tcrop until he reached the fallen tree. Johnny saw that
he was carrying a heavy stone. "What's the blamed fool goin' to do?" he
said to himself; the man's evident ignorance regarding footprints
had lessened the boy's awe of him. But the stranger's next essay took
Johnny's breath away. Standing on the fallen tree trunk at its axis on
the outcrop, he began to rock it gently. To Johnny's surprise it
began to move. The upper end descended slowly, lifting the root in the
excavation at the lower end, and with it a mass of rock, and revealing a
cavern behind large enough to admit a man. Johnny gasped. The desperado
coolly deposited the heavy stone on the tree beyond its axis on the
rock, so that it would keep the tree in position, leaped from the tree
to the rock, and quickly descended, at which he was joined by the
other man, who was carrying two heavy chamois-leather bags. They both
proceeded to the opening thus miraculously disclosed, and disappeared in
it.

Johnny sat breathless, wondering, expectant, but not daring to move. The
men might come out at any moment; he had seen enough to know that their
enterprise as well as their cave was a secret, and that the desperado
would subject any witness to it, however innocent or unwilling, to
horrible penalties. The time crept slowly by,--he heard every rap of a
woodpecker in a distant tree; a blue jay dipped and lighted on a branch
within his reach, but he dared not extend his hand; his legs were
infested by ants; he even fancied he heard the dry, hollow rattle of a
rattlesnake not a yard from him. And then the entrance of the cave
was darkened, and the two men reappeared. Johnny stared. He would have
rubbed his eyes if he had dared. They were not the same men! Did the
cave contain others who had been all the while shut up in its dark
recesses? Was there a band? Would they all swarm out upon him? Should he
run for his life?

But the illusion was only momentary. A longer look at them convinced
him that they were the same men in new clothes and disguised, and as one
remounted the outcrop Johnny's keen eyes recognized him as Spanish Pete.
He merely kicked away the stone; the root again descended gently over
the opening, and the tree recovered its former angle. The two hurried
away, but Johnny noticed that they were empty-handed. The bags had been
left behind.

The boy waited patiently, listening with his ear to the ground, like an
Indian, for the last rustle of fern and crackle of