“Don’t shoot. Time enough for that. They don’t know where we are. They—” Hippy paused abruptly.
“They don’t, eh?” jeered Tom Gray as a bullet flattened itself on the rocks just above the opening into the cave. “Keep down in there!”
“I think they are merely trying to smoke us out,” answered Hippy calmly.
A scattering volley of bullets was fired at the cave opening as he spoke, but there was no response from the besieged Overland Riders. Elfreda called softly to know if the two men needed assistance, but both said all the assistance they needed just then was to be let alone.
“There go the ponies!” exclaimed Tom Gray.
When Hippy looked he saw three men leading the Overland saddle ponies into a defile in the mountains. Hippy threw up his rifle, but lowered it instantly.
“It won’t do any good to shoot. Then again I might hit a pony. What I want to do is to get a man. Sh-h-h-h!”
The man that Hippy had seen, but who had disappeared immediately afterward, he now discovered lying on a slab of rock up high enough to give him a fairly good view of the entrance to the cave.
“I see him. Don’t move. He is looking this way,” whispered Lieutenant Wingate.
After a few moments of cautious observation, the man on the rock crawled back and disappeared.