Leon, a moment later, was singing out blithely from the pine-tree's top: "I see that gap between the trees too, just a little way farther on. I guess it's a logging-road at last--probably a shanty as well--the road will lead somewhere anyhow. Hurrah! We'll be out o' the misery in time. Race you down, Nix?" he challenged exuberantly at the top of his voice. Then began a swift, racing descent, marked on Leon's part by the touch of recklessness that often characterized his movements; he was determined that though the boy scout might excel him in certain points of knowledge, he should not outdo him in athletic activity. "There! I knew I could 'trim' you anywhere--in a tree or on the ground," he cried all in one gasping breath as--caution to the winds--he stepped on one of the lower dead boughs which he had avoided going up. It snapped under his hundred and twenty-five pounds of sturdy weight, like a breaking twig. He crashed to the ground, alighting in a huddle upon the decayed branch, the crumbling wind-fall, at the foot of the tree. "Gracious! are you hurt, Starrie?" Coombsie and Colin rushed to him. "I--think--not! I guess I'm all here." Leon made a desperate attempt to rise, and instantly sank back, clutching at the grass around him with such a sound as nobody had ever heard before from the lips of Leon Starr Chase--the moan of a maimed creature. "My ankle! My right ankle!" he groaned. "I twisted it, coming down on that rotten branch. It feels as if every tree in the woods had fallen on it together! Ouch! I--can't--stand." Drops of agony stole out upon his forehead. "You've sprained it, I guess!" Nixon was now bending over the victim. "Here, let me take your shoe off, before the foot swells! Perhaps, with Col and me helping you, you can limp along to that clearing?" Leon made another attempt, with the leather pressure removed, but sank down again and began to relieve himself of his stocking too, in order to examine the injury. "Ou-ouch!" he groaned savagely. "My ankle is as black as a thundercloud already. It feels just like a thunderstorm, too--all heavy throbs an' lightning shoots of pain!" The trail of those fiery darts could be traced in the livid blue and yellow streaks that were turning the rapidly swelling ankle, in which the ligaments were badly torn, to as many hues as Joseph's coat, against a background of sullen black. "Well! this is the--limit!" Coombsie dropped the lunch-basket, to which he had clung faithfully, into a nest of underbrush: with a probable logging-road within reach that might serve as a clue to lead them somewhere, here was one of their number with a thunderstorm in his ankle! And then the hero that dwelt in the shadow of the savage in that contradictory breast of Leon Chase flashed awake again in a moment, as at Big Swamp; the real plucky boyhood in him shone out like a star!