“We’ll tell you everything later. In the meantime, you can come along with us and take your chance like the rest. But if you make one move to give us away——” His unspoken words carried a threat that Sherlock did not dare ignore.
“I’ll come!” Young Detective Jones was feeling better already. After all, if he could not expose a desperate criminal, the next most exciting thing was joining that criminal’s band in an effort to baffle the forces of the law. “Here, Jerry, take your mackinaw. I feel warm enough.”
“Then let’s get going again,” urged Jake, rising. “We can’t stay here all night; we’ll get too stiff to move if we sit down any longer.”
Again they took the weary trail. Their steps now were slower; it took more effort for them to keep up a ringing, mile-eating stride. Down in his heart, the impatient Burk knew that he could not keep up the pace many hours longer; his brief rest at Lenape had not been enough to make up for the many days of starvation and exposure he had undergone. His prison life, too, had taken from him his old endurance; he was no longer the steel-muscled hunter he had been a year ago. And he realized that the twins, for several nights, had taken considerably less than their usual ration of sleep; their nightly forays had fatigued them, as he could tell by their actions, and no doubt the attendant excitement had also told upon them. One cannot live in an atmosphere of mysterious incidents and midnight captures without paying for them in physical strain. And Sherlock, the least hardy of them all, had been trussed up tightly for half a day, and was in no condition to endure the demands of a long hike in the dark.
Left—right—left! The quartette, strung along the trail in Indian file, lifted their feet more leadenly as one endless mile followed another. The moon was right overhead now; they were a long way from Lenape, marching somewhere on the flank of the mountains. Only the sound of their footsteps attended them, except now and then the rasping hunting-cry of an owl, that nocturnal marauder, and once, up the ridge, the short bark of a fox. Several times they crossed the beds of swift hill-streams, and once they floundered about in a spreading thicket of rhododendrons for some minutes before Jerry, in the lead, found the trail again.