in the dense woods about the foot of Katahdin before he escaped
from the prison of trees, and climbed to the hut he sought.

Such wanderings, Herb declared, generally ended in "a man having wheels
in his head," being half or wholly insane, though he might keep
sufficient wits to provide himself with food and warmth, as Chris had
done while his strength held out. This was not long; for the
half-breed's words suggested that he felt near to the great change he
roughly called "keeling over," when he started to find his cheated
partner.

But Cyrus, while he watched the guide making preparations for the
mountain burial, pictured the poor weakling tramping for hundreds of
miles through rugged forest-land, doubtless with aching knee-joints and
feet, that he might make upon his own skin justice for the skins which
he had stolen, and so, in the only way he knew, square things with his
wronged chum. And the city man thought, with a tear of pity, that even
that poor drink-fuddled mind must have been lit by some ray of longing
for goodness.

It was a strange funeral.

The guide chose a spot where the earth had been much softened by the
recent rain; and, with the ingenuity of a man accustomed to wilderness
shifts, he broke up the drenched ground with the axe which he took from
his shoulders.

That axe, which had so often made camp, had never before made a grave;
the Farrars doubted that it ever would. But Herb worked away upon his
knees, moisture dripping from his skin, putting sorrow for years of
anger into every blow of his arms. Then, stopping a while, he went off
down the mountain to the nearest belt of trees, and cut a limb from one,
out of which, with his hunting-knife, he fashioned a rude wooden
implement, a cross between a spade and shovel.

With this he scooped out the broken earth until a grave appeared over
three feet deep. He lined it with fragrant spruce-boughs from the
wind-beaten tangle below.

These Cyrus and Dol had busied themselves in cutting. Neal thought of
other work for his fingers. Getting hold of Herb's axe when the owner
was not using it, he felled one of the dwarf white birches. Out of its
light, delicate wood, with the help of his big pocket-knife and a ball
of twine that was hidden somewhere about him, he made a very presentable
cross, to point out to future hunters on Katahdin the otherwise unmarked
grave.

He was a bit of a genius at wood-carving, and surveyed his work with
satisfaction when