him
well. Dick, with his glasses, could not discern a single outline of the
man behind the glittering tracery.

But as they looked, a head of red appeared suddenly in the silver,
smoke floated away, and a bullet knocked up the ice near them. They
scattered in lively fashion, and from shelter watched the silver bush.
A second bullet came from its foliage and wounded slightly a man who
was carrying wood to one of the fires. But the annoying sharpshooter
remained invisible.

"He's lying down on the ice like a Sioux or Cheyenne in a gully," said
Pennington.

"Maybe he has a gully in the ice," said Dick, "and he can crouch here and
shoot at us all day, almost in perfect safety."

But Colonel Winchester appeared and ordered a score of the men, with the
heaviest rifles, to shoot away the entire clump of cedars. They did it
with a method and a regard for mathematics that filled Warner's soul with
delight, firing in turn and planting their bullets in a line along the
front of the clump, cutting down everything like a mower with a scythe.

Dick with the glasses saw the ice fly into the air in a silver spray as
bush after bush fell. Presently they were all cut away by that stream of
heavy bullets, but no human being was disclosed.

"He's just gone over the other side of the ridge," said Warner in disgust,
"and is waiting there until we finish. We couldn't shoot through a
mountain, even if we had one of our biggest cannon here. He'll find
another clump of bushes soon and be potting us from it."

"But we can shoot that away too," said Dick hopefully.

"We can't shoot down all the forests on the mountain. He must have heavy
hobnails, or, like the mountaineers, he has drawn thick yarn socks over
his boots, else he couldn't scoot about on the ice the way he does."

"Ah, there goes his rifle, behind the clump of bushes to the right of the
one that we shot away!"

A second man was wounded by the bullet, and then an extraordinary siege
ensued, a siege of three hundred men by a single sharpshooter on top of a
mountain as smooth as glass. Whenever they shot his refuge away he moved
to another, and, while they were shooting at it he had nothing to do but
drop down a few feet on the far side of the ridge and remain in entire
safety until he chose another ambush.

"I suppose this was visited upon us because we were puffed up with pride
over our exploits," said Pennington, "but it's an awful jolt to us to
have the whole W