ed, "it's standing yet! I see it--the old home-camp! There
it is above us on that bit of a platform, with the big rock behind it.
And I've kep' saying to myself for the last quarter of an hour that we
wouldn't find it--that we'd find nary a thing but mildewed logs!"

A wealth of memories was in the woodsman's eyes as he gazed up at the
timber nest, the log camp which his own hands had put up, standing on a
narrow plateau, and built against a protecting wall of rock that rose in
jagged might to a height of thirty or forty feet.

An earth bank or ridge, covered with hardy mosses and mountain creepers,
sloped gently up to the sheltered platform. To climb this was, indeed,
"as easy as rolling off a log."

"We used to have a good beaten path here, but I guess it's all growed
over," said Herb in a thick voice, as if certain cords in his throat
were swelling. "Many's the time I've blessed the sight of that old
home-camp, boys, after a hard week's trapping. Hundert's o' night's I've
slept snug inside them log walls when blasts was a-sweeping and
bellowing around, like as if they'd rip the mountain open, and tear its
very rocks out."

While the guide spoke he was leaping up the ridge. A few minutes, and he
stood, a towering figure, on the platform above, waving his battered hat
in salute to the old camp.

"I guess some traveller has been sheltering here lately!" he cried to
Neal Farrar, as the latter overtook him. "There's a litter around,"
pointing to dry sticks and withered bushes strewn upon the
camping-ground. "And the door's standing open. I wonder who found the
old shanty?"

Neal remembered, hours afterwards, that at the moment he felt an odd
awakening stir in him, a stir which, shooting from head to foot, seemed
to warn him that he was nearing a sensation, the biggest sensation of
this wilderness trip.

He heard the voices of Cyrus and Dol hallooing behind; but they sounded
away back and indistinct, for his ears were bent towards the deserted
camp, listening with breathless expectation for something, he didn't
know what.

One minute the vague suspense lasted, while he followed Herb towards the
hut. Then heaven and earth and his own heart seemed to stand still.

Through the wide-open door of the shanty came random, crooning snatches
of sound. Was the guttural voice which made them human? The English boy
scarcely knew. But as the noise swelled, like the moaning of a dry wind
among trees, he began, as it were, to