ly that Wabigoon bumped into him from behind.

"Did you hear that?"

"No."

For a few moments the three huddled close together in watchful
silence. Mukoki was behind the boys or they would have seen that his
rifle was ready to spring to his shoulder and that his black eyes were
snapping with something not aroused by curiosity alone. The cabin was
not more than twenty paces away. It was old, so old that Rod wondered
how it had withstood the heavy storms of the last winter. A growth of
saplings had found root in its rotting roof and the logs of which it
was built were in the last stage of decay. There was no window,
and where the door had once been there had grown a tree a foot in
diameter, almost closing the narrow aperture through which the
mysterious inhabitants had passed years before. A dozen paces, five
paces from this door, and Mukoki's hand reached out and laid itself
gently upon Wabi's shoulder. Rod saw the movement and stopped. A
strange look had come into the old Indian's face, an expression in
which there was incredulity and astonishment, as if he believed and
yet doubted what his eyes beheld. Mutely he pointed to the tree
growing before the door, and to the reddish, crumbling rot into which
the logs had been turned by the passing of generations.

"Red pine," he said at last. "That cabin more'n' twent' t'ous'nd year
old!"

There was an awesome ring in his voice. Rod understood, and clutched
Wabi's arm. In an instant he thought of the other old cabin, in which
they had found the skeletons. They had repaired that cabin and had
passed the winter in it, and they knew that it had been built half a
century or more before. But this cabin was beyond repair. To Rod it
seemed as though centuries of time instead of decades had been at work
on its timbers. Following close after Wabi he thrust his head through
the door. Deep gloom shut out their vision. But as they looked,
steadily inuring their eyes to the darkness within, the walls of the
old cabin took form, and they saw that everywhere was vacancy. There
was no ancient table, as in the other cabin they had discovered at the
head of the first chasm, there were no signs of the life that had once
existed, not even the remnants of a chair or a stool. The cabin was
bare.

Foot by foot the two boys went around its walls. Mukoki took but a
single glance inside and disappeared. Once alone he snapped down the
safety of his rifle. Quickly, as if he feared interruption, h