Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/236

220 heard a man's voice. There was some one just behind him, higher up the bank, and that some one had stumbled awkwardly and cursed thereafter.

"Drunk," muttered Steele, as his hand tightened about his rifle and he rose and turned, still keeping close to the rock against which he had leaned. "Embry has overdone it a little."

But there would be others than the one incautious man, and were they drunk? No; not if Embry were back of this play. Steele, crouching a little so as to be in the thickest of the shadows, moved quietly toward the spot where Turk was sleeping. But before he had taken three paces he guessed what they were up to up there and called out sharply:

"Turk! Bill! Look out!"

With the snap of his words, before either of the two sleeping men could start to his feet, there came a crashing in the brush on the steep bank above them, the sound of a leaping, thudding boulder, and Steele sprang back again, again shouting his warning. And then there were quick muffled cries, the sound of other brush cracking and snapping, the smashing of timbers as a rock which more than one pair of hands must have struggled with to set it in motion tore into the flume, the black blur of another boulder bounding by him, come from the gloom, gone into the gloom … and a great wrathful cry from Turk:

"My leg. They're broke my leg. By Gawd … where's my rifle?"

"Back that way!" shouted Steele. "Can you walk, Turk?"