e same impenetrable mystery as the sea.

That evening the camp was unusually quiet. Tellier let his fiddle hang.
After supper Thorpe was approached by Purdy, the reptilian red-head with
whom he had had the row some evenings before.

"You in, chummy?" he asked in a quiet voice. "It's a five apiece for
Hank's woman."

"Yes," said Thorpe.

The men were earning from twenty to thirty dollars a month. They had,
most of them, never seen Hank Paul before this autumn. He had not,
mainly because of his modest disposition, enjoyed any extraordinary
degree of popularity. Yet these strangers cheerfully, as a matter of
course, gave up the proceeds of a week's hard work, and that without
expecting the slightest personal credit. The money was sent "from the
boys." Thorpe later read a heart-broken letter of thanks to the unknown
benefactors. It touched him deeply, and he suspected the other men of
the same emotions, but by that time they had regained the independent,
self-contained poise of the frontiersman. They read it with unmoved
faces, and tossed it aside with a more than ordinarily rough joke
or oath. Thorpe understood their reticence. It was a part of his own
nature. He felt more than ever akin to these men.

As swamper he had more or less to do with a cant-hook in helping the
teamsters roll the end of the log on the little "dray." He soon caught
the knack. Towards Christmas he had become a fairly efficient cant-hook
man, and was helping roll the great sticks of timber up the slanting
skids. Thus always intelligence counts, especially that rare
intelligence which resolves into the analytical and the minutely
observing.

On Sundays Thorpe fell into the habit of accompanying old Jackson Hines
on his hunting expeditions. The ancient had been raised in the woods.
He seemed to know by instinct the haunts and habits of all the wild
animals, just as he seemed to know by instinct when one of his horses
was likely to be troubled by the colic. His woodcraft was really
remarkable.

So the two would stand for hours in the early morning and late evening
waiting for deer on the edges of the swamps. They haunted the runways
during the middle of the day. On soft moccasined feet they stole about
in the evening with a bull's-eye lantern fastened on the head of one of
them for a "jack." Several times they surprised the wolves, and shone
the animals' eyes like the scattered embers of a camp fire.

Thorpe learned to shoot at a deer's should