“I wonder what that can be?” he said to himself.  “Is some one hitting the tree?  No, it isn’t that.”

It seemed not so much a jarring of the trunk as a swaying of the whole tree.

Puzzled and alarmed, Fred drew his legs from their rather cramped position, and picked his way downward among the limbs until he had descended far enough to inform himself.

“Heaven save me! they’re in the tree!” he gasped, paralyzed for the moment with terror.

In one sense, such was the case.  The frolicsome wolves had varied their amusement by springing upward among the lowermost branches.  A brute would make a jump, and, landing upon the limb, sustain himself until one or two of his comrades imitated his performance, when they would all come tumbling to the ground.

Thus, it may be said, they were climbing the tree, but they were scarcely in it when they were out of it again, and Fred had nothing to fear from that source.

In his fright, he hastily clambered back again after his rifle, with the intention of shooting the one that was nearest, but by the time he laid his hand upon the weapon his terror had lessened so much that he concluded to wait until assured that it was necessary.  And a few minutes’ waiting convinced him that he had nothing to fear from that source.  It was only another phase of the hilarious fun they were keeping up for their own amusement.

“I guess I’ll try it again,” concluded Fred, as he proceeded to stow his arms and legs into position for the nap which he came so near commencing a few minutes before.

He did not consider it within the range of possibility that he could unconsciously displace his limbs during sleep sufficiently to permit him to fall.

He heard the yelping and occasional baying below, the rustling among the limbs, and the undulation caused by the animals leaping upward among the branches; but they ceased to disturb him after a time, and became like the sound of falling water in the ears of the hunter by his camp-fire.  It was not long before slumber stole away his senses, and he slept.

A healthful boy generally sleeps well, and is untroubled by dreams, unless he has been indulging in some indiscretion in the way of diet, but the stirring scenes of the last few days were so impressed upon the mind of Fred that they reappeared in his visions of night, as he lived them all over again.  He was again standing in the silent wood along the Rio Pecos, with Mickey O’Rooney, watching for the stealthy approach of the Apaches.  As time passed, he saw the excited figure of Sut Simpson the scout, as he came thundering over the prairie, with his warning cry of the approach of the red-skins.  The rattling fight in front of the young settlement, the repulse of the Apaches, the swoop of Lone Wolf and the lad’s capture, the night ride, the encampment among the mountains, his own singular escape, and, finally, his siege by the mountain wolves—­all these passed through the mind of the sleeping lad, and finally settled down to a hand-to-hand fight with the leader of the brutes.