“Why can’t we?” cried Dig explosively. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You can’t get down there,” repeated the lame Indian, but stepping out of the way when Dig urged Poke along the trail.
“Why not?” asked Chet again.
“You can’t get down there,” said the Indian for a third time, and then he turned and hobbled back toward the shack.
“You can’t get any sense out of him,” grumbled Dig, in disgust. “He’s got some bug in his head. Maybe he thinks this whole mountain belongs to him because it used to belong to his tribe. Old Scarface told me this mountain was ‘bad medicine’ and nobody used to come here but the Indian medicine men in the old days. You couldn’t hire Scarface to come up here.”
The two white boys were riding steadily on over the rough trail. Chet kept looking back at the abandoned camp, for he was puzzled. He wondered what John Peep could have meant.
“There!” he exclaimed suddenly. “See that?”
“See what?” demanded his chum, twisting his neck in order to look behind him.
“There’s a man with that fellow—a white man.”
“With the lame Indian?” queried Digby. “Why, so there is! Funny! Can’t be one of the boys following us?”