"Animals don't generally have 'hants,' do they?" asked Joe, in reply. "There was a man there, and he howled and screamed—"
"Oh, great Scott!" groaned Tom, while Bob rubbed his hands together, and gazed down the mountain, as if he were meditating instant flight.
"And he kept it up after he received those four charges of shot in his head, and—"
These words had a magical effect upon Tom and Bob, who were really afraid that their practical joke had resulted in a terrible tragedy.
They looked at Joe so steadily that the latter could control himself no longer. He sat down on a convenient log, threw back his head, and laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks.
"You shot closer to the mark than you thought for when you made that letter say there was something in the gorge," said Joe, at last. "There's a man down there—two of them, according to my way of thinking."
"Well," said Bob, who was immensely relieved by this sudden and unexpected turn of affairs, "we knew it. We went into the gorge day before yesterday, to catch a trout for dinner, and when we came home we followed the stream, thinking it would be easier than to climb up the bluff. That was the way we found it out. When we came to the place where we had located our robbers' cave our ears were saluted by such sounds as we never listened to before, but we didn't see anything."
"What sort of an object was it that Dan shot at?" asked Tom, who was glad to see that Joe was not inclined to be angry over the trick that had been played upon his father and brother. "Was it a dummy?"
"If it had been anything else I might have had a different story to tell you," was Joe's reply. "There are at least two outlaws in hiding there, and they have taken that way to make inquisitive hunters keep at a distance."