the regular way we'll have them after us. We've got to
go a way that they _can't_ go. Say the word. Are you game?"

"You heard them call me a dare-devil, didn't you?" Hervey whispered.
"They claim I don't care anything about the Eagle award. They're right.
I'd rather be a dare-devil. Go ahead and don't ask foolish questions."

For about twenty yards Tom descended, stealthily pausing every few feet
or so. Hervey was behind him and could not see what Tom saw. He did not
venture to speak.

Then Tom paused, holding the brush open, and peering
through--thoughtfully, intently. He looked like a scout in a picture.
Hervey waited behind him, his heart in his throat. He could not have
stood there if Tom had not been in front of him. It seemed interminable,
this waiting. But Tom was not the one to leap without looking.

Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, he threw aside all stealth and
caution and, tearing the bushes out of his path, darted forward like a
hunted animal. Hervey could only follow, his heart beating, his nerves
tingling with excitement. What happened, seemed all in an instant. It
was over almost before it began. Tom had emerged into a little clearing
where there was a spring and the next thing Hervey knew, there was his
companion stuffing a handkerchief into the mouth of a little fellow in
a red sweater and lifting the little form into his arms.

Hervey saw the clearing, the spring, the handkerchief stuffed into the
child's mouth, the little legs dangling as Tom carried the struggling
form--he saw these things as in a kind of vision. The next thing he
noticed (and that was when they had descended forty or fifty yards below
the spring) was that the child's sweater was frayed near the shoulder.

Down the steep declivity Tom moved, over rocks, now crawling, now
letting himself down, now handing himself by one hand from tree to tree,
agilely, carefully, surely. Now he relieved one arm by taking the child
in the other, always using his free hand to let himself down through
that precipitous jungle. Never once did he speak or pause until he had
left an almost perpendicular area of half a mile or so of rock and
jungle between them and the spring above.

Then, breathless, he paused in a little level space above a great rock
and set the child down.

"Don't be frightened, Tony," he said; "we're going to take you home. And
don't scream when I take this handkerchief out because that will spoil
it all."

"Is it safe to