“He has a rifle with him, and as sure as we live he’s sitting down on the ice, and picking out a target here in the valley.”

“A risky business for Slade.  Shooting upward we can take better aim at him than he can at us.”

There was a great stir in the valley, as others saw the figure on the mountain and read Slade’s intentions.  Fifty men sprang to their feet and seized their rifles.  But the guerrilla moved swiftly along the knife-edge of the ridge, obviously sure of his footing, and before any of them could fire, dropped down behind a little group of cedars.  Every stem and bough was cased in a sheath of silver mail, but they hid him well.  Dick, with his glasses, could not discern a single outline of the man behind the glittering tracery.

But as they looked, a head of red appeared suddenly in the silver, smoke floated away, and a bullet knocked up the ice near them.  They scattered in lively fashion, and from shelter watched the silver bush.  A second bullet came from its foliage and wounded slightly a man who was carrying wood to one of the fires.  But the annoying sharpshooter remained invisible.

“He’s lying down on the ice like a Sioux or Cheyenne in a gully,” said Pennington.

“Maybe he has a gully in the ice,” said Dick, “and he can crouch here and shoot at us all day, almost in perfect safety.”

But Colonel Winchester appeared and ordered a score of the men, with the heaviest rifles, to shoot away the entire clump of cedars.  They did it with a method and a regard for mathematics that filled Warner’s soul with delight, firing in turn and planting their bullets in a line along the front of the clump, cutting down everything like a mower with a scythe.

Dick with the glasses saw the ice fly into the air in a silver spray as bush after bush fell.  Presently they were all cut away by that stream of heavy bullets, but no human being was disclosed.

“He’s just gone over the other side of the ridge,” said Warner in disgust, “and is waiting there until we finish.  We couldn’t shoot through a mountain, even if we had one of our biggest cannon here.  He’ll find another clump of bushes soon and be potting us from it.”

“But we can shoot that away too,” said Dick hopefully.

“We can’t shoot down all the forests on the mountain.  He must have heavy hobnails, or, like the mountaineers, he has drawn thick yarn socks over his boots, else he couldn’t scoot about on the ice the way he does.”

“Ah, there goes his rifle, behind the clump of bushes to the right of the one that we shot away!”

A second man was wounded by the bullet, and then an extraordinary siege ensued, a siege of three hundred men by a single sharpshooter on top of a mountain as smooth as glass.  Whenever they shot his refuge away he moved to another, and, while they were shooting at it he had nothing to do but drop down a few feet on the far side of the ridge and remain in entire safety until he chose another ambush.