“Say!––you don’t suppose they’re wise?” asked Morrison.
“Sure they are!”
“But who could give the show away?”
“I’m thinking that sprained ankle of Brenchfield’s was 179 a darned lame excuse,” Jim answered. And that was all they could get out of him on the subject.
It was sufficient, however, to set all of them a-wondering. But no shadow of suspicion had ever before crossed their minds, and they soon dismissed the suggestion as one more distorted ridiculous romance from the fertile brain of Jim Langford.
The whimpering Stitchy––like most of his kind; never a hero when alone––was secured in the same way as Red had been, then the men hunters continued to the top of the hill, where, as soon as dawn came up, a good view would be had of the single road as it wound, snake-like, for half a mile on the incline.
“It is five o’clock,” remarked Jim. “With no mishaps, they should be here any time now.”
The seven men distributed themselves in the ditches and bushes––three on one side and four on the other, at intervals of ten yards, covering a distance of seventy yards in all.
As they lay there in the ditches by the roadside, the early morning air bit sharp and chilly, having a touch of frost in it––the harbinger of colder weather to come––but still retaining a dampness that searched into the marrow.
A grey light was just beginning to spear the darkness on the top of Blue Nose Mountain away to the east. A heavy blanket of cold fog completely enveloped the low-lying lands. Suddenly, the dark leaden sky seemed to break up into ten thousand sections of gloomy puff-clouds, all sailing hap-hazard inside a dome of the lightest, brightest blue. The sun, cold to look at but shining with the light of a blazing ball, rode up over the hills, sending great shafts of searchlight down the sides of the hills and filling the ghostly valley below, with its tightly-packed firs and skeleton-like pine trees, with a 180 warm, yellow mist, suggestive of luminous smoke rising from some fairy cauldron of molten gold; transforming the dead, chilly night into a crisp, living, moving, late-autumn morning.