"But what's that you were singing?" reiterated Neal. "The words weren't English, and they had a fine sort of roll."

"They're Injun," was the answer. "I guess 'twas all the talking I done last night that brung 'em into my head. I picked 'em up from that fellow I was telling you about. He'd start crooning 'em whenever he looked at the stars to find out the hour."

"Are they about the stars?"

"I guess so. A city man, who had studied the redskins' language a lot, told me they meant:—

'We are the stars which sing, We sing with our light.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Leland's translation.]

Then Herb chanted the two lines again in the original tongue.

"There was quite a lot more," he said; "but I can't remember it. I learned some queer jargon from Chris, and how to make most of the signs belonging to the Indian sign-talk. The fellow had more of his mother than his father in him. I guess I'd better give over jabbering, and cook our breakfast."

It was evident that Herb did not want to dwell upon his reminiscences. And Neal had tact enough to swallow his burning curiosity about all things Indian. He asked no more questions, but rolled off the fir-boughs, and dressed himself.

Cyrus and Dol sprang up too. All three were soon busy helping forward preparations for the start. They packed their knapsacks with a few necessaries; and after a hearty breakfast had been eaten,—their last meal off moose-steaks for a while, as Herb informed them he "could not carry any fresh meat along,"—the guide's voice was heard shouting:—

"Ready, are ye, boys? Got all yer traps? Here, Cyrus, jest strap this pack-basket on my shoulders. Now we're off!"

The pack contained the tent, the camp-kettle, and frying-pan, together with the aforementioned provisions, a good axe, etc. It was an uncomfortable load, even for a woodsman's shoulders. But Herb strode ahead with it jauntily. And many times during that first day's tramp of a dozen miles, his comrades—as they trudged through rugged places after him, spots where it was hard to keep one's perpendicular, and feet sometimes showed a sudden inclination to start for the sky—threw envious glances at his tall figure, "straight as an Indian arrow," his powerful limbs, and unerring step. Even the horny, capable hands came in for a share of the admiration.

"I guess anything that got into your grip, Herb, would find it hard to get out again without your will," said Cyrus, studying the knotted fists which held the straps of the pack-basket.

"Mebbe so," answered the guide frankly. "I've a sort of a trick of holding on to things once I've got 'em. P'raps that was why I didn't let go of Chris in that big blizzard 'till I landed him at camp. But I hope"—here Herb's shoulders shook with heaving laughter, and the cooking utensils in his pack jingled an accompaniment—"I hope I ain't like a miserly fellow we had in our lumber-camp. He was awful pious about some things, and awful mean about others. So the boys said, 'he kept the Sabbath and everything else he could lay his hands upon.' He used to get riled at it.

"Not that I've a word to say against keeping Sunday," went on Herb, in a different key. "Tell you what, out here a fellow thinks a heap of his day o' rest, when his legs can stop tramping, and his mind get a chance to do some tall thinking. Now, boys, we've covered twelve good miles since we left Millinokett Lake, and you needn't go any farther to-day unless you've a mind to. We can make camp right here, near that stream. It will be nice, cold drinking-water, for it has meandered down from Katahdin."

He pointed to a brook a little way ahead, shimmering in the rays of the afternoon sun, of which they caught stray peeps through the gaps in an intervening wall of pines and hemlocks. A few minutes brought them to its brink. Tired and parched from their journey, each one stooped, and quenched his thirst with a delicious, ice-cold draught.

"Was there ever a soda-fountain made that could give a drink to equal that?" said Cyrus, smacking his lips with content. "But listen to the noise this stream makes, boys. I guess if I were to lie beside it for an hour, I'd think, as the Greenlanders do, that I could hear the spirits of the world talking through it."

"That's a mighty queer notion," answered Herb; "and I never knew as other folks had got hold of it. But, sure's you live! I've thought the same thing myself lots o' times, when I've slept by a forest stream. Who'll lend a helping hand in cutting down boughs for our fire and bed? I want to be pretty quick about making camp. Then we'll be able to try some moose-calling after supper."

At this moment a peculiar gulping noise in Neal's throat drew the eyes of his companions upon him. His were bright and strained, peering at the opposite bank.

"Look! What is it?" he gasped, his low voice rattling with excitement.

"A cow-moose, by thunder!" said Herb. "A cow-moose and a calf with her! Here's luck for ye, boys!"

One moment sooner, simultaneously with Neal's gulp of astonishment, there had emerged from the thick woods on the other bank a brown, wild-looking, hornless creature, in size and shape resembling a big mule, followed by a half-grown reproduction of herself.

Her shaggy mane flew erect, her nostrils quivered like those of a race-horse, her eyes were starting with mingled panic and defiance.

A snort, sudden and loud as the report of a shot-gun, made the four jump. Neal, who was standing on a slippery stone by the brink, lost his balance and staggered forward into the water, kicking up jets of shining spray. The snort was followed by a grunt, plaintive, distracted, which sounded oddly familiar, seeing that it had been so well imitated on Herb's horn.

And with that grunt, the moose wheeled about and fled, making the air swish as she cut through it, followed by her young, her mane waving like a pennon.

"Well, if that ain't bang-up luck, I'd like to know what is," said the guide, as he watched the departure. "I never s'posed you'd get a chance to see a cow-moose; she's shyer'n shy. Say! don't you boys think that I've done her grunt pretty well sometimes?"

"That you have," was the general response. "We couldn't tell any difference between your noise and the real thing."

"But she wasn't a patch on the bull-moose in appearance," lamented Dol.

"No more she was, boy. Most female forest creatures ain't so good-looking as the males! And that's queer when you think of it, for the girls have the pull over us where beauty is concerned. We ain't in it with 'em, so to speak."

There was a big gale of laughter over Herb Real's gallant admiration for the other sex, and the sigh which accompanied his expression of it. He joined in the mirth himself, though he walked off to make camp, muttering:—

"Sho! You city fellows think that because I'm a woodsman I never heard of love-making in my life."

"Perhaps there is a little girl at some settlement waiting for a home to be fixed up out of guide's fees," retorted Cyrus.

And the three shouted again for no earthly reason, save that the stimulus of forest air and good circulation was driving the blood with fine pressure through their veins, and life seemed such a glorious, unfolding possession—full of a wonderful possible—that they must hold a sort of jubilee.

Herb, who perhaps in his lonely hours in the woods did cherish some vision such as Cyrus suggested, was so infected with their spirit, that, as he swung his axe with a giant's stroke against a hemlock branch, he joined in with an explosive:—

"Hurrup! Hur-r-r-rup!"

This startled the trio like the bursting of a bomb, and trebled their excitement; for their guide, when abroad, had usually the cautious, well-controlled manner of the still-hunter, who never knows what chances may be lurking round him which he would ruin by an outcry.

"Quit laughing, boys," he said, recovering prudence directly he had let out his yell. "Quit laughing, I say, or we may call moose here till crack o' doom without getting an answer. I guess they're all off to the four winds a'ready, scared by our fooling."



CHAPTER XIX.

TREED BY A MOOSE.

"I told you so, boys," breathed the guide two hours later, with an overwhelming sigh of regret, after he had given his most fetching calls in vain. "I told you so. There ain't anything bigger'n a buck-rabbit travelling. That tormented row we made scared every moose within hearing."

Herb was standing on the ground, horn in hand, screened by the great shadows of a clump of hemlocks; the three were perched upon branches high above him, a safe post of observation if any moose had answered.

"You may as well light down now," he continued, turning his face up, though the boys were invisible; "I ain't a-going to try any more music to-night. I guess we'll stretch ourselves for sleep early, to get ready for a good day's work to-morrow. An eight-mile tramp will bring us to the first heavy growth about the foot of Katahdin, and I'll promise you a sight of a moose there."

His companions dropped to earth; and the four sought the shelter of their tent, which had been pitched a few hundred yards from the calling-place. Some dull embers smouldered before it; for Herb, even while preparing supper, had kept the camp-fire very low, lest any wandering clouds of smoke should interfere with the success of his calling.

Now he heaped it high, throwing on without stint withered hemlock boughs and massive logs, which were soon wrapped in a sheet of flame, making an isle of light amid a surrounding sea of impenetrable darkness.

Many times during the night the watchful fellow arose to replenish this fire, so that there might be no decrease in the flood of heat which entered the tent, and kept his charges comfortable. Once, while he was so engaged, the placid sleepers whom he had noiselessly quitted were aroused to terror—sudden, bewildering night-terror—by a gasping cry from his lips, followed by the leaping and rushing of some brute in flight, and by a screech which was one defiant note of unutterable savagery.

"Good heavens! What's that?" said Cyrus.

"Is it—can it—could it be a panther?" stammered Dol.

"Get out!" answered Neal contemptuously. "The panthers have got out long ago, so every one says."

"A lynx! A Canada lynx, boys, as sure as death and taxes!" panted Herb Heal, springing into the tent on the instant, with a burning brand in his hand. "'Tain't any use your tumbling out, for you won't see him. He's away in the thick of the woods now."

Cyrus gurgled inarticulate disappointment. At the first two words he had sprung to his legs, having never encountered a lynx.

"The brute must have been prowling round our tent," went on Herb, his voice thick from excitement. "He leaped past me just as I was stooping to fix the fire, and startled me so that I guess I hollered. He got about half a dozen yards off, then turned and crouched as if he was going to spring back. Luckily, the axe was lying by me, just where I had tossed it down after chopping the last heap of logs. I caught it up, and flung it at him. It struck him on the side, and curled him up. I thought he was badly hurt; but he jumped the next moment, screeched, and made off. A pleasant scream he has; sounds kind o' cheerful at night, don't it?"

No one answered this sarcasm; and Herb flung himself again upon his boughs, pulling his worn blanket round him, determined not to relinquish his night's sleep because a lynx had visited his camp. The city fellows sensibly tried to follow his example; but again and again one of them would shake himself, and rise stealthily, convinced that he heard the blood-curdling screech ringing through the silent night.

It was nearly morning before fatigue at last overmastered every sensation, and the three fell into an unbroken sleep, which lasted until the sun was high in the sky. When they awoke, their sense of smell was the first sense to be tickled. Fragrant odors of boiling coffee were floating into the tent. One after another they scrambled up, threw on their coats, and hurried out to find their guide kneeling by the camp-fire on the very spot from which he had hurled his axe at the lynx a few hours before. But now his right hand held a green stick, on which he was toasting some slices of pork into crisp, appetizing curls.

"'Morning, boys!" he said, as the trio appeared. "Hope your early rising won't opset ye! If you want to dip your faces in the stream, do it quick, for these dodgers are cooked."

The "dodgers" were the familiar flapjacks. Herb set down his stick as he spoke to turn a batch of them, which were steaming on the frying-pan, tossing them high in air as he did so, with a dexterous turn of his wrist.

The boys having performed hasty ablutions in the stream, devoted themselves to their breakfast with a hearty will. There was little leisure for discussing the midnight visit of the lynx, or for anything but the joys of satisfying hunger, and taking in nutrition for the day's tramp, as Herb was in a hurry to break camp, and start on for Katahdin. The morning was very calm; there seemed no chance of a wind springing up, so the evening would probably be a choice one for moose-calling.

In half an hour the band was again on the march, the business of breaking camp being a swift one. The tent was on Herb's shoulders; and naught was left to mark the visit of man to the humming stream but a bed of withering boughs on which the lynx might sleep to-night, and a few dying embers which the guide had thrashed out with his feet.

No halt was made until four o'clock in the afternoon. Then Herb Heal came to a standstill on the edge of a wide bog. It lay between him and what he called the "first heavy growth;" that is, the primeval forest, unthinned by axe of man, which at certain points clothes the foot of Katahdin.

The great mountain, dwelling-place of Pamolah, cradle of the flying Thunder and flashing Lightning, which according to one Indian legend are the swooping sons of the Mountain Spirit, now towered before the travellers, its base only a mile distant.

"I've a good mind to make camp right here," said Herb, surveying the bog and then the firm earth on which he stood. "We may travel a longish ways farther, and not strike such a fair camping-ground, unless we go on up the side of the mountain to that old home-camp I was telling you about, which we built when we were trapping. I guess it's standing yet, and 'twould be a snug shelter; but we'd have a hard pull to reach it this evening. What d'ye say, boys?"

"I vote for pitching the tent right here," answered Cyrus.

The English boys were of the same mind, and the guide forthwith unstrapped his heavy pack-basket. As he hauled forth its contents, and strewed them on the ground, the first article which made its appearance was the moose-horn; it had been carefully stowed in on top. Dol snatched it up as a dog might snatch a bone, and touched it with longing in every finger-tip.

"There's one bad thing about this place," grumbled Herb presently, surveying the landscape wherever his eye could travel, "there isn't a pint of drinking-water to be seen. There may be pools here and there in that bog; but, unless we want to keel over before morning, we'd better let 'em alone. Say! could a couple of you fellows take the camp-kettle, and cruise about a bit in search of a spring?"

"I volunteer for the job!" cried Dol instantly, with the light of some sudden idea shining like a sunburst in his face.

"You don't budge a step, old man, unless I go with you," said Cyrus. "Not much! I don't want to patrol the forests like a lunatic for five mortal hours in search of you, and then find you roasting your shins by some other fellow's camp-fire. One little hide-and-seek game of that kind was enough."

"Well! the fact that I did bring up by Doc's camp-fire shows that I am able to take care of myself. If I get into scrapes, I can wriggle out of them again," maintained the kid of the camp, with a brazen look, while his eyes showed flinty sparks, caused by the inspiring purpose hidden behind them, which had little to do with water-carrying.

"Why can't you both go without any more palaver?" suggested Herb, as he started away towards a belt of young firs to cut stakes for the tent. "Cruise straight across the bog, mark your track by the bushes as you go 'long, don't get into the woods at all, and 'twill be plain sailing. I guess you'll strike a spring before very long."

Cyrus caught up the camp-kettle, and stepped out briskly over the springy, spongy ground. Dol Farrar followed him. The two were half-way across the bog before the elder noticed that the younger was carrying something. It was the moose-horn.

"If we run across any moose-signs, I'm going to try a call," said Dol, his strike-a-light eyes fairly blazing while he disclosed his purpose. "You may laugh, Cy, and call me a greenhorn; but I bet you I'll get an answer, at least if there's a bull-moose within two miles."

"That's pretty cheerful," retorted the Boston man; "especially as neither of us has brought a rifle. Mr. Moose may be at home, and give you an answer; but there's no telling what sort of temper he'll be in."

"I left my Winchester leaning against a tree on the camping-ground," said the would-be caller regretfully. "But you know you wouldn't fire on him, Cy, unless he came near making mince-meat of us. If he should charge, we could make a dash for the nearest trees. Let's risk it if we run across any tracks!"

"And in the meantime, Herb will be wondering where we are, vowing vengeance on us, and waiting for the kettle while we're waiting for the moose," argued Garst. "It won't do, Chick. Give it up until later on. We undertook the job of finding water, and we're bound to finish that business first."

"If I wait until later on, I may wait forever," was the boy's gloomy protest. "Tonight, when Herb is there, Neal and you will just sit on me, and be afraid of my making a wrong sound, and spoiling the sport.

"And I know we'll see moose-tracks before we get back to camp!" wound up the young pleader passionately. "I've been working up to it all day. I mean I've felt as if something—something fine—was going to happen, which would make a ripping story for the Manchester fellows when we go home. Do let me have one chance, Cy,—one fair and honest chance!"

There was such a tremendous force of desire working through the English boy that it set his blood boiling, and every bit of him in motion. His eyes were afire, his eyelids shut and opened with their quick snap, his lips moved after he had finished speaking, his fingers twitched upon the moose-horn.

He was a picture of heart-eagerness which Cyrus could not resist, though he shook with laughter.

"I'll take mighty good care that the next time I go to find water for the camp-supper, I don't take a crank with me, who has gone mad on moose-calling," he said. "See here! If we do come across moose-signs, I'll get under cover, and give you quarter of an hour to call and listen for an answer—not a second longer. Now stop thinking about this fad, and keep your eyes open for a spring."

But, unfortunately, this seemed to be a thirsty and tantalizing land for travellers. The soft sod under their feet oozed moisture; slimy, stagnant bog-pools appeared, but not a drop of pure, gushing water, to which a parched man dare touch his lips.

They crossed the wide extent of bog, Cyrus breaking off stunted bushes here and there to mark his pilgrimage; they reached the dense timber-growth at the base of the mountain, longing for the sight of a spring as eagerly as ever pilgrims yearned to behold a healing well; but their search was unsuccessful.

Decidedly nonplussed, Dol all the time keeping one eye on the lookout for water and the other for moose-signs, they took counsel together, and determined to "cruise" to the right, skirting the foot of Katahdin, hoping to find a gurgling, rumbling mountain-torrent splashing down. Having travelled about half a mile in this new direction, with the giant woods which they dared not enter rising like an emerald wall on the one hand, and the dreary bog-land on the other, they at last, when patience was failing, came to a change in the landscape.

The desired water was not in view yet; but the bog gave way to fairer, firmer ground, covered with waving grasses, studded with rising knolls, and having no timber growth, save stray clumps of birches and hemlocks, several hundred yards apart.

"Now, this is jolly!" exclaimed Dol. "This looks a little bit like an English lawn, only I'm afraid it's not a likely place for moose-tracks. But I'm glad to be out of that beastly bog."

"Confusion to your moose-tracks," ejaculated Cyrus, half exasperated. "I wish we could find a well. That would be more to the purpose. Listen, Dol, do you hear anything?"

"I hear—I hear—'pon my word! I do hear the bubbling and tinkling of water somewhere! Where on earth is it? Oh! I know. It comes from that knoll over there—the one with the bushes."

Dol Farrar, as he finished his jerky sentences, pointed to an eminence which was two or three hundred yards from where they stood, and a like distance from the wall of forest.

"Well! It's about time we struck something at last," grumbled Garst. "Catch me ever coming on a water pilgrimage again! I'll let Herb fill his own kettle in future. Now, I believe that fellow could smell a spring."

"Just as I smelt this one!" exclaimed Dol triumphantly. "I told you 'twas on the side of the knoll. And here it is!"

"Bravo, Chick! You've got good ears, if you are crazy upon one subject."

And so speaking, Cyrus, with a chuckle of joy, unslung the tin drinking-cup which hung at his belt, filled and refilled it, drinking long, inspiriting draughts before he prepared to fill the camp-kettle.

"The best water I ever tasted, Dol!" he exclaimed, smacking his lips. "It's ice-cold. There's not much of it, but it has quality, if not quantity."

The long-sought well was, in truth, a tiny one. It came bubbling up, clear and pellucid, from the bowels of the earth, and showed its laughing face amid a cluster of bushes—which all bent close to look at it lovingly—half-way up the knoll. A wee stream trickled down from it,—dribble—dribble—a rivulet that had once been twice its present size, judging from the wide margin of spattered clay at each side.

Dol had been following his companion's example, and drinking joyfully before thinking of aught else. When the moment came for him to straighten his back, and rise upon his legs, instead of this natural proceeding, he suddenly crouched close to the ground, his breath coming in quick puffs, his eyes dilating, a froth of excitement on his lips.

"What on earth are you staring at?" asked Cyrus. "You look positively crazy."

For answer, the English boy shot up from his lowly posture, seized his companion by the arm, making him drop the camp-kettle, which he was just filling, and forced him to scan the soft clay by the rivulet.

"Look there—and there!" gurgled Dol, his voice sounding as if he was being choked by suppressed hilarity. "I told you we'd find them, and you didn't believe me! Aren't those moose-tracks? They're not deer-tracks, anyhow; they're too big. I may be a greenhorn, but I know that much."

"They are moose-tracks," Cyrus answered slowly, almost unbelievingly, though the evidence was before him. "They certainly are moose-tracks," he repeated, "and very recent ones too. A moose has been drinking here, perhaps not half an hour ago. He can't be far away."

Garst was now warming into excitement himself. His bass tones became guttural and almost inarticulate, while he lowered them to prevent their travelling. On the reddish clay at his feet were foot-marks very like the prints of a large mastiff. He studied them one by one, even tracing the outline with his forefinger.

"Then I'm going to call," whispered Dol, his words tremulous and stifled. "Lie low, Cy! You promised you'd give me a fair chance; you'll have to keep your word."

"I'll do it too," was the answering whisper. "But let's get higher up on the knoll, behind those big bushes at the top. And listen, Dol, if a moose makes a noise anywhere near, we must scoot for the trees before he comes out from cover. I've got to answer to your father for you."

It was an intense moment in Dol Farrar's life; sensation reached its highest pitch, as he crouched low behind a prickly screen, put the birch-bark horn to his mouth, and slowly breathed through it with the full power of his young lungs, marvellously strengthened by the forest life of past weeks.

There was a minute's interval while he removed it again, and drew in all the air he could contain. Then a call rose upon the evening air, so touching, so plaintive, with such a rising, quavering impatience as it surged out towards the woods,—whither the boy-caller's face was turned,—that Cyrus could scarcely suppress a "Bravo!"

The summons died away in a piteous grunt. A second time the call rose and fell. On the third repetition it broke off, as usual, in an abrupt roar, which seemed to strike the tops of the giant trees, and boom among them.

A froth was on Dol Farrar's lips, his eyes were reddened, he puffed hard through spread nostrils, like a young horse which has been trying its mettle for the first time, as he lowered that moose-horn, lifted his head, and cocked his ears to listen.

Two soundless minutes passed. Dol, who, if he had mastered the hunter's call, had certainly not mastered his patience, put the bark-trumpet again to his lips, determined to try the effect of a surpassingly expressive grunt.

But he never executed this false movement, which would have given away the trick at once.

A bellow—a short, snorting, challenging bellow—burst the silence, coming from the very edge of the woods. It brought Cyrus to his feet with a jump. It so startled the ambitious moose-caller, that, in rising hurriedly from his squatting position, he lost his balance, and rolled over and over to the bottom of the knoll, smashing the horn into a hundred pieces.

He picked himself up unhurt, but with a sensation as if all the bells in Christendom were doing a jumbled ringing in his head. And loud above this inward din he heard the sound, so well remembered, as of an axe striking repeatedly against a tree, the terrible chopping noises of a bull-moose, not two hundred yards away.

No sooner had he scrambled to his legs, than Garst was at his side, gripping his arm, and forcing him forward at a headlong run.

"You've done it this time with a vengeance!" bawled the Bostonian. "He's coming for us straight! And we without our rifles! The trees! The trees! It's our only chance!"

With the belling still in his head, and so bewildered by his terrible success that he felt as if his senses were shooting off hither and thither like rockets, leaving him mad, Dol nevertheless ran as he had never run before, shoulder to shoulder with his comrade, dashing wildly for a clump of hemlocks over a hundred yards distant. Yet, for the life of him, he could not help glancing back once over his shoulder, to see the creature which he had humbugged, luring it from its forest shelter, and which now pursued him.

The moose was charging after them full tilt, gaining rapidly too, his long thin legs, enormous antlers, broad, upreared nose, and the green glare in his starting eyes, making him look like some strange animal of a former earth. Dol at last trembled with actual fear. He gave a shuddering leap, and forced his legs, which seemed threatened with paralysis, to wilder speed.

"Climb up that hemlock! Get as high as you can!" shrieked Cyrus, stopping to give him an upward shove as they reached the first friendly trunk.

Dol obeyed. Gasping and wild-eyed, he dug his nails into the bark, clambering up somehow until he reached a forked branch about eight feet from the ground. Here strength failed. He could only cling dizzily, feeling that he hung between life and death.

The moose was now snorting like a war-horse beneath. The brute stood off for a minute, then charged the hemlock furiously, and butted it with his antlers till it shook to its roots, the sharp prongs of those terrible horns coming within half an inch of Dol's feet.

With a gurgle of horror the boy tried to reach a higher limb, and succeeded; for at the same moment a timely shout encouraged him. Cyrus was bawling at the top of his voice from a tree ten feet distant:—

"Are you all right, Dol? Don't be scared. Hold on like grim death, and we can laugh at the old termagant now."

"I'm—I'm all right," sang out Dol, though his voice shook, as did every twig of his hemlock, which the moose was assaulting again. "But he's frantic to get at me."

"Never mind. He can't do it, you know. Only don't you go turning dizzy or losing your balance. Ha! you old spindle-legged monster, stand off from that tree. Take a turn at mine now, for a change. You can't shake me down, if you butt till midnight."

Garst's last sentences were hurled at the moose. The Bostonian, having reached a safe height, thrust his face out from his screen of branches, waving first an arm, and then a leg, at the besieging foe, hoping that the force of those battering antlers would be directed against his hemlock, so that his friend's nerves might get a chance to recover.

The ruse succeeded. The moose, reminded that there was a second enemy, charged the other tree; stood off for a minute to get breath, then charged it again, snorting, bellowing, and knocking his jaws together with a crunching, chopping noise.

"Ha! that's how he makes the row like a man with an axe—by hammering his jaws on each other. Well, well! but this is a regular picnic, Dol," sang out Cyrus jubilantly, caring nothing for the shocks, and forgetting camp, water, peril, everything, in his joy at getting a chance to leisurely study the creature he had come so far to visit.

"I owe you something for this, little man!" he carolled on in triumph, as he watched every wild movement of the moose. "This is a show we'll only see once in our lives. It's worth a hundred dollars a performance. Butt and snort till you're tired, you 'Awful Jabberwock!'"—this to the bull-moose. "We've come hundreds of miles to see you, and the more you carry on the better we'll be pleased."

Indeed, the wrathful king of forests seemed in no hurry to cut short his pantomime. He ramped and raged, tearing from one tree to another, expending paroxysms of force in vain attempts to overturn one or the other of them. The ground seemed to shake under his thundering hoofs. His eyes were full of green fire; his nostrils twitched; the black tassel or "bell" hanging from his shaggy throat shook with every angry movement; his muffle, the big overhanging upper lip, was spotted with foam.

As he gulped, grunted, snorted, and roared, his uncouth, guttural noises made him seem more than ever like a curious creature of earth's earliest ages.

"We came pretty near to being goners, Dol, I tell you!" carolled Cyrus again from his high perch in the hemlock, carrying on a by-play with the enemy between each sentence. "How in the name of wonder did you manage such a call? It would have moved the heart-strings of any moose. I was lying flat, you know, peeping through a little gap in the bushes, and you had scarcely taken the horn from your mouth when I saw the old fellow come stamping out of the woods. My! wasn't he a sight? He stood for a minute looking about for the fancied cow; then he bellowed, and started towards the knoll. I knew we had better run for our lives. As soon as he saw us he gave chase."

"And 'the fancied cow' should go tumbling down the knoll like a rolling jackass, and smash that grand horn to bits!" lamented Dol, who now sat serenely on his bough, with a firm clasp of the hemlock trunk, and a reckless enjoyment of the situation which far surpassed his companion's.

Cyrus began to have an occasional twinge of uneasiness about the possible length of the siege, after his first exuberance subsided; but the younger boy, his short terror overcome, had no misgivings. He coquetted with the moose through a thick screen of foliage, shook the branches at him, gibed and taunted him, enjoying the extra fury he aroused.

But suddenly the old bull, having kept up his wild movements for nearly an hour, resolved on a change of tactics. He stood stock-still and lowered his head.

"Goodness! He has made up his mind to 'stick us out!'" gasped Cyrus.

"What's that?" said Dol.

"Don't you see? He's going to lay siege in good earnest—wait till we're forced to come down. Here's a state of things! We can't roost in these trees all night."

The hemlocks were throwing ever-lengthening shadows on the grass. A slow eclipse was stealing over everything. The motionless moose became an uncouth black shape. Garst muttered uneasily. His fingers tingled for his rifle—a very unusual thing with him. His eyes peered through the creeping darkness in puzzled search for some suggestion, some possibility of escape.

"If it were only myself!" he whispered, as if talking to his hemlock. "If it were only myself, I wouldn't care a pin. 'Twould do me no great harm to perch here for hours. But an English youngster, on his first camping-trip! Why, the chill of a forest night might ruin him. He wouldn't howl or make a fuss, for both those Farrar boys have lots of grit, but he'd never get over it. Dol!" he wound up, raising his voice to a sharp pitch. "Say, Dol, I'm going to try a shout for help. Herb must be getting anxious about us by this time. If we could once make him hear, he could try some trick to lure this old curmudgeon away, or creep up and shoot him. Something must be done."

Fetching a deep breath, Cyrus sent a distance-piercing "Coo-hoo!" ringing through the night-air. He followed it with another.

But, so far as he could hear, the hails fetched no answer, save from the moose-jailer. The brute was stirred into a fresh tantrum by the noise. He charged the hemlocks once more, butted and shook them like a veritable demon.

When his paroxysm had subsided, and he stood off to get breath, Garst hailed again.

Glad sound! An answer this time! First, a shrill, long "Coo-hoo!" Next, Herb's voice was heard pealing from far away in the bog: "What's up, boys? Where in the world are you?"

"Here in the trees—treed by a bull-moose!" yelled Cyrus. "He's the maddest old monster you ever saw. Could you coax him off, or sneak up and shoot him? He means to keep us prisoners all night."

There was no wordy answer. But presently the treed heroes heard an odd, bird-like whistle. Dol thought it came from a feathered creature; his more experienced companion guessed that the guide's lips gave it as a signal that he was coming, but that he didn't want to draw the moose's attention in his direction just yet.

Such a quarter of an hour followed! With the fresh spurt of anger the bull-moose became more savage than ever. He grunted, tramped, and hooked the trees with his horns, so that the pair who were perched like night-birds on the branches had to hold on for dear life, lest a surprising shock should dislodge them. Whenever the creature stood off, to gather more fury, they could have counted their heart-beats while they listened, breathlessly anxious to, know what action the approaching woodsman would take.

Once Cyrus spoke.

"Dol Farrar," he said, "I guess this caps all the adventures that you or I have had up to date. No wonder you felt all day as if you were working up to something. I'll believe in presentiments in future."

The words had scarcely passed his lips, when there was the sharp bang! bang! of a rifle not twenty yards distant. A bright sputter of fire cut the darkness beneath the hemlocks.

The moose's blind rage threatened to be his own undoing. While he was fighting an imaginary danger, ears and nostrils half-choked by fury, through the calm night Herb Heal, Winchester in hand, had crept noiselessly on, till he reached the very trees which sheltered his friends.

Once, twice, three times the rifle snapped. The first shot missed altogether. At the second, the moose rose upon his hind-legs, with a sharp sound of fright and pain, quite unlike his former noises. Then he gave a quick jump.

"Great Governor's Ghost! he's gone;" yelled Cyrus, who had swung himself down a few feet, and was hanging by one arm, in his anxiety to see the result of the firing. "You needn't shoot again, Herb! He's off! Let him go!"

"I guess that second shot cut some hair from him, and drew blood too," answered Herb, his deep voice giving the pair a queer sensation as they heard it right beneath. "It was too dark to see plain, but I think he reared; and that's a sign that he was hurt, little or much. Don't drop down for a minute, boys, till we see whether he has bolted for good."



CHAPTER XX.

TRIUMPH.

He had bolted for good, vanished into the mysterious deeps of the primeval forest, whether hurt unto death, or merely "nipped" in a fore-leg, as Herb inclined to think, nobody knew.

"It's too dark to see blood-marks, if there are any, so we can't trail him to-night. If he's hit bad—but I guess he ain't—we can track him in the morning," said the guide; as, after an interval of listening, the rescued pair dropped down from their perches. "Did he chase you, boys? Where on earth did you come on him?"

Talking together, their words tumbling out like a torrent let loose, Cyrus Garst and Dol Farrar gave an account of the past two hours—strangest hours of their lives—filling up the picture of them bit by bit.

"Whew! whew! You did have a narrow squeak, boys, and a scarey time; but I guess you had a lot of fun out of the old snorter," said Herb, his rare laugh jingling out, starting the forest echoes like a clang of bells. "You've won those antlers, Dol—won 'em like a man. Blest, but you have! I promised 'em to the first fellow who called up a moose; and nary a woodsman in Maine could have done it better. I'm powerful glad 'twasn't your own death-call you gave. I'll keep my eye on you now till you leave these woods. Where's the horn?"

"Smashed to bits," answered Dol regretfully.

"And the camp-kettle?"

"Lying by the spring, over there on the knoll, unless the moose kicked it to pieces," said Cyrus.

"My senses! you're a healthy pair to send for water, ain't ye? Let's cruise off and find it. I guess you'll be wanting a drink of hot coffee, after roosting in them trees for so long."

Garst led the way to the spring. Its pretty hum sounded like an angel's whisper through the night, after the tumult of the past scene. Herb fumbled in his leather wallet, brought out a match and a small piece of birch-bark, and kindled a light. With some groping, the kettle was found; it was filled, and the party started for camp.

"I heard the distant challenge of a bull-moose a couple of hours ago," said the guide, as they went along. "I never suspicioned he was attacking you; but after the camp was a' ready, and you hadn't turned up, I got kind o' scared. I left Neal to tend the fire and toast the pork, and started out to search. I s'pose I took the wrong direction; for I hollered, and got no answer. Afterwards, when I was travelling about the bog, I heard a 'Coo-hoo!' and the noises of an angry moose. Then I guessed there was trouble."

"Won't Neal look blue when he hears that he was toasting pork while we were perched in those trees, with the moose waltzing below!" exclaimed Dol. "Well, Cy, I've won the antlers, and I've got my ripping story for the Manchester fellows. I don't care how soon we turn home now."

"You don't, don't ye?" said the guide. "Well, I should s'pose you'd want to trail up that moose to-morrow, and see what has become of him."

"Of course I do! I forgot that."

And Dol Farrar, who had thought his record of adventure and triumph so full that it could hold no more, realized that there is always for ambition a farther point.

Neal did feel a little blue over the thought of what he had missed. But, being a generous-hearted fellow, he tasted his young brother's joy, when the latter cuddled close to him upon the evergreen boughs that night, muttering, as if the whole earth lay conquered at his feet:—

"My legs are as stiff as ramrods, but who'd think of his legs after such a night as we've had?

"I say, Neal, this is life; the little humbugging scrapes we used to call adventures at home are only play for girls. It's something to talk about for a lifetime, when a fellow comes to close quarters with a creature like that moose. I said I'd get the better of his ears, and I did it. Pinch me, old boy, if I begin a moose-call in my sleep."

Several times during the night Neal found it necessary to obey this injunction, else had there been no peace in the camp. But, in spite of Dol's ravings and riotings in his excited dreams, the party enjoyed a needed ten hours' slumber, all save Herb, who, as usual, was astir the next morning while his comrades were yet snoring.

He got his fire going well, and baked a great flat loaf of bread in his frying-pan, setting the pan amid hot ashes and covering it over. Previous to this, he had made a pilgrimage to the distant spring, to fill his kettle for coffee and bread-making, and had carefully examined the ground about the clump of hemlocks.

The result of his investigation was given to the boys as they ate their breakfast under the shade of a cedar, with a sky above them whose morning glories were here and there overshot by leaden tints.

"I guess we've got a pretty fair chance of trailing that moose," he said. "I found both hair and blood on the spot where he was wounded. I'm for following up his tracks, though I guess they'll take us a bit up the mountain. If he's hurt bad, 'twould be kind o' merciful to end his sufferings. If he ain't, we can let him get off."

"Right, as you always are, Herb," answered Cyrus. "But what on earth made the creature bolt so suddenly? If you had seen him five minutes before he was shot, you'd have said he had as much fight in him as a lion."

"That's the way with moose a'most always. Their courage ain't that o' flesh-eating animals. It's only a spurt; though it's a pretty big spurt sometimes, as you boys know now. It'll fail 'em in a minute, when you least expect it. And, you see, that one last night didn't know where his wound came from. I guess he thought he was struck by lightning or a thunder-ball, so he skipped. Talking of thunder-balls, boys," wound up Herb, "I shouldn't be surprised if the old Mountain Spirit, who lives up a-top there, gave us a rattling welcome with his thunders to-day. The air is awful heavy for this time of year. Perhaps we'd better give up the trailing after all."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Dol indignantly. "Do you think a shower will melt us? Or that we'll squeal like girls at a few flashes of lightning? 'Twould be jolly good fun to see old Pamolah sending off his artillery."

"Well, there'd be no special danger, I guess, if we were past the heavy timber growth before the storm began. There's lots of rocky dens on the mountain side where we could shelter under a granite ledge, and be safer than we'd be here in tent. Or we might come a-near our old log camp. I guess, if that's standing yet, you'd like to see it. Say! we'll leave it to Cyrus. He's boss, ain't he?"

Cyrus, desperately anxious to know whether it would be life or death for the wounded moose, and regarding the signs of bad weather as by no means certain, decided in favor of the expedition. The campers hurriedly swallowed the remainder of their breakfast, and made ready for an immediate start.

"In trailing a moose the first rule is: go as light as you can; that is, don't carry an ounce more stuff than is necessary. Even a man's rifle is apt to get in his way when he has to scramble over windfalls, or slump between big bowlders of rock, which a'most tear the clothes off his back. And we may have to do some pretty tall climbing. So leave all your traps in the tent, boys; I'll fasten it down tight. There won't be any human robbers prowling around, you bet! Bears and coons are the only burglars of these woods, and they don't do much mischief in daytime."

The guide rapidly gave these directions, his breezy voice setting a current of energy astir, like a wind-gust cutting through a quiet grove, while he rolled his indispensable axe, some bread that was left from the meal, and a lump of pork into a little bundle, which he strapped on his back.

"Now," he said, "if that trail should give us a long tramp, or if you boys should take a notion to go a good ways up Katahdin, or anything turns up to hinder our getting back to camp till nightfall, I've our snack right here. I can light a fire in two minutes, to toast our pork; and we'll wash it down with mountain water, the best drink for climbers. I could rig you up a snug shelter, too, in case of accidents. A woodsman ain't in it without his axe."

To what strange work that axe would be put ere night again closed its shutters over granite peaks and evergreen forest, Herb Heal little knew; nor could he have guessed that the coming hours would make the most heart-stirring day of his stirring life. If he could, would he have started out this morning with a happy-go-lucky whistle, softly modulated on his lips, and no more sober burden on his mind than the trail of that moose?



CHAPTER XXI.

ON KATAHDIN.

"See there, boys, I told you so," said Herb, as the party reached the ever-to-be-remembered clump of hemlocks, the beginning of the trail which they were ready to follow up like sleuth-hounds. "There's plenty of hair; I guess I singed him in two places."

He pointed to some shaggy clotted locks on the grass at his feet, and then to a small maroon-colored stain beside them.

"Is that blood?" asked Neal.

"Blood, sure enough, though there ain't much of it. But I'll tell you what! I'd as soon there wasn't any. I wish it had been light enough last night for me to act barber, and only cut some hair from that moose, instead of wounding him. It might have answered the purpose as well, and sent him walking."

"I don't believe it would have done anything of the kind," exclaimed Dol. "He was far too red-hot an old customer to bolt because a bullet shaved him."

"Well, I don't set up to be soft-hearted like Cyrus here; and I'm ready enough to bag my meat when I want it," said the woodsman. "But sure's you live, boys, I never wounded a free game creature yet, and seed it get away to pull a hurt limb and a cruel pain with it through the woods, that I could feel chipper afterwards. It's only your delicate city fellows who come out here for a shot once a year, who can chuckle over the pools of blood a wounded moose leaves behind him. Sho! it's not manly."

A start was now made on the trail, Herb leading, and showing such wonderful skill as a trailer that the English boys began to believe his long residence in the woods had developed in him supernatural senses.

"That moose was shot through the right fore-leg," he whispered, as the trackers reached the edge of the forest.

"How do you know?" gasped the Farrars.

The woodsman answered by kneeling, bending his face close to the ground, and drawing his brown finger successively round three prints on a soft patch of earth, which the unpractised eyes could scarcely discern.

"There's no mark of the right fore-hoof," he whispered again presently; "nothing but that," pointing to another dark red blotch, which the boys would have mistaken for maroon-tinted moss.

A breathless, wordless, toiling hour followed. Through the dense woods, which sloped steadily upward, clothing Katahdin's highlands, Herb Heal travelled on, now and again halting when the trail, because of freshly fallen pine-needles or leaves, became quite invisible. Again he would crouch close to the ground, make a circle with his finger round the last visible print, and work out from that, trying various directions, until he knew that he was again on the track which the limping moose had travelled before him.

His comrades followed in single file, carrying their rifles in front of their bodies instead of on their shoulders, so that there might be no danger of a sudden clang or rattle from the barrels striking the trees. Following the example of their guide, each one carefully avoided stepping on crackling twigs or dry branches, or rustling against bushes or boughs. The latter they would take gingerly in their hands as they approached them, bend them out of the way, and gently release them as they passed. Heroically they forebore to growl when their legs were scraped by jagged bowlders or prickly shrubs, giving thanks inwardly to the manufacturers of their stout tweeds that their clothes held together, instead of hanging on them like streamers on a rag-bush.

It was a good, practical lesson in moose-trailing; but, save for the knowledge gained by the three who had never stalked a moose before, it was a failure.

The air beneath the dense foliage grew depressing—suffocating. Each one longed breathlessly for the minute when he should emerge from this heavy timber-growth, even to do more rugged climbing. Distant rumbles were heard. Herb's prophecy was being fulfilled. Pamolah was grumbling at the trailers, and sending out his Thunder Sons to bid them back.

But it was too late for retreat. If they gave up their purpose, turned and fled to camp, the storm, which was surely coming, would catch them under the interlacing trees, a danger which the guide was especially anxious to avoid. He pressed on with quickened steps, stooping no more to make circles round the moose's prints. Old Pamolah's threatenings grew increasingly sullen. At last the desired break in the woods was reached; the trackers found themselves on the open side of Katahdin, surrounded by a tangled growth of alders and white birches struggling up between granite rocks; then the mountain artillery broke forth with terrifying clatter.

A loud, long thunder-roll was echoed from crag, slide, forest, spur, and basin. The "home of storms" was a fort of noise.

"Ha! there'll be a big cannonading this time, I guess. Pamolah is going to let fly at us with big shot, little shot, fire and water—all the forces the old scoundrel has," said Herb Heal, at last breaking the silence which had been kept on the trail, and looking aloft towards the five peaks guarding that mysterious basin, from which heavy, lurid clouds drifted down.

At the same time a blustering, mighty wind-gust half swept the four climbers from their feet. A great flash of globe lightning cut the air like a dazzling fire-ball.

"We'll have to quit our trailing, and scoot for shelter, I'm thinking!" exclaimed Cyrus.

"Good land, I should say so!" agreed the guide. "The bull-moose likes thunder. He's away in some thick hole in the forest now, recovering himself. We couldn't have come up with him anyhow, boys, for them blood-spots had stopped. I guess his leg wasn't smashed; and he'll soon be as big a bully as ever. Follow me now, quick! Mind yer steps, though! Them bushes are awful catchy!"

Undazzled by the lightning's frequent flare, unstaggered by the down-rushing wind, as if the mountain thunders were only the roll of an organ about his ears, Herb Heal sprang onward and upward, tugging his comrades one by one up many a precipitous ledge, and pulling them to their feet again when the tripping bushes brought their noses to the ground and their heels into the air.

"Hitch on to me, Dol!" he cried, suddenly turning on that youngster, who was trying to get his second breath. "Tie on to me tight. I'll tow you up! I wish we could ha' reached that old log camp, boys. 'Twould be a stunning shelter, for it has a wall of rock to the back. But it's higher up, and off to the right. There! I see the den I'm aiming for."

A few energetic bounds brought Herb, with Dol in tow, to a platform of rock, which rose above a bed of blueberry bushes. It narrowed into a sort of cave, roofed by an overhanging bowlder.

"We'll be snug enough under this rock!" he exclaimed, pointing to the canopy. "Creep in, boys. We'll have tubs of rain, and a pelting of hail. The rumpus is only beginning."

So it was. The storm had been creeping from its cradle. Now it swept down with an awful whirl and commingling of elements.

The boys, peering out from their rocky nest, saw a magnificent panorama beneath them. The regiments of the air were at war. Lightning chains encircled the heavens, lighting up the forests below. Winds charged down the mountain-side, sweeping stones and bushes before them. Hail-bullets rattled in volleys. Thunder-artillery boomed until the very rocks seemed 'to shake.

"It's fine!" exclaimed Cyrus. "It's super-fine!"

Then a curtain of thick rain partly hid the warfare, the lightning still rioting through it like a beacon of battle.

"The stones up above will have to be pretty firmly fixed to keep their places," said Herb. "Boys, I hope there ain't a-going to be slides on the mountain after this."

"Slides?" echoed Dol questioningly.

"Landslides, kid. Say! if you want to be scared until your bones feel limp, you've got to hear a great big block of granite come ploughing down from the top 'o the mountain, bringing earth and bushes along with it, and smashing even the rocks to splinters as it pounds along."

"I guess that's a sensation we'd rather be spared," said Cyrus gravely.

And under the quieting spell of the airy warfare there was silence for a while.

"Do you think it's lightening up, Herb?" asked Neal, after the storm had raged for three-quarters of an hour.

"I guess it is. The rain is stopping too. But we'll have an awful slushy time of it getting back to camp. To plough through them soaked forests below would be enough to give you city fellows a shaking ague."

"Couldn't we climb on to your old log camp?" suggested Garst. "If we have the luck to find the old shanty holding together, we can light a fire there after things dry out a bit, and eat our snack. Then we needn't be in a hurry to get down. We'll risk it, anyhow."

"I reckon that's about the only thing to be done," assented the guide.

And in twenty minutes' time the four were again straining up Katahdin, clutching slippery rocks, sinking in sodden earth, shivering as they were besprinkled by every bush and dwarfed tree, and dreadfully hampered with their rifles.

"Never mind, boys; we'll get there! Clinch yer teeth, and don't squirm! Once we're past this tangle, the bit of climbing that's left will be as easy as rolling off a log!"

So shouted Herb cheerfully, as he tore a way with hand and foot through the stunted growth of alders and birch, which, beaten down by the winds, was now an almost impassable, sopping tangle.

"Keep in my tracks!" he bellowed again. "Gracious! but this sort o' work is as slow as molasses crawling up-hill in winter."

But ten minutes later, when the dripping jungle was behind, he dropped his jesting tone.

He came to a full stop, catching his breath with a big gulp.

"Boys," he cried, "it's standing yet! I see it—the old home-camp! There it is above us on that bit of a platform, with the big rock behind it. And I've kep' saying to myself for the last quarter of an hour that we wouldn't find it—that we'd find nary a thing but mildewed logs!"

A wealth of memories was in the woodsman's eyes as he gazed up at the timber nest, the log camp which his own hands had put up, standing on a narrow plateau, and built against a protecting wall of rock that rose in jagged might to a height of thirty or forty feet.

An earth bank or ridge, covered with hardy mosses and mountain creepers, sloped gently up to the sheltered platform. To climb this was, indeed, "as easy as rolling off a log."

"We used to have a good beaten path here, but I guess it's all growed over," said Herb in a thick voice, as if certain cords in his throat were swelling. "Many's the time I've blessed the sight of that old home-camp, boys, after a hard week's trapping. Hundert's o' night's I've slept snug inside them log walls when blasts was a-sweeping and bellowing around, like as if they'd rip the mountain open, and tear its very rocks out."

While the guide spoke he was leaping up the ridge. A few minutes, and he stood, a towering figure, on the platform above, waving his battered hat in salute to the old camp.

"I guess some traveller has been sheltering here lately!" he cried to Neal Farrar, as the latter overtook him. "There's a litter around," pointing to dry sticks and withered bushes strewn upon the camping-ground. "And the door's standing open. I wonder who found the old shanty?"

Neal remembered, hours afterwards, that at the moment he felt an odd awakening stir in him, a stir which, shooting from head to foot, seemed to warn him that he was nearing a sensation, the biggest sensation of this wilderness trip.

He heard the voices of Cyrus and Dol hallooing behind; but they sounded away back and indistinct, for his ears were bent towards the deserted camp, listening with breathless expectation for something, he didn't know what.

One minute the vague suspense lasted, while he followed Herb towards the hut. Then heaven and earth and his own heart seemed to stand still.

Through the wide-open door of the shanty came random, crooning snatches of sound. Was the guttural voice which made them human? The English boy scarcely knew. But as the noise swelled, like the moaning of a dry wind among trees, he began, as it were, to disentangle it. Words shaped themselves, Indian words which he had heard before on the guide's tongue.

"N'loan pes-saus, mok glint ont-aven, Glint ont-aven, nosh morgun."

These lines from the "Star Song," the song which Herb had learned from his traitor chum, floated out to him upon Katahdin's breeze. They struck young Farrar's ears in staggering tones, like a knell, the sadness of which he could not at the moment understand. But he had a vague impression that the mysterious singer in the deserted camp attached no meaning to what he chanted.

"Look out, I say! I don't want to come a cropper here."

It was Dol's young voice which rang out shrilly among the mountain echoes. Side by side with Cyrus, the boy had just gained the top of the ridge when the guide suddenly backed upon him, Herb's great shoulder-blade knocking him in the face, so that he had to plant his feet firmly to avoid spinning back.

But Herb had heard that guttural crooning. Just now he could hear nothing else.

Twice he made a heaving effort to speak, and the voice cracked in his throat.

Then, as he sprang for the camp-door, four words stumbled from his lips:—

"By thunder! it's Chris."



CHAPTER XXII.

THE OLD HOME-CAMP.

The silence which followed that ejaculation was like the hush of earth before a thunder-storm.

Not a syllable passed the lips of the boys as they followed Herb into the log hut, but feeling seemed wagging a startled tongue in each finger-tip which convulsively pressed the rifles.

And not another articulate sentence came from the guide; only his throat swelled with a deep, amazed gurgle as he reached the interior of the shanty, and dropped his eyes upon the individual who raised that queer chanting.

On a bed of withered spruce boughs, strewn higgledy-piggledy upon the camp-floor—mother earth—lay the form of a man. Thin wisps of blue-black hair, long untrimmed, trailed over his face and neck, which looked as if they were carved out of yellow bone. His figure was skeleton-like. His lips—the lips which at the entrance of the strangers never ceased their wild crooning—were swollen and fever-scorched. His black eyes, disfigured by a hideous squint, rolled with the sick fancies of delirium.

Cyrus and the Farrars, while they looked upon him, felt that, even if they had never heard Herb's exclamation, they would have had no difficulty in identifying the creature, remembering that story which had thrilled them by the camp-fire at Millinokett. It was Herb Heal's traitor chum—the half-breed, Cross-eyed Chris.

And Herb, backing off from the withered couch as far as the limited space of the cabin would allow, stood with his shoulders against the mouldy logs of the wall, his eyes like peep-holes to a volcano, gulping and gurgling, while he swallowed back a fire of amazed excitement and defeated anger, for which his backwoods vocabulary was too cheap.

A flame seemed scorching and hissing about his heart while he remembered that during some hour of every day for five years, since last he had seen the "hound" who robbed him, he had sworn that, if ever he caught the thief, he would pounce upon him with a woodsman's vengeance.

"I couldn't touch him now—the scum! But I'll be switched if I'll do a thing to help him!" he hissed, the flame leaping to his lips.

Yet he had a strange sensation, as if that vow was broken like an egg-shell even while he made it. He knew that "the two creatures which had fought inside of him, tooth and claw," about the fate of his enemy, were pinching his heart by turns in a last hot conflict.

His eyes shot flinty sparks; he drew his breath in hard puffs; his knotted throat twitched and swelled, while they (the man and the brute) strove within him; and all the time he stood staring in grisly silence at the half-breed.

The latter still continued his Indian croon; though from the crazy roll of his malformed eyes it was plain that he knew not whether he chanted about the stars, his old friends and guides, or about anything else in heaven or earth.

But one thing quickly became clear to Cyrus, and then to the Farrar boys,—less accustomed to tragedy than their comrade,—that this strange personage, in whose veins the blood of white men and red men met, carrying in its turbid flow the weaknesses of two races, was singing his swan-song, the last chant he would ever raise on earth.

At their first entrance, as their bodies interfered with the broad light streaming through the cabin-door, Chris had lifted towards them a scared, shrinking stare. But, apparently, he took them for the shadows which walked in the dreams of his delirium. Not a ray of recognition lightened the blankness of that stare as Herb's big figure passed before him. Letting his eyes wander aimlessly again from log wall to log wall, from withered bed to mouldy rafters, his lips continued their crooning, which sank with his weakening breath, then rose again to sink once more, like the last wind-gusts when the storm is over.

Suddenly his shrunken body shivered in every limb. The humming ceased. His yellow teeth tapped upon each other in trouble and fear. He raised himself to a squatting posture, with his knee-bones to his chin, the wisps of hair tumbling upon his naked chest.

"It's dark—heap dark!" he whimpered, between long gasps. "Can't strike the trail—can't find the home-camp. Herb—Herb Heal—ole pard—'twas I took 'em—the skins. 'Twas—a dog's trick. Take it out—o' my hide—if yer wants to—yah! Heap sick!"

Not a ray of sense was yet in the half-breed's eyes. An imaginary, vengeance-dealing Herb was before him; but he never turned a glance towards the real, and now forgiving, old chum, who leaned against the wall not ten feet away. His voice dropped to a guttural rumble, in which Indian sounds mingled with English.

But the flame at Herb's heart was quenched at the first whimpered word. His stiffened muscles and lips relaxed. With a gurgle of sorrow, he crossed the camp-floor, and dropped into a crawling position on the faded spruces.

"Chris!" he cried thickly. "Chris,—poor old pard,—don't ye know me? Look, man! Herb is right here—Herb Heal, yer old chum. You're 'heap sick' for sure; but we'll haul you off to a settlement or to our camp, and I'll bring Doc along in two days. He'll"—

But Cross-eyed Chris became past hearing, his flicker of strength had failed; he keeled over, and lay, with his limp legs curled up, faint and speechless, upon the dead evergreens.

"You ain't a-going to die!" gasped Herb defiantly. "I'll be jiggered if you be, jest as I've found you! Say, boys! Cyrus! Neal! rub him a bit, will ye? We ain't got no brandy, I'll build a fire, and warm some coffee."

It was strange work for the hands of the Bostonian, and stranger yet for those of young Farrar,—son of an English merchant-prince,—this straightening and rubbing of a dying half-Indian, a "scum," as Herb called him, drunkard, and thief. Yet there was no flash of hesitation on Farrar's part, as they brought their warm friction to bear upon the chill yellow skin, piebald from dirt and the stains of travel, as if it were the very mission which had brought them to Katahdin.

They had grave thoughts meanwhile that the old mountain was decidedly gloomy in its omens, first a thunder-storm and then a tragedy; for, rub as they might with brotherly hands, they could not pass their own warmth into the body of the half-breed, though he still lived.

But the mountain had not ended its terrors yet.

Its mumbling lips began to speak, with a threatening, low at first like muttered curses, but swelling into a nameless noise—a rumbling, pounding, creeping, crashing.

"Great Governor's Ghost! what's that?" gasped Cyrus, stopping his rubbing. "Pamolah or some other fiend seems to be bombarding us from the top now."

"It's more thunder rolling over us," said Neal; but as he spoke his tongue turned stiff with fear.

"Sounds as if the whole mountain was tumbling to pieces. Perhaps it's the end of the world," suggested Dol, as a succession of booming shocks from above seemed to shake the camping-ground under his feet.

There was one second of awful indecision. The boys looked at each other, at the dying man, at the roof above them, in the stiffness of uncertain terror.

Then a figure leaped into their midst, with an armful of dry sticks, which he dashed from him. It was Herb, with the fuel for a fire. And, for the first and last time in his history, so far as these friends of his knew it, there was that big fear in his face which is most terrible when it looks out of the eyes of a naturally brave man.

"Boys, where's yer senses?" he yelled cuttingly. "Out, for your lives! Run! There's a slide above us on the mountain!"

"Him?" questioned Cyrus's stiff lips, as he pointed to the breathing wreck on the spruce boughs. "He's not dead yet."

"D'ye think I'd leave him? Clear out of this camp—you, or we'll be buried in less'n two minutes! To the right! Off this ridge! Got yer rifles? I'm coming!"

The woodsman flung out the words while his brawny arms hoisted the body of his old chum. His comrades had already disappeared when he turned and sprang for the camp-door with his limp burden, but his moccasined foot kicked against something.

A great hiccough which was almost a sob rose from Herb's throat. It was his one valuable possession, his 45-90 Winchester rifle, his second self, which he had rested against the log wall.

"Good-by, Old Blazes!" he grunted. "You never went back on me, but I can't lug him and you! My stars! but that was a narrow squeak."

For, as he cleared the camping-ground with a blind dash, with head bent and tongue caught between his clenched teeth, with a boom like a Gatling gun, a great block of granite from the summit of Katahdin struck the rock which sheltered the old camp, breaking a big piece off it, and shot on with mighty impetus down the mountain.

An avalanche of loose earth, stones, and bushes, brought down by this battering-ram of the landslide, piled themselves upon the log hut, smashing to kindling-wood its walls, which had stood many a hard storm, burying them out of sight, and flinging wide showers of dust and small missiles.

A scattered rain of clay caught Herb upon the head, and lodged, some of it, on the little pack containing axe and lunch which was strapped upon his shoulders.

He shook. His grip loosened. The limp, dragging body in his arms sank until the feet touched the earth.

But with the supreme effort, moral and physical, of his life, the forest guide gathered it tight again.

"I'll be blowed if I'll drop him now," he gasped. "He ain't nothing but a bag o' bones, anyhow."

Only a strong man in the hour of his best strength could have done it. With a defiant snort Herb charged through the choking dust-clouds, pelted by flying pebbles, sods, and fragments of sticks.

"This way, boys!" he roared, after five straining, staggering minutes, as he caught a glimpse of his comrades ahead, tearing off to the right, as he had bidden them. "You may let up now. We're safe enough."

They faced back, and saw him make a few reeling, descending steps, then lay what now seemed to be an out-and-out lifeless man on a bed of moss beneath a dwarfed spruce.

The nerves of the three were in a jumping condition, their brains felt befuddled, and their hearts sinking and melting in the midst of their bones, from the astounding shock and terror of the land-slide. But, as they beheld the guide deposit his burden, with its helplessly trailing head and limbs, a cheer in unsteady tones rang above the slackening rattle of earth and stones, and the far-away boom of the granite-block as it buried itself in the forest beneath.

"Hurrah! for you, Herb, old boy," yelled Cyrus triumphantly. "That was the grittiest thing I ever saw done' Hurrah! Hurrah! Hoo-ray!"

The English boys, open-throated, swelled the peal.

But their cheering broke off as they came near, and saw the mask-like face over which Herb bent.

"Is he gone, poor fellow?" asked Garst. "What do you suppose caused it—the slide?"

"Why, it was a thundering big lump of granite from the top o' the mountain," answered Herb, replying to the second question. "That plaguy heavy rain must ha' loosened the earth around it the clay and bushes that kep' it in place. So it got kind o' top-heavy, and came slumping and pitching down, slow at first, and then a'most as quick as a cannon-ball, bringing all that pile along with it. I've seen the like before; but, sho! I never came so near being buried by it."

He pointed as he spoke to the late camping-ground, with its lodgment of clay, sods, pygmy trees, and pieces of rock, big and little.



"The old camp's clean wiped out, boys," he said; "and I guess one of the men that built it is gone, or a'most gone, too. Stick your arm under his head, Cyrus, while I hunt for some water."

Garst did as he was bidden, but his help was not needed long. The guide went off like a racer, covering the ground at a stretching gallop. He remembered well the clear Katahdin spring, which had supplied the home-camp during that long-past trapping winter. He returned with his tin mug full.

When the ice-cold drops touched Chris's forehead, and lay on his parted lips, gem-like drops which he was past swallowing, his malformed eyes slowly opened. There was intelligence in them, shining through the gathering death-film, like a sinking light in a lantern.

He was groping in the dim border-land now, and in it he recognized his old partner with shadowy wonder; for delirium was past, with the other storms of a storm-beaten life.

"Herb," he gurgled in snatches, the words being half heard, half guessed at, "'twas I—took 'em—the skins—an' the antlers. I wanted—to get—to the ole camp—an' let you—take it out o' me—afore I—keeled over."

Herb had taken Cyrus's place, and was upholding him with a tenderness which showed that the guide's heart was in this hour melted to a jelly. Two tears were dammed up inside his eyelids, which were so unused to tears that they held them in. He neither wiped nor winked them away before he answered:—

"Don't you fret about that—poor kid. We'll chuck that old business clean out o' mind. You've jest got to suck this water and try to chipper up, and—we'll make camp together again."

But Herb knew as well as he knew anything that the man who had robbed him was long past "chippering up," and was starting alone to the unseen camping-grounds.

"How long since you got back here?" he' asked, close to the dulling ear.

"Couldn't—keep—track—o' days. Got—turned—round—in woods. Lost—trail—heap—long—getting—to—th' old—camp."

The words seemed freezing on the lips which uttered them. Herb asked no more questions. Silence was broken only by the rolling voice of the land-slide, which had not yet ceased. Occasional volleys of loose earth and stones, dislodged or shaken by the down-plunging granite, still kept falling at intervals on the buried camp.

At one unusually loud rattle, Chris's lips moved again. In those strange gutturals which the boys had heard in the hut, he rumbled an Indian sentence, repeating it in English with scared, breaking breaths.

It was a prayer of her tribe which his mother had taught him to say at morning and eve:—

"God—I—am—weak—Pity—me!"

"Heap—noise! Heap—dark!" he gasped. "Can't—find—th' old—camp."

"You're near it now, old chum," said Herb, trying to soothe him. "It's the home-camp."

"We'll—camp—to-ge-ther?"

"We will again, sure."

* * * * *

The last stone pounded down on the heap above the old camp; and Herb gently laid flat the body of the man he had sworn to shoot, closed the malformed eyes, and turned away, that the fellows he was guiding might not see his face.



CHAPTER XXIII.

BROTHERS' WORK.

They buried Chris upon Katahdin's breast. It was a good cemetery for woodsmen, so Herb said, granite above and forest beneath.

But, good or bad, this was the one thing to be done. An attempt to transfer the body to a distant settlement would be objectless labor; for, as far as the guide knew, the half-breed had not a friend to be interested in his fate, father and mother having died before Herb found him in the snow-heaped forest.

There were three reliable witnesses, besides the man who was known to have a grudge against him, to testify as to the cause and manner of his death when the party returned to Greenville; so no suspicious finger could point at Herb Heal, with a hint that he had carried out his old threat.

How long Chris, in lonely, crazed repentance, had sheltered in the camp on the mountain-side could only be a matter of guess. Herb inclined to think that he had been there for weeks,—months, perhaps,—judging from the withered spruce bed and the dry boughs and sticks upon the camping-ground, which had evidently been gathered and broken for fuel. His ravings made it clear that, on returning to the old haunts after years of absence, he had missed the trail he used to know, and wandered wearily in the dense woods about the foot of Katahdin before he escaped from the prison of trees, and climbed to the hut he sought.

Such wanderings, Herb declared, generally ended in "a man having wheels in his head," being half or wholly insane, though he might keep sufficient wits to provide himself with food and warmth, as Chris had done while his strength held out. This was not long; for the half-breed's words suggested that he felt near to the great change he roughly called "keeling over," when he started to find his cheated partner.

But Cyrus, while he watched the guide making preparations for the mountain burial, pictured the poor weakling tramping for hundreds of miles through rugged forest-land, doubtless with aching knee-joints and feet, that he might make upon his own skin justice for the skins which he had stolen, and so, in the only way he knew, square things with his wronged chum. And the city man thought, with a tear of pity, that even that poor drink-fuddled mind must have been lit by some ray of longing for goodness.

It was a strange funeral.

The guide chose a spot where the earth had been much softened by the recent rain; and, with the ingenuity of a man accustomed to wilderness shifts, he broke up the drenched ground with the axe which he took from his shoulders.

That axe, which had so often made camp, had never before made a grave; the Farrars doubted that it ever would. But Herb worked away upon his knees, moisture dripping from his skin, putting sorrow for years of anger into every blow of his arms. Then, stopping a while, he went off down the mountain to the nearest belt of trees, and cut a limb from one, out of which, with his hunting-knife, he fashioned a rude wooden implement, a cross between a spade and shovel.

With this he scooped out the broken earth until a grave appeared over three feet deep. He lined it with fragrant spruce-boughs from the wind-beaten tangle below.

These Cyrus and Dol had busied themselves in cutting. Neal thought of other work for his fingers. Getting hold of Herb's axe when the owner was not using it, he felled one of the dwarf white birches. Out of its light, delicate wood, with the help of his big pocket-knife and a ball of twine that was hidden somewhere about him, he made a very presentable cross, to point out to future hunters on Katahdin the otherwise unmarked grave.

He was a bit of a genius at wood-carving, and surveyed his work with satisfaction when he considered it finished, having neatly cut upon it the name, "Chris Kemp," with the date, "October 20th, 1891."

"Couldn't you add a text or motto of some kind?" suggested Dol, glancing over his shoulder. "Twould make it more like the things one sees in cemeteries. You're such a dab at that sort of work."

"Can't think of anything," answered the elder brother.

Then, with a sudden lighting of his face, he seized the knife again, and worked in, in fine lettering, the frightened prayer he had heard on the half-breed's lips:—

"God, I am weak; pity me!"

Herb and Cyrus lowered the body into its resting-place, and covered it with the green spruces.

The four campers knelt bare-headed by the grave.

"Couldn't one of you boys say a bit of a prayer?" asked Herb in a thick voice. "I ain't used to spouting."

All former help had been easily given. This was a harder matter, yet not so difficult as it would have been amid a city congregation.

Garst tried to recall some suitable prayer from a funeral service; so did Neal. Both failed.

But here upon Katahdin's side, where, in the large forces of storm and slide, in forest and granite, through every wind-swept bush, waving blade, and tinted lichen, breathed a whisper from God, it seemed no unnatural thing for a man or a boy to speak to his Father.

"Can't one of you fellers say a prayer?" asked Herb again.

Then the river of feeling in Cyrus broke the dam of reserve, and flowed over his lips in a prayer such as he had never before uttered.

It was the prayer of a son who was for the minute absorbed in his Father.

It left the five, those who were camping here and one who had gone to unseen camping-grounds, with son-like trust to the Father's dealings.

Herb and the Farrars responded to it with heart-eager "Amens!" the fervor of which was new to their lips.

"I thank you as if he were my own brother, boys," said the woodsman, while he filled in the grave, and planted Neal's cross at its head. "Sho! when it comes to a time like we've been through to-day, a man, if he has anything but a gizzard in him, must feel as how we're all brothers,—every man-jack of us,—white men, red men, half-and-half men, whatever we are or wherever we sprung."

"A fellow is always hearing that sort of thing," said Neal Farrar to Cyrus. "But I'm blessed if I ever felt it stick in me before! that we're all of the one stuff, you know—we and that poor beggar. Some of us seem to get such precious long odds over the others."

"All the more reason why we should do our level best to pull the backward ones up to us," answered the American.

The words struck into the ears of Dol—that youngster listening with a soberness of attention seldom seen in his flash-light eyes.

A few years afterwards, when Neal Farrar was a newly blown lieutenant in his Queen's Twelfth Lancers, as full of heroic impulses and enthusiasms as a modern young officer may be,—while his half-fledged ambitions were hanging on the chances of active service, and the golden, remote possibility of his one day being a V.C.,—there was a peaceful honor which clung to him unsought.

During his first year of army life, he became the paragon of every poor private and raw recruit struggling with the miseries of goose-step, with whom he came even into momentary contact. For sometimes through a word or act, sometimes through a flash of the eye, or a look about the mouth, during the brief interchange of a military salute, these "backward ones" saw that the progressive young officer looked on them, not as men-machines, but as brothers, as important in the great schemes of the nation and the world as he was himself; that he was proud to serve with them, and would be prouder still to help them if he could.

It was an understanding which inspired many a tempted or newly joined fellow to drill himself morally as his sergeant drilled him physically, with a determination to become as fine a soldier and forward a man as his paragon.

But only one American friend of Lieutenant Farrar's, who has let out the secret to the writer, knows that the binding truth of human brotherhood was first born into him when, on Katahdin's side, he helped to bury a thieving half-Indian.



CHAPTER XXIV.

"KEEPING THINGS EVEN."

"Now, you musn't be moping, boys, because of this day's work that you took a hand in, and that wasn't in your play-bill when you come to these woods. We'll have to try and even things up to-morrow with some big sport. You look kind o' wilted."

So said Herb when the tired party were half-way back to camp, doing the descent of the mountain in a silence clouded by the scene which they had been through.

The woodsman seemed troubled with a rasping in his throat. He cleared it twice and spat before he could open a passage for a decently cheerful voice in which to suggest a rise of spirits. But Herb was too faithful a guide to bear the thought that his employers' trip should end in any gloom because the one painful chapter in his own life had closed forever. Moreover, although more than once, as he fought his way through a jungle or jumped a windfall, something nipped his heart, pinching him up inside, and making his eyes leak, he felt that the thing had ended well for him—and for Chris.

Herb, in his simple faith, scarcely doubted that the old chum, whom he had forgiven, had reached a Home-Camp where his broken will and stunted life might be repaired, and grow as they had poor chance to grow here.

"Say, boys!" he burst forth, a few minutes after his protest against "moping," and when the band were within sight of the spring whence they had started, an age back, as it seemed, on the trail of the moose. "Say, boys! I've been all these years raging at Chris. Seems to me now as if he was a poor sort of overgrowed baby, and not so bad a thief as the chump who gave him that whiskey, and stole his senses. It's a thundering big pity that man hadn't the burying of him to-day.

"He was always the under dog,—was Chris," he went on slowly, as if he was seeking from his own heart an excuse for those unforeseen impulses which had worked it and his body during the past five hours. "Whites and Injuns jumped on him. They said he was criss-cross all through, same as his eyes. But he warn't. Never seed a half-breed that had less gall and more grit, except when the hanker for whiskey would creep up in him, and boss him. He could no more stand agen it, and the things it made him do, than a jack-rabbit."

"Another reason why we Americans ought to feel our responsibility towards every man in whose veins runs Indian blood, a thousand times more hotly than we do!" burst out Cyrus. "It maddens a fellow to think that we made them the under dogs, and as much by giving them a 'boss,' as you say, in fire-water, as by anything else."

"I kind o' think that way myself sometimes," said Herb.

And there was silence until the guide cried:—

"Here's our camp, boys. I'll bet you're glad to see it. I must get the kettle, and cruise off for water. 'Tain't likely I'll trust one of you fellers after last night. But you can hustle round and build the camp-fire while I'm gone."

Herb had a shrewd motive in this. He knew that there is nothing which will cure the blues in a camper, if he is touched by that affliction, rare in forest life, like the building of his fire, watching the little flames creep from the dull, dead wood, to roar and soar aloft in gold-red pennons of good cheer.

The result proved his wisdom. When he returned in a very short time from that ever-to-be-famous spring, with his brimming kettle, he found a glorious fire, and three tired but cheerful fellows watching it, its reflection playing like a jack-o'-lantern in each pair of eyes.

"Now I'll have supper ready in a jiffy," he said. "I guess you boys feel like eating one another. Jerusha! we never touched our snack—nary a crumb of it."

In the strange happenings and chaotic feelings of the day, hunger, together with the bread and pork for satisfying it which Herb had carried up the mountain, were forgotten until now.