e jumping hail.

"Not recently," said Jo. "Fire away, Jeems, and relieve your mind."

"Well, in the circus they have a king rigged up on a throne. Him in
a red robe and a tinsel crown. All the varlets come in and bow low
before his majesty. Then comes the clown and bows lower than the
others.

"'Hail! Hail!' he cries.

"'How dare you hail,' roars the king, 'when I'm reigning!' Then the
crowd yells."

"That isn't so worse, Jeems," laughed Jo, and the rest joined in.

"What's the difference, boys," questioned Jim, "between rain and a
hen?"

"Give it up," said the chorus.

"The one lays the dust and the other dost lay."

Then Jim leaped out of the tent to get away from the boys, who
would have combined and given him a good licking in token of their
appreciation of his brilliant wit. It was his turn to keep watch,
anyway, and so he stayed out under a tree, while the boys went
peacefully to sleep, with the hail beating on the canvas roof of their
tent, confident that with Jim on deck they would be safe enough.

How about the vanished Mexican? He had made his escape as Jim had
said. Though stiff from being tightly bound and suffering from the
blow he had got from the stone that Jo had thrown at him, he made
quick time to the pine-clad slope of the mountain. He seemed to know
the way even through the darkness of the forest of pine. After going
half a mile he saw the outline of his horse hitched to a sapling.

As soon as he was mounted he turned his animal's head down the slope
until he came to the edge of the meadow. There he stopped for a moment
and looked towards the star of the boys' campfire upon the hill, then
he shook his fist in their direction, with an imprecation and a threat
of what was going to happen to them in a short time. Finally he turned
his mustang's head up the valley and rode at a slow dog trot through
the darkness, groaning considerably with the pain that the jolting
gave him.

In a short time the storm overtook him and the falling hail made his
pony hump himself threateningly, but his rider gave him a dig with his
long and cruel spurs in the flank and that furnished the broncho with
something else to think about. After several miles of hard travel, the
two began going up steadily, along a narrow and steep trail, with the
brawling stream below. The valley had narrowed into a deep canyon with
great walls of pale granite, and uncountable black pines growing
everywhere.

The hail made the tr