n away
the trick at once.

A bellow--a short, snorting, challenging bellow--burst the silence,
coming from the very edge of the woods. It brought Cyrus to his feet
with a jump. It so startled the ambitious moose-caller, that, in rising
hurriedly from his squatting position, he lost his balance, and rolled
over and over to the bottom of the knoll, smashing the horn into a
hundred pieces.

He picked himself up unhurt, but with a sensation as if all the bells in
Christendom were doing a jumbled ringing in his head. And loud above
this inward din he heard the sound, so well remembered, as of an axe
striking repeatedly against a tree, the terrible chopping noises of a
bull-moose, not two hundred yards away.

No sooner had he scrambled to his legs, than Garst was at his side,
gripping his arm, and forcing him forward at a headlong run.

"You've done it this time with a vengeance!" bawled the Bostonian. "He's
coming for us straight! And we without our rifles! The trees! The trees!
It's our only chance!"

With the belling still in his head, and so bewildered by his terrible
success that he felt as if his senses were shooting off hither and
thither like rockets, leaving him mad, Dol nevertheless ran as he had
never run before, shoulder to shoulder with his comrade, dashing wildly
for a clump of hemlocks over a hundred yards distant. Yet, for the life
of him, he could not help glancing back once over his shoulder, to see
the creature which he had humbugged, luring it from its forest shelter,
and which now pursued him.

The moose was charging after them full tilt, gaining rapidly too, his
long thin legs, enormous antlers, broad, upreared nose, and the green
glare in his starting eyes, making him look like some strange animal of
a former earth. Dol at last trembled with actual fear. He gave a
shuddering leap, and forced his legs, which seemed threatened with
paralysis, to wilder speed.

"Climb up that hemlock! Get as high as you can!" shrieked Cyrus,
stopping to give him an upward shove as they reached the first friendly
trunk.

Dol obeyed. Gasping and wild-eyed, he dug his nails into the bark,
clambering up somehow until he reached a forked branch about eight feet
from the ground. Here strength failed. He could only cling dizzily,
feeling that he hung between life and death.

The moose was now snorting like a war-horse beneath. The brute stood off
for a minute, then charged the hemlock furiously, and butted it with
hi