Tad, as he skulked along, was wondering if Ned had heard the shot and hoping that his companion would make no false moves.  Each boy was determined to round up the man who had winged Stacy Brown and narrowly missed killing the others of the party.

Night was coming on rapidly and it behooved the lads to make haste.  In the first place they did not know these hills, and, in the second, the professor would become alarmed and come in search of them were their return delayed too long.  This was not desirable.  It might mean the undoing of the entire party unless Tad and Ned succeeded in rounding up their enemy first.

Ned, in his excitement, had a mishap.  While creeping along the upper rim of a galley he stepped on a round stone.  Ned fell crashing into a heap of rotting limbs and went floundering from there to the bottom of the incline, making a racket that must have been heard clear out on the plain.

The lad got up, his clothing torn, his face scratched, very much chagrined over his blundering fall.

“I guess I’m not so much of a scout as I thought I was,” he muttered.  “Chunky could have done no worse and for a blundering idiot he’s always held the cup up to the present time.  I’m glad no one saw me make such an exhibition of myself.  But what if that fellow heard me?  No, he couldn’t.  He is too far away.”

In this Ned was wrong.  The “man” was not so far away as the Pony Rider Boy thought.  The fellow, while watching for another opportunity to shoot, had caught the distant sound of crashing twigs.  It might have been a falling tree, it might have been an animal.  At any rate it put the fellow instantly on his guard.  Lowering his rifle he began skulking in the direction of the racket.

By this time Ned was walking ruefully down the galley looking for a convenient trail up the side to the ridge.  Not that he could not have made the ascent anywhere, but that he did not wish to raise any more disturbance than be already had done.  At last, finding what seemed to him to be a path, Ned began climbing the side of the galley.  Had the boy first taken a survey of the ground at the top of the rise, he might possibly have made a discovery, and then again he might not.  Crouched behind a rock was a man.  The fellow was fingering his rifle suggestively.  Twice he raised it to a level with his eyes and drew a bead on the advancing form of Ned Rector, and as many times lowered it.

The watcher observed that Ned carried no rifle, only a revolver slapping against his thigh in its holster as the boy stumbled on up the mountain side.  The mountaineer evidently changed his mind about shooting, for he changed ends with the gun and sat waiting.  A few moments later Ned stepped up beside the rock where he stood listening and looking about him.  The Pony Rider Boy looked everywhere except in the right place.

Suddenly there was a crackling of twigs behind him.  Ned turned just in time to see the figure of a man leaping upon him.  The boy went down under the crushing weight, the cry that rose to his lips smothered by a stinging blow in the face.