Eli was determined to be in the game, too, and while his chum was thus engaged in creating a chance for the escape of the two upon the roof, the boy from the timber region hustled several men forward, bearing armfuls of pelts that others had just drawn from the lower floor of the house--they were especially costly skins, and the lot might be worth a duke's ransom; but at the moment, with those two precious lives in peril, to the anxious factor they were as dross, and he would only too willingly have stood the loss of the whole kit could he by this means have saved the one so dear to his old heart.