Page:Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron.djvu/211

Rh ordinary run; every person thought they had a right, either to make a hero out of him, or else sneer at the story as something like the accepted fish yarn.

His wheel was in good shape, as always; the road seemed much better for a bicycle than it had been for a car, and with the bracing atmosphere made a combination difficult to surpass. Before the hour was up he had dropped off at the bridge, and stood there leaning on the rail looking down.

"H'm! after all, it was a good thing I knew so much about this same place. If I'd jumped ten feet further along I'd have come slap down on that ugly looking bunch of rocks that stick their noses up above the water. Juniper is low, like all the other streams around here, after this dry fall. But I knew there was a deep pool right under and below the bridge."

So he mused as in imagination his eye followed his course after reaching the water. He could see just where he had crawled out, as Jim discovered later, when the fugitive was already half-way back to the road again.

"He had to run uphill, and that's one reason why he couldn't head me off, as Bart wanted him to do. Then that lame arm prevented him from shooting decently. On the whole, I guess I was mighty lucky," he concluded.

After lingering around for a short time he once