orests to raise
the hair on a fellow's head half a dozen times a day!"

A matter of forty yards more, and a burst of light swam before his eyes.
He had reached the end of the blazed trail.

CHAPTER VIII.

ANOTHER CAMP.

"Hello! Come to supper, boys! Come to supper right away!"

Half eagerly, half shrinkingly, Dol emerged from the woods, feeling a
very torment of hunger quickened in him by the tantalizing sound of that
oft-repeated invitation.

A sight met him which, because of what went before and all that came
after, will be forever chief among the forest pictures which rise in
exciting panorama before his memory, when camping is a thing of the
past.

A broad dash of evening light, the sun's afterglow, fell upon a patch of
clearing bordered by clumps of slim, outstanding pines, the scouts of
their massive brethren. That this was used as a camping-ground the
first glance revealed. A camp which looked to the tired eyes of the lost
boy a real "home-camp," though it consisted of rude log cabins, occupied
it. A couple of birch-bark canoes reposed amid a network of projecting
roots. Withered stumps and tree-tops littered the ground.

In the foreground of the picture stood a man with a horn in his uplifted
hand, which he had just taken from his mouth. He was minus a coat; and
the rough-and-tumble disarray of his attire showed that he had been
lounging by his camp-fire, or perhaps overseeing the preparation of
supper. Dol had a vague impression that the individual was not a
forest-guide like Uncle Eb, nor a rough lumberman such as he had heard
of. He would have taken him for a pioneer farmer,--not having yet
encountered such a character,--but there could be no farm on this little
bit of clearing. And he was too dazed to see that there were signs of a
cultivated intelligence in the tanned, beaming face under the
horn-blower's broad-brimmed hat. Indeed, the hat itself, its wearer, log
huts, canoes, and trees seemed to have a strange propensity to waltz
before the lad's eyes, and there was a queer waving sensation in his
own legs, as if they, too, would join in the spinning movement. For as
he advanced into the light out of the sombre shadows, a dizziness from
long tramping in the woods, and from a hunger such as he had never
before experienced, overcame him. He reeled against an outstanding tree,
troubled by an affliction which Uncle Eb had called "wheels in his
head."

"Ho! you boys. Where in thunder are you