“Just give us as much as an hour’s start and I’ll bet they’ll never catch us,” Dick cried exultantly.
“No, you bet they’ll never catch me,” Sandy repeated emphatically. “I think too much of my skin to have it punched full of holes by that gun in Mistak’s belt.”
Settling into a long, swinging, crab-like stride, the boys covered almost four miles on their snowshoes before they felt it necessary to call a halt.
Sandy was about winded, and fell back against a boulder completely relaxed, but Dick still felt fairly spry so he crawled to the top of a nearby hill and looked over the back trail. He was about to call down to Sandy that all was well when, from a narrow defile through which he remembered they had passed, he saw five figures coming fast on snowshoes. Dick felt a chill that was not from the frosty air creep up his spine. He did not doubt that the distant men were Mistak and several of his gang.
“Sandy, they’re after us,” Dick called down in a tense voice.
Sandy got excitedly to his feet and urged Dick to hurry on with him. But the elder lad had something else in mind as he climbed down from the hill.
“Sandy, there are expert snowshoers in that bunch following us,” Dick said coolly. “We don’t stand a show of keeping the lead we have.”
“Well, we can’t stand them off without rifles. All we have left is our hunting knives.”
“But we can still throw them off our track if we use our heads,” said Dick quickly. “Did you notice that long stretch of hard ice and barren rock that we’ve been following for more than half a mile?”
“Yes,” Sandy began to be interested.