terror protruding from the thicket—a long, slender, cylindrical thing. Promptly her heart went as cold as that rifle-barrel itself.
Behind her someone laughed, she felt her arms seized, and a thick scarf was bound swiftly across her mouth and jerked into a vicious knot—a needless precaution, for she could not have screamed just then if her lips had been free.
Darting this way and that, her eyes gathered in the figures of the group around her,—the tall, dark man she feared, the pink-complexioned one with the tow scalp and the red undershirt, and behind them, the sullen face of Phil, and the bowlegged old fellow, now with a hasty bandage across his left shoulder, and grinning as wickedly as one of Rip van Winkle s bearded bowlers when the pins go crashing for a thunderous strike.
Rapidly she was pushed on through the tangle into a break, where the five held council.
The Pink Swede and the Old Man returned toward the camp, as the others, with the prisoner, travelled in the same general direction, but at an angle to the path, deflecting to the north of it. Forty yards from the grove where her own tent had been pitched, they released her from bonds and gag—a queer manœuvre which she could not understand. For a moment she stood irresolute. Then gathering herself together she made a dash for freedom, crying, very foolishly as she afterwards learned:
"Dick, Dick, look out!"
No sooner was the warning uttered than she was seized again by her amused captors, bound and gagged as before.
