“We’ll get to the mine tonight,” he exulted. “Throw on these packs, Toma. If we can’t cross the river any other way, I’m going to swim.”
The contagion had caught Dick, too. His own hands were trembling as he stooped down to untie the picket-rope from the stake he had driven down only a few minutes before.
“This is great!” he mumbled to himself. “We’re almost there. I can hardly believe—”
The pony, only a few feet away, reared suddenly on its hind legs, screaming in pain. The stake snapped under Dick’s hands and the rope swished away in the grass as the stricken little beast leaped forward a few feet, then fell headlong.
Completely taken aback, Dick raised his head. Sandy and Toma had flattened themselves out on the ground and were reaching for their rifles. A series of sounds very much like small rocks thudding around them, was followed soon after by a deep, resounding crash from the direction of Toma and Sandy. A few more reports from Toma’s gun, and the deep, brooding hush of the wilderness became suddenly intensified—a silence that seemed to wall them about, to encompass them.
Three startled, white-faced youths crawled on hands and knees to the protection of a large rock and squatted down in mute terror. By some wonderful miracle, each had escaped injury. A score or more of yellow-plumed shafts; the arrows of the invading party, projected here and there above the green grass, like so many tiny sentinels of death.
“A close call,” breathed Dick, “and may God help us if they come back.”
“They were all in hiding over there on that ridge,” Sandy volunteered the information, pointing out the place with a finger that still shook. “I didn’t see one of them—not one! Did you, Toma?”
“No.”
“Cracky! but how those arrows came,” Sandy shivered. “Well, our pony’s gone.”