It was only another phase of the hilarious fun they were keeping up for their own amusement.
"I guess I'll try it again," concluded Fred, as he proceeded to stow his arms and legs into position for the nap which he came so near commencing a few minutes before.
He did not consider it within the range of possibility that he could unconsciously displace his limbs during sleep sufficiently to permit him to fall.
He heard the yelping and occasional baying below, the rustling among the limbs, and the undulation caused by the animals leaping upward among the branches; but they ceased to disturb him after a time, and became like the sound of falling water in the ears of the hunter by his camp-fire.
It was not long before slumber stole away his senses, and he slept.
A healthful boy generally sleeps well, and is untroubled by dreams, unless he has been indulging in some indiscretion in the way of diet, but the stirring scenes of the last few days were so impressed upon the mind of Fred that they reappeared in his visions of night, as he lived them all over again.

He was again standing in the silent wood along the Rio Pecos, with Mickey O'Rooney, watching for the stealthy approach of the Apaches.

As time passed, he saw the excited figure of Sut Simpson the scout, as he came thundering over the prairie, with his warning cry of the approach of the red-skins.

The rattling fight in front of the young settlement, the repulse of the Apaches, the swoop of Lone Wolf and the lad's capture, the night ride, the encampment among the mountains, his own singular escape, and, finally, his siege by the mountain wolves--all these passed through the mind of the sleeping lad, and finally settled down to a hand-to-hand fight with the leader of the brutes.
Fred fancied that the two had met in the ravine, and, clubbing his gun, he whacked the beast over his head every time he leaped at him.
He struck him royal, resounding blows, too, but, somehow or other, they failed to produce any effect.

The wolf kept coming and coming again, until, at last, the boy concluded he would wind up the bout by jumping upon, and throwing him down, and then deliberately choking him to death.
He made the jump, and awakening instantly, found he had leaped "out of bed," and was falling downward through the limbs.