They listened to his heavy footsteps plunging up the steep hillside till they died out, and then took up the ordinary occupations of the camp. The rocky defile up which the old miner had disappeared on his quest was well covered with pine timber almost down to where it reached the arid ground on the edge of which the lads were camped. Except for the occasional scream of a hawk making for its night roost, or the crash of some animal making its way through the dense growth that grew higher up on the hillside, the place was as quiet as a cemetery.
Billy Barnes was examining his camera, which had been severely shaken up on the trip, Frank and Harry were going over the Golden Eagle admiringly, remarking on the way she had stood her hard ordeal, and old Mr. Joyce was taking a lesson in wireless telegraphy from Lathrop. It was beginning to grow dusk. Somewhere far up on the hillside there came the hoot of an owl. The hush of the evening in the foothills lay over everything, when suddenly the silence was broken by a sound that brought them all to their feet.
The report of a rifle had rung out on the hillside above them.
“Must be Bart shooting at something,” remarked Billy, gazing at the scared faces about him.
“That was a rifle shot,” said Frank slowly, “and Bart Witherbee carried no rifle.”
“Then somebody else fired it?”
“That’s about it. Don’t make a sound now. Listen!”
They all held their breaths and waited anxiously in the stillness that followed. For perhaps ten minutes they stood so, and then there came a sharp crackle of snapping twigs, that told them some one was descending the hillside.
Who was it?
Several minutes of agonizing suspense followed before they knew whether it was friend or enemy advancing toward them. Then Bart Witherbee glided, like a snake, out of the woods.