you will like that,
hein?" and with an evil grin he left the room, leaving Phil again in the
darkness to eat his food as best he could.

Phil rescued his candle, and lighted it to eat by, and then carefully
extinguished it, for he knew it would not last a great while were it to
burn steadily.

He had one wild idea left. It was dangerous in the extreme, it might
mean death, but it was death if he stayed in the clutches of the
renegade half-breed. This idea was to try to set fire to the door, in
the hopes that it would burn enough without setting the whole room on
fire until he could battle his way out.

This idea he meant to carry out only as a last resort. There were two
chances left to him. One was that he could find some other method of
escape, the other was that his chums would come to his rescue when he
failed to return at the appointed hour of sundown.

At any rate, he would wait until the last minute before trying his
desperate scheme. LeBlanc, he knew, would be gone the greater part of
the night, for they did not plan to start until almost midnight for Lafe
Green's house.

The long day dragged on and he got hungry and thirsty. No one came
again, evidently one meal was all that he was to have. Presently he
decided that it must be past sundown, and he lay down on the blanket,
and before he knew it dropped off to sleep.

Then out of a sound and dreamless sleep he heard a number of mysterious
tappings on the iron shutter that guarded the window.

He ran to the window and listened again.

Yes, there they were, being repeated in a sort of a staccato yet
rhythmic measure.

Suddenly it dawned on him what it was. The tappings were dots and dashes
of the International Code, and they were spelling out:

P-H-I-L- P-H-I-L- P-H-I-L-

CHAPTER XIV.

CHUMS TO THE RESCUE.

To return now for a while to the lean-to we shall see what happened when
sundown came and no Phil appeared.

"Oh, Dick, I'm sorry I let Phil go alone. We should have gone together,
then there would have been less chance of anything having happened,"
said Garry brokenly.

"Cheer up, Garry, it's only a little past sundown, perhaps he didn't
allow himself enough time to get back here, may have thought the
distance was less than it was. You know he has been over this distance
only two or three times. We'll give him a little while longer and then
set our heads together and see what we can do. I have a lot of
confidence in Phil, he man