“But I can’t stay with you here, Jerry,” objected the girl.

“Of course you can’t, Miss.  I will get you out—­another way.  You’ll see.  But we’ll explain to your friends above and they will stop yelling then.  If they keep on that way they’ll draw Lem Daggett here, if he isn’t already snooping around.”

Meanwhile Jerry had found a scrap of paper and a pencil.  He hurriedly wrote a few lines upon the paper.  Then he produced a heavy bow and a long arrow.  The message he tied around the shank of the arrow.

“Oh! can you shoot with that?” cried Ruth, much interested.

“Reckon so,” grinned Jerry.  “Uncle Pete wouldn’t give me much powder and shot when I was a kid.  And finally I could bring home a bigger bag of wild turkeys than he could, and all I had to get ’em with was this bow’n’arrer.”

He strung the bow, and Ruth saw that it took all his strength to do it.  The boys and girls were still shouting for her in a desultory fashion.  Jerry laid his finger on his lips, nodded at his visitor, and stepped swiftly out of sight along the cleared shelf of rock.

Ruth left the fire to peer after him.  She saw him bend the bow and saw the swift flight of the arrow as it shot out of the chasm and curved out of sight beyond the broken edge of the snow-wreath which masked the summit of the cliff.

She heard the clamor of her friends’ voices as they saw the arrow shoot over their heads.  Then they were silent.

Jerry ran back to her and unstrung the bow, putting it away in its niche.  But from the same place he produced a blue-barrelled rifle.

“I know you won’t tell Blent, or any of them, how to reach me, Miss Ruth,” he said, looking at her with a smile.

“I guess not!” exclaimed the girl.

“I am going to show you the way out—­to the other end.  I wish you were wearing rubber boots like me.”

“Why?”

“So you could wade in the stream when we come to it.  That’s how I threw them off the track,” explained Jerry, laughing.  “Why, I know this old island better than Uncle Pete himself knowed it.”

“And yet you haven’t found the box you say your uncle hid?” asked Ruth, curiously.

“No.  I never knowed anything about it until Blent came to drive us off and swore that Uncle Pete had never had nothin’ but ‘squatter rights.’  But I’m not sure that I couldn’t find that place where Uncle Pete hid his treasure box—­if I had time to hunt for it,” added Jerry, gravely.

“That’s what Mr. Blent is afraid of,” declared Ruth, with conviction.  “That’s why he is afraid of your being here on the island.”

“You bet it is, Miss.”

“And we boys and girls will do everything we can to help you, Jerry,” Ruth assured him, warmly.  “If you think you can find the place where your uncle hid his papers——­”

“But suppose I find them and the papers show that this Mr. Tingley hasn’t a clear title to the island?” demanded the backwoods boy, looking at the girl of the Red Mill sharply.