and estimated its depth, and then stooped and picked up a stone as large as his fist, to drop it and find if he could figure the depth by the time of its fall, in case that he was able to hear it alight. He bent forward in order to drop it sheer, and then suddenly whirled in his tracks to look into the slightly wavering barrel of a revolver not a dozen feet away. And then it was that his boyhood's baseball training stood him in good stead. Instantly, as if he had suddenly caught a man off base, the rock flew from his hand and the revolver hurtled through the air and dropped far below in an impenetrable mass of uluhi fern, while the man immediately grasped his right arm in his other hand and bent over it in a nursing attitude.
"What made you so slow?" called Dick, jocosely. "Got buck fever?"
The man looked up and swore.
"Wait where you are!" called Dick. Near as he was, there was still the slope of the little hillock upon which Dick stood, as well as the curve in the trail, to negotiate; and by the time that Dick had made these, on the jump, the man had sufficiently recovered from his jolt to take to his heels back down the trail. Dick had recognized him from the first glance, as Carter McKnight; and now his first thought was to let him go without further attention; but in another instant he remembered that there were half a hundred places on the back trail
