," flouted the Henkyl Hunter, piqued even in
the presence of girls into giving back tit for tat. "But you're carrying
too many eggs in one basket, let me tell you, and you're likely enough
to take a leap in the dark an' smash 'em all."

"Ha! Am I now," snarled the other, resenting the implication that his
brick-red head was a brash basket into which to pack all his chances of
safety, such as were not anchored to the poor stay of a few fickle
matches.

"Am I now-ow?" he chortled, very red in the face--and tongue-tied--as he
shadowed the picnic party through the cave.

At his wits' end for a verbal retort, he presently proceeded, after the
manner of his kind, to throw a stone in his own garden.

"See here! you kids, if you'll let me stand on your shoulders, you two,
I'll give those Tin Scouts an eye-opener," he said, retaliating after a
manner to hurt only himself, as he addressed the two younger boys with
him, his eyes cast up to that mysterious fissure, outlined, a rocky
tripod, above his head, of which the Scoutmaster had remarked that all
behind it was black as a tinker's pot.

Into that ebony pot, forthwith, climbing by the willing step-ladder of
his companions' bodies, Ruddy, the rashling, presently thrust his
head--that flaming head with all his chances in it!

His body followed, finding entrance through the crevice amidships, so to
speak, where it broadened out to some three feet across from the
tapering point of the lowest corner.

"Oh-h! look at him. Do look at him!" panted the girls, held up in their
search for pale-faced cave flowers and strange fungi by the "derring-do"
act.

"Gracious! some of you scouts ought to stop him--re-al-ly ought to stop
him," shrilled Jessie, catching her breath at the shock of darkness
visible in the yawning fissure's mouth, where the brief flicker of a
match now chased bogies.

"Humph! We can't head him off, Jess." Her brother disclaimed
responsibility with a shrug--while the little lamp winked sarcastically
from his hatbrim--but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been
trained to feel--as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal--that
Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of
a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. "We can't turn him back!" Stud
shrugged his khaki shoulders. "But he'll strike a blind bargain in
there. Ha! There goes another 'niggling' match!"

A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection flickered a moment, a gold
too