIV.
THE GUIDE “SURROUNDS” MATT‘S CAMP.
“How do you like the looks of them?” said Matt Coyle, picking up one of the switches and flourishing it before Joe’s face. “It’s hickory an’ it’ll cut. Whew! I don’t like to think how it will cut when it’s laid on good and strong. Now, then, where is it? You see that we are in dead ’arnest, I reckon, don’t you? What have you done with it?”
It was at this juncture that the canvas canoe carrying Roy Sheldon and Arthur Hastings came around the point in full view of the camp. The boys were so surprised at what they saw before them that for a minute or two they were incapable of action. They were as motionless as so many sticks of wood; and, although their blood boiled with indignation when they saw Jake so unmercifully beaten, they never said a word. But, when Matt drew back as if he were about to strike Joe with the switch he held in his hand, they had life enough in them.
“Hold on there! If you touch that boy I will put more holes through you than you ever saw in a skimmer,” shouted Arthur, as he raised his gun to his shoulder; and the squatter’s triumph was cut short.
“This is an outrage that shall not be over-looked,” said Roy, plunging his paddle into the water and sending the canvas canoe rapidly toward the beach. “Keep him covered, Art, so that he can’t escape, and we’ll march the whole caboodle of them to Indian Lake.”
Before the words had fairly left Roy’s lips Arthur found, to his intense amazement, that he was pointing his gun at the bushes, instead of covering Matt Coyle’s head. The squatter and his boys had dropped to the ground, and that was the last that was seen of them. If three trap-doors had opened beneath their feet, they could not have disappeared with more astonishing and bewildering celerity. The boys did not wait to beach the canoe but jumped overboard, as soon as they could see bottom, and rushed to Joe’s relief.
“Who, what—how—what’s the meaning of this?” stammered Roy, drawing his knife across the rope that held the prisoner’s hands, while Arthur severed the one with which his feet were confined. “How came those vagabonds up here, and what was it that Tom Bigden told them about money?”
Joe Wayring stretched his arms and briefly explained.
“You came just in time, boys,” said he, in conclusion. “Did you see Jake’s face when Matt got through beating him? That was a contemptible thing for Matt to do, and he ought to be punished for it.”
“Your back would have looked worse than that if we had delayed our coming a few minutes longer,” said Roy. “How did you feel when Matt told you that he had seen Art and me putting for the lake as fast as we could go?”