Camp and Trail | Page 4

stand to gaze at a light again.
"And--and--I can't shoot the thing while it's looking at me like that!"
the boy blurted out.
"You dunderhead! What do you mean?" gasped Cyrus, breaking silence
in a gusty whisper of mingled anger and amusement. "You won't get a
chance to shoot it or anything else now. You've lost us our meat for
to-night."
"Well, I couldn't help it," Neal whispered back. "For pity's sake, what
has been moving this canoe? The quiet was enough to set a fellow mad!
And then that buck stared straight at me like a human thing. I could see
nothing but two burning eyes with white rings round them."
"Stuff!" was the American's answer. "He was gazing at the jack, not at
you. He couldn't see an inch of you with that light just over your head.
But it would have been a hard shot anyhow, for his nose was towards
you, and ten to one you'd have made a clean miss."
"Well," he added, after five minutes of acute listening, "I guess we may
give over jacking for to-night. That first cry of yours was enough to set
a regiment of deer scampering. I'm only half mad after all at your
losing a chance at such a splendid buck. It was something to see him as
he stooped to drink in the glare of the jack, a midnight forest picture
such as one wants to remember. Long may he flourish! We wouldn't
have started out to rid him of his glorious life if we weren't half-starved
on flapjacks and ends of pork. Let's get back to camp! I guess you felt a
few new sensations to-night, eh, Neal Farrar?"

CHAPTER II.
A SPILL-OUT.
Indeed, shocks and sensations seemed to ride rampant that night in
endless succession; a fact which Neal presently realized, as does every
daring young fellow who visits the Maine wilderness for the first time,
whatever be his object.
Ere turning the canoe towards home, Cyrus drove it a few feet nearer to
shore, again warily listening for any further sound of game. Just then
another wild, whooping scream cleft the night air; and, on looking
towards the bank, Neal beheld his owlship, who had finished the
squirrel, seated on an aged windfall,[1] one end of which dipped into
the water.
[Footnote 1: A forest tree which has been blown down.]
The gray bird on the gray old trunk formed a second thrilling midnight
picture, but at this moment young Farrar was in no mood for studying
effects. He felt rather unstrung by his recent emotions; and, though he
was by no means an imaginative youth, he actually took it into his head
half seriously that the whooping, hooting thing was taunting him with
making a failure of the jacking business. Without pausing to consider
whether the owl would furnish meat for the camp or not, he let fly at
him suddenly with his rifle.
The fate of that ghostly, big-eyed creature will be forever one of those
mysteries which Neal Farrar would like to solve. Whether the heavy
bullet intended for deer laid him open--which is improbable--or
whether it didn't, nobody had a chance to discover. Being unused to
birch-bark canoes, the sportsman gave a slight lurch aside after he had
discharged his leaden messenger of death, startled doubtless by the
loud, unexpected echoes which reverberated through the forest after his
shot.

"Hold on!" cried Cyrus, trying to avert a ducking by a counter-motion.
"You'll tip us over!"
Too late! The birch skiff spun round, rocked crazily for a second or two,
and keeled over, spilling both its occupants into the black and silver
water of the pond.
Of course they ducked under, and of course they rose, gurgling and
spluttering.
"You didn't lose the rifle, Neal, did you?" gasped the American directly
he could speak.
"Not I! I held on to it like grim death."
"Good for you! To lose a hundred-and-fifty-dollar gun when we're
starting into the wilds would be maddening."
Then, just because they were extremely healthy, happy, vigorous
fellows, whose lungs had been drinking in pure, exhilarating ozone and
fragrant odors of pine-balsam and were thereby expanded, they took a
cheerful view of this duck under, and made the midnight forest echo,
echo, and re-echo, with peals and gusts and shouts of laughter, while
they struggled to right their canoe.
The merry jingles rang on in challenge and answer, repeating from both
sides of the pond, until they reached at last the wooded slopes and
mighty bowlders of Old Squaw Mountain, a peak whose "star-crowned
head" could be imagined rather than discerned against the horizon, near
the distant shore from which the hunters had started. Here echo ran riot.
It seemed to their excited fancies as if the ghost of Old