he loaded the old shot-gun. It belched forth fire and smoke into
space. And the thunder of his shot went rolling off in a reverberating
din among the mountain echoes, until a hundred tongues repeated his
appeal for help. Again he loaded rapidly and fired. And yet again, with
nervous, eager fingers. So on, till he had let off half a dozen shots in
quick succession.

Then he waited, listening as if every pulse in his body had suddenly
become an ear.

But when the last growling echo had died away, not a sound broke the
almost absolute silence on the mountain-side. Evidently not a human soul
was near enough to hear or understand his signals of distress.

In these bitter minutes some sensations ran through Dol Farrar which he
had never known before; and, as he afterwards expressed it, "they were
enough to cover any fellow with goose-flesh."

He felt that he had reached the dreariest point of the unknown, and was
a lonely, drifting atom in this immense solitude of forest and rock.

Never in his life before or afterwards did he come so near to Point
Despair as when he stumbled down the mountain, spurning that treacherous
trail, and going wherever his jaded feet found travelling tolerably
easy. He had picked up the shot-gun; but the black ducks, the primary
cause of his misadventure, he clean forgot, leaving them lying amid the
chaos at the foot of the crag, to have their bones picked by some lucky
raccoon or fox.

Wandering along in a zigzag way, he by and by reached the base of the
mountain at a point where there was a break in the forest. A patch of
dreary-looking swamp was before him, covered with clumps of
alder-bushes--a true Slough of Despond.

Dol Farrar knew none of the miseries of plunging through an alder-swamp,
but he luckily recalled in time a warning from Cyrus that a slight
wetting would render his moccasins useless. While he halted undecidedly
on its brink, he pulled out his watch; one glance at this, and another
at the sky, which now lay open like a scroll above him, gave him a
sickening shock. He had started from camp at noon; now it was after five
o'clock. Little more than another hour, and not twilight, but the
blackness of a total eclipse, would reign in the forest.

The blood rushed to his head, and his mouth grew feverish at the
thought. As he licked his cracking lips, he caught a faint, tinkling,
rumbling sound of falling water somewhere to the right. Of a sudden his
sufferings of mind and body