“What is it?” he whispered.

“A.  H.”  Tom hardly breathed.  “It’s little Anthony Harrington—­shh.  Don’t speak from now on; just follow me.  See this trickle of water?  There’s a spring down there.  They can’t have their camp there, they’d roll down.  The kid is there alone.  If you’re not willing to tackle the descent, say so.  If we go down the regular way we’ll have them after us.  We’ve got to go a way that they can’t go.  Say the word.  Are you game?”

“You heard them call me a dare-devil, didn’t you?” Hervey whispered.  “They claim I don’t care anything about the Eagle award.  They’re right.  I’d rather be a dare-devil.  Go ahead and don’t ask foolish questions.”

For about twenty yards Tom descended, stealthily pausing every few feet or so.  Hervey was behind him and could not see what Tom saw.  He did not venture to speak.

Then Tom paused, holding the brush open, and peering through—­thoughtfully, intently.  He looked like a scout in a picture.  Hervey waited behind him, his heart in his throat.  He could not have stood there if Tom had not been in front of him.  It seemed interminable, this waiting.  But Tom was not the one to leap without looking.

Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, he threw aside all stealth and caution and, tearing the bushes out of his path, darted forward like a hunted animal.  Hervey could only follow, his heart beating, his nerves tingling with excitement.  What happened, seemed all in an instant.  It was over almost before it began.  Tom had emerged into a little clearing where there was a spring and the next thing Hervey knew, there was his companion stuffing a handkerchief into the mouth of a little fellow in a red sweater and lifting the little form into his arms.

Hervey saw the clearing, the spring, the handkerchief stuffed into the child’s mouth, the little legs dangling as Tom carried the struggling form—­he saw these things as in a kind of vision.  The next thing he noticed (and that was when they had descended forty or fifty yards below the spring) was that the child’s sweater was frayed near the shoulder.

Down the steep declivity Tom moved, over rocks, now crawling, now letting himself down, now handing himself by one hand from tree to tree, agilely, carefully, surely.  Now he relieved one arm by taking the child in the other, always using his free hand to let himself down through that precipitous jungle.  Never once did he speak or pause until he had left an almost perpendicular area of half a mile or so of rock and jungle between them and the spring above.

Then, breathless, he paused in a little level space above a great rock and set the child down.

“Don’t be frightened, Tony,” he said; “we’re going to take you home.  And don’t scream when I take this handkerchief out because that will spoil it all.”

“Is it safe to stop here?” Hervey asked.

“Sure, they’ll go down the path when they want to hunt for him.  They’ll never get down here.  The mountain is with us now.”