y hands, they could not pass their own
warmth into the body of the half-breed, though he still lived.

But the mountain had not ended its terrors yet.

Its mumbling lips began to speak, with a threatening, low at first like
muttered curses, but swelling into a nameless noise--a rumbling,
pounding, creeping, crashing.

"Great Governor's Ghost! what's that?" gasped Cyrus, stopping his
rubbing. "Pamolah or some other fiend seems to be bombarding us from the
top now."

"It's more thunder rolling over us," said Neal; but as he spoke his
tongue turned stiff with fear.

"Sounds as if the whole mountain was tumbling to pieces. Perhaps it's
the end of the world," suggested Dol, as a succession of booming shocks
from above seemed to shake the camping-ground under his feet.

There was one second of awful indecision. The boys looked at each other,
at the dying man, at the roof above them, in the stiffness of uncertain
terror.

Then a figure leaped into their midst, with an armful of dry sticks,
which he dashed from him. It was Herb, with the fuel for a fire. And,
for the first and last time in his history, so far as these friends of
his knew it, there was that big fear in his face which is most terrible
when it looks out of the eyes of a naturally brave man.

"Boys, where's yer senses?" he yelled cuttingly. "Out, for your lives!
Run! There's a slide above us on the mountain!"

"Him?" questioned Cyrus's stiff lips, as he pointed to the breathing
wreck on the spruce boughs. "He's not dead yet."

"D'ye think I'd leave him? Clear out of this camp--you, or we'll be
buried in less'n two minutes! To the right! Off this ridge! Got yer
rifles? I'm coming!"

The woodsman flung out the words while his brawny arms hoisted the body
of his old chum. His comrades had already disappeared when he turned and
sprang for the camp-door with his limp burden, but his moccasined foot
kicked against something.

A great hiccough which was almost a sob rose from Herb's throat. It was
his one valuable possession, his 45-90 Winchester rifle, his second
self, which he had rested against the log wall.

"Good-by, Old Blazes!" he grunted. "You never went back on me, but I
can't lug him and you! My stars! but that was a narrow squeak."

For, as he cleared the camping-ground with a blind dash, with head bent
and tongue caught between his clenched teeth, with a boom like a Gatling
gun, a great block of granite from the summit of Katahdin struck the