For an instant of time it seemed to Rob as if he was bound to be captured by his pursuers, but in his extremity his mind worked with the lightning-like rapidity common to quick intelligences in moments of great stress. At the precise instant that his little mount gave a groan and plunged forward into the dust of the trail, Rob reached above his head and seized the low-hanging branch of a small, stout tree. With the activity of the practiced athlete, he swung himself up into the thick greenery as the poor pony lay in its death struggles below. Rapidly working his way among the branches, he was soon several feet from the trail. While Bill Bender and Clark Jennings were hanging over the dead pony and searching in vain for the boy's trail, Rob was noiselessly making his way over rocks and stones down into a deep-timbered gully. He could hardly keep himself from an exultant laugh as he pictured the chagrin and amazement of his old enemies at his total disappearance. He rapidly sped on, and after an hour or more of traveling, feeling himself safe once more, he halted. Up to that moment he had pressed on without feeling much fatigue. The excitement of the rapid happenings since he had slipped upon the Indian pony's back had sustained him. Now, however, that he felt comparatively safe, the inevitable relapse came. Rob's knees began to feel strained and weak, as they had never felt before. His head, too, buzzed queerly, and a feeling of overpowering lassitude assailed him in every limb. "Good gracious! am I going to play out?" The boy asked himself the question with every feeling of dismay. He was in a solitary, remote part of even those wild mountains, and although he was on a small eminence, he could see nothing at any point of the compass but dreary, monotonous woods or rocky patches of sun-burned wild oats and foxtail. By the height of the sun and its direction, he guessed that it was about noon, and that he had been traveling in a southerly direction, but even of this, in his sudden collapse, he had no very clear notion. All he really knew was that he craved food with a wild, aching longing in his every fibre that had never before assailed him. "I wonder if starving men in cities ever feel like this?" the boy asked himself. "Woof! I could eat a horse raw cheerfully." Then came an interval of utter lassitude of mind and body, in which the boy lay stretched out on the hot ground, without a thought of anything. A strange ringing began to sound in his ears and his head felt dizzy. "Got to get out of the sun," he thought in a dim, remote sort of way. He voiced his thought aloud, and his tones sounded faint and far away to him, like the accents of another person. "Brace up, Rob, brace up," he began repeating to himself, as he made for a patch of deep shadow under a bush covered with a kind of purple berry.