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 Squaw herself,
the disappointed Indian mother who had, according to tradition, lived so
long in loneliness upon this mountain, were joining in their mirth with
haggish peals.

The canoe had turned bottom uppermost. On righting it they found that
the jack-staff had been dislodged. The jack was floating gayly away over
the ripples; its light, being in an air-tight case, was unquenched.

"Swim ashore with the rifle, Neal," said Cyrus. "I'll pick up the jack.
Did you ever see anything so absurdly comical as it looks, dodging off
on its own hook like a big, wandering eye?"

With his comrade's help young Farrar succeeded in getting the gun across
his back, slinging it round him by its leather shoulder-strap; then he
struck out for the bank, having scarcely twenty yards to swim before he
reached shallow water.

Now, for the first time to-night, the moon shone fully out from her veil
of cloud, casting a flood of silver radiance, and showing him a scene in
white and black, still and clear as a steel engraving, of a beauty so
unimagined and grand that it seemed a little awful. It gave him a