swer. Let him speak again.
We've got to gain time."

They waited several minutes in tense anxiety, for, after all, it was
conceivable that, diplomacy failing, the jumper would adopt more
forcible means. Then the man waved his hand.

"You've got to decide what you're going to do," he said.

Devine proceeded to urge every reason he could think of, and held him
in play a little longer, until finally the jumper lost his patience.

"Oh," he said, "you make me tired! Light out and be done with it!
We're going to pull up that post."

Saunders thrust forward the rifle barrel so that the moonlight
sparkled on it.

"Then," he said grimly, "come right along and shift it."

Instead of doing so, the man jumped back into the shadow, which was
perhaps a very natural proceeding. Then there was oppressive silence
for a few minutes. Devine, who could not hear anything, felt horribly
anxious as to what their opponents might be doing. Suddenly there was
a fresh rustling among the undergrowth, and Saunders thrust the rifle
into his companion's hands.

"Crawling in at the back of us! Let them see you on the opposite
side!" he said.

Devine wriggled through the fern, and, though he knew that this was
rash, stood up where the moonlight fell upon him, with the long barrel
glinting in front of him. He fancied, though he could not be certain,
that he saw a shadowy figure flit back among the trees, and in any
case the rustling died away again. After that he crawled back to
Saunders, for, as he admitted afterward, he did not like standing on
the other side of that thicket alone.

He subsequently repeated the maneuver several times, and Saunders once
or twice answered the jumpers' warnings with a sardonic invitation to
remove the post. Neither of them afterward was sure how long the
horrible tension lasted, though they agreed that a very little more of
it would probably have broken down their nerve; but at length a faint
sound came out of the shadows down the valley. It rapidly grew louder,
and when it resolved itself into such a smashing of undergrowth as
might have been made by a body of men, Saunders sprang up and waved
his rifle toward where he supposed the jumpers to be.

"You'd better git," he said. "The boys from the settlement will head
you off inside five minutes."

There was no answer, and it appeared that the jumpers had already
departed as silently as possible. A little later the men from the
settlement came limping in, a