“What luck I have had,” he thought exultantly. “Now I suppose I ought to put out the fire; it would not be fair to risk burning up their cabin, no matter who they are.”
He had stepped back to the hearth when a low growl from Nicholas startled him to sudden attention. The big dog was standing with ears and head up and the hair on his back beginning to bristle. Tiptoeing to the window, Hugh peered cautiously out. There, on the side of the clearing away from the stream, he saw three men coming out of the edge of the wood. Even at that distance he could recognize the tall figure and swarthy face of Half-Breed Jake as he came up the hill a little ahead of the other two. The door was on the opposite side of the cabin, so that Hugh could slip out undiscovered, but it was a long, long open slope that lay between him and the sheltering woods.
Down the hill he plunged, cutting off corners of the trail, leaping over the rocks and scrambling through the low-growing bushes. Nicholas seemed to cover the distance in two bounds with a speed that Hugh greatly envied. He was burdened with the two heavy packs and the rifle slung across his shoulders, but, by some instinctive obstinacy, he would not drop them for the pirates to capture.
For a minute he thought he could escape unseen, but his progress was slower than he thought and he had delayed in the cabin an instant too long. A shout behind him told that he was discovered. He looked desperately upward as a clattering of feet sounded on the stony trail and saw three men cross the top of the hill and come running down the path.
Any person of real judgment, so Hugh realized even at the time, would have thrown away the pack and rifle and run to safety unimpeded. He did think of it, but somehow he could not. So he stumbled on, the men behind him gaining, the river and the fallen tree seeming a long distance away. He reached the sheltering underbrush, turned sharply upstream and was hidden for a moment from his pursuers as they came dashing down the hill. He had just leaped upon the tree-trunk when they came out upon the bank.
“Look out, Hugh,” came a shout from the other shore, where stood Dick, who had shamelessly deserted his brother. “Look out! They are going to shoot.”