“What the deuce!” Ken ejaculated, snatching up his rifle. He snapped a clip in the magazine and dropped several loaded clips and a box of extra shells into his coat pocket. After his adventure with the jaguar he decided never again to find himself short of ammunition. Running up the sloping bank, he entered the forest, shouting for his companions. Answering cries came from in front and a little to the left. He could not make out what was said. Save for drooping moss the forest was comparatively open, and at a hundred paces from the river-bank were glades covered with thickets and long grass and short palm-trees. The ground sloped upward quite perceptibly. “Hey, boys, where are you?” called Ken. Pepe’s shrill yells mingled with George’s shouts. At first their meaning was unintelligible, but after calling twice Ken understood. “Javelin! Go back! Javelin! We’re treed! Wild pigs! Santa Maria! Run for your life!” This was certainly enlightening and rather embarrassing. Ken remembered the other time the boys had made him run, and he grew hot with anger. “I’ll be blessed if I’ll run!” he said, in the pride of conceit and wounded vanity. Whereupon he began to climb the slope, stopping every few steps to listen and look. Ken wondered what had made Pepe go so far for fire-wood; still, there was nothing but green wood all about. Walking round a clump of seared and yellow palms that rustled in the breeze, Ken suddenly espied George’s white shirt. He was in a scrubby sapling not fifteen feet from the ground. Then Ken espied Pepe, perched in the forks of a ceiba, high above the thickets and low shrubbery. Ken was scarcely more than a dozen rods from them down the gradual slope. Both saw him at once. “Run, you Indian! Run!” bawled George, waving his hands. George implored Ken to fly to save his precious life. “What for? you fools! I don’t see anything to run from,” Ken shouted back. His temper had soured a little during the last few days. “You’d better run, or you’ll have to climb,” replied George. “Wild pigs--a thousand of ’em!” “Where?” “Right under us. There! Oh, if they see you! Listen to this.” He broke off a branch, trimmed it of leaves, and flung it down. Ken heard a low, trampling roar of many hard little feet, brushings in the thicket, and cracking of twigs. As close as he was, however, he could not see a moving object. The dead grass and brush were several feet high, up to his waist in spots, and, though he changed position several times, no _javelin_ did he see. “You want to look out. Say, man, these are wild pigs--boars, I tell you! They’ll kill you!” bellowed George. “Are you going to stay up there all night?” Ken asked, sarcastically. “We’ll stay till they go away.” “All right, I’ll scare them away,” Ken replied, and, suiting action to word, he worked the automatic as fast as it would shoot, aiming into the thicket under George.