hundred feet.

The old silver watch, the size of a turnip, which Turner had carried
forty years or more, was in his pocket, and by the light of the stars
Nick managed to see the time--ten o'clock.

"There is no time like the present," he mused to himself, while he
hesitated in the doorway. "If I wait until all is quiet, I will stand
all the more chance of being discovered; and, besides, it won't be long
until Handsome returns here, and after he has come and crawled into his
bunk it will be next to impossible for me to get out of here without
rousing him--unless I should drug him, and that will not do at all.
Handsome is altogether too fly for that. He would know that he had been
drugged.

"Now, if it wasn't for these white whiskers, I could creep around the
edge of the bottom of the cliff to the cabin where Patsy is, without
being noticed; and I dare not take them off----"

He stopped there. There was absolutely no use in conjecturing upon the
"ifs" of the question, and so, after another moment, during which he
studied the lay of the land intently, he slipped noiselessly out at the
door and around behind the cabin, and from there crept on his hands and
knees to the bottom of the cliffs. And there he discovered what he had
been unable to see in the imperfect light. The grass there was quite
tall, where it had not been trampled by the feet of the motley crew that
infested the place, and he found that by lying at full length and
pulling himself slowly along on his stomach he would be able to conceal
himself almost entirely from view.

Nick made that half circle of the small valley, crawling in that way,
and entirely without being discovered; and in that manner he arrived
directly in the rear of the cabin where Patsy was a prisoner.

But here a new difficulty confronted him. There was a guard in front of
the door, and that guard, strangely enough, was Cremation Mike.

The cabin in which Patsy was a prisoner was built of roughly hewn logs,
the crevices and chinks being stopped with mud and clay. The ground
beneath it was hard--rocky, in fact; so there was no possibility of
digging under the logs without tools to do it, and even then it would
have taken too much time to accomplish it.

Nick turned his attention to Cremation Mike. He was seated upon a
convenient stump, smoking a short pipe. His back was toward the door of
the cabin, and he was about ten feet from it. The door itself had been
fastened by passing a fres