“Patient?  Patient nothing!” growled Darry between his teeth.  “I was so angry all the time that I couldn’t keep from sputtering, but that rascal had me fast, and kept making me more secure.”

“How old a man was he?” asked Dick.

“I don’t know whether he was a man or a boy.”

“Is your eyesight failing, Dave?” asked Tom.

“I haven’t eyes in the back of my head,” snapped Darry.  “Say, aren’t you fellows going to hurry up and free me?”

“Can’t you free yourself?” suggested Reade.

“If I could have done that I’d now be ranging these woods in search of the perpetrator of this outrage,” Darry declared.  “Hurry up and untie me!”

“We will, but please be patient for a moment or two longer,” begged young Prescott.  “This is such a cleverly artistic job that I want to study out just how it was done.  How did the fellow attack you?”

“From behind,” muttered Darry.

“But how?”

“Wait, and I’ll tell you,” Dave went on, forcing himself to talk a trifle more calmly.  “When I’m free I’ll show you the spot over there, in the thicket between the two clumps of bushes.  Well, I had gotten this far when I saw the missing steaks.  They rested on a tin pan on the ground in the thicket.  It looked as though the thief of our supper had gone away to get water or something.  I had just stepped, on tiptoe, of course, past this tree when I heard a soft step behind me.  Before I could turn, the noose was dropped over my head, and then down on my neck.  It was jerked tight, like a flash, and I was pulled against this tree.  The fellow took some kind of hitch around the trunk of the tree to hold me-----”

“Yes; I see the hitch,” assented Dick.  “It was well done.”

“So well done that it held me, for a moment,” Dave went on.  “The noose choked me, for a brief space, so that I didn’t have much presence of mind.  Before I recovered myself, the fellow had passed the rope several times around my body and arms, and had taken the extra loops on my arms.  By that time I was so helpless that I couldn’t stir to free myself.”

“And you didn’t see the fellow?” asked Dick.

“Not a glimpse of him.  He worked from behind, and did his trick like lightning.”

“But there are no steaks, nor any plate, on the ground in the thicket now,” Reade reported, after looking.

“No,” Darry grunted.  “The fellow who tried me up like this passed over my eyes a dirty cloth that perhaps he would call a handkerchief.  Then I heard him over by the thicket.  Next he was back here and had whisked that cloth away from my eyes.  That was the last I heard of him.”

“Why didn’t you set up a roar as soon as he attacked you?” demanded Tom Reade.

“The noose bound my throat so tightly, I couldn’t,” Darry explained.  “I was seeing stars, and I was dizzy.  After he had taken a few hitches of the rope around me he eased up on the noose a bit.”