Even when he was lost in the chaparral, and saw the sun go down without any hope of escaping from the spider-web of buffalo-paths, Cal had not felt quite so badly as he did when he found himself staked out. There he lay upon his back under the vast canopy of an ancient cypress-tree. Near him the two uncouth-looking Apaches had thrown themselves upon the grass. They seemed to be asleep pretty soon, for there was no more need of their watching the prisoner.

Get away?

He could move his hands and feet just enough to keep the blood in circulation, and that was all. He could turn his head and look at the glow of the camp-fires and at the forms of men that now and then went stalking to and fro. They were only dog-soldier Indian police in charge of the camp, for the remainder of the band was taking all the sleep it could get. Even the dogs were entirely quiet. If he looked up, there was nothing but a dense mass of foliage, but it began at a height of fifty feet or more from the ground. Great branches reached out, and from these hung long ropes of vines of some sort, here and there, to the very ground. There was no opening through which a star could be seen, and it seemed to Cal as if his last hope had departed.

The position of a staked-out man is peculiarly uncomfortable, but it is the traditional method of the red men for securing captives. The Hurons and Shawnees and Iroquois, and other eastern tribes, made a forest-jail in precisely the same way before any white men ever came among them. Cal found that it was a great affliction not to be able to turn over in bed, but that was nothing to the torment of having a mosquito on his chin, another on his nose, and ten more humming around his head on all sides, with no hand loose to slap among them. He almost ceased thinking of Indian cruelties while suffering the merciless torments of those insects. Tired as he was, he felt no longer any inclination to sleep. His eyes grew accustomed to the dimness about him and over him. As he looked up into the branches of the tree, after a while, he heard a strange, mournful cry, very much like something that he had listened to before, and then something whitish and wide-winged came sweeping down from the darkness, and his eyes followed it as it swiftly shot across the camp.

"Owl, I guess," groaned Cal. "Never saw one so large before. White owl. What a hoot he had! Oh, my nose! These are the biggest kind of mosquitoes."

So they were, and they kept their victim in continual misery. It was not long before he saw something else, not so large as the owl, fly very silently past him. It went and came several times, with a peculiarly rapid flight, and he had pretty fair glimpses of it."What an enormous bat!" exclaimed Cal. "They have almost everything down here. What I'm most afraid of are scorpions and centipedes and tarantulas. Such woods as these must have lots of 'em, and I couldn't get away."

They were dreadful things to think of, but Cal had not remembered all of the customary inhabitants of a Mexican forest. He was put in mind of yet one more after a while. He heard a rustling sound among the grass and leaves near him, and it made him lift his head as high as he could. Just then something else lifted its head, and Cal saw a pair of small, glittering, greenish eyes that travelled right along at a few inches above the ground. The cold sweat broke out all over him, but he held perfectly still.

"They don't bite if you don't stir or provoke them," was the thought in his mind; but that snake was not of the biting, venomous kind. It was only a constrictor, not more than seven or eight feet long, and only three inches thick at his thickest point. He was in no hurry, and it seemed to Cal as if it took him about half an hour, or half a century, he could not tell which, to crawl across the pair of legs which the Apaches had pinned down. It was really about a quarter of a minute.

Cal had no idea how hard he had been straining at his fetters, spurred by the mosquitoes. He made an unintentional jerk with his right arm as the snake disappeared, and was startled by a discovery.

"Loose?" he said to himself. "Then I can loosen it more. I won't disturb either of those fellows, but I must scratch these mosquito-bites."A pull, another pull, and that forked stick began to come up, for one of its legs had been put down in a gopher's hole, and had no holding. Out it came, slowly, softly, and Cal's right hand was free to reach over and help his left. That stake was hard pulling, but it came up at last, and then the ankles could be set free.

"I'll drive them all down again hard," said Cal to himself, and he did so.

"Let them wonder how I got out," he added; "but there isn't any use in my trying to run away. They'd only catch me and kill me at once."

He rose to his feet, and it occurred to him that his safest place might be by one of the smouldering camp-fires. The short June night was nearly over, and the dawn was in the tree-tops when Cal walked away from the shadow of the great cypress. He had a sort of desperate feeling, and it made him singularly cool and steady. He did not meet anybody on his way. His first discovery, as he drew near the fire, was that the Apaches had found plentiful supplies in the packs of the Mexican mules. They knew how to make coffee, too, for there was a big tin coffee-pot nearly full. Cal put it upon some coals to heat, and then he saw a tin cup lying on the ground, a box of sugar, a piece of bacon, and a fragment of coarse corn-cake.

"That'll do," he said to himself. "I may as well eat."

The coffee boiled quickly, and Cal sat with a cup of it in one hand, while with the other he held a stick with a slice of bacon at the fire end of it. He did not know what was happening under the cypress.One wrinkle-faced brave opened his beady black eyes and looked at the place where the staked-out captive had been. The mocking smile he had begun flitted away from his lips.

"Ugh!" he exclaimed as he sprang up and kicked his comrade, and in an instant more two dreadfully puzzled Apaches were examining the forked stakes which ought to have had a white boy's wrists and ankles in them. Hard driven into the ground were all four, but the white boy? Where was he?

"Heap bad medicine!" exclaimed one brave, almost despairingly.

"Boy heap gone," said the other.

They looked in all directions, but the last refuge they dreamed of was the camp-fire where Cal was sitting.