settled down
to spend the night there. Still Tom slept, but he breathed easier and
had ceased to shiver. Suddenly he sat up and cried, "Help!"

"Don't you know where you are?" Addison asked. "Still dreaming?"

He stared round in the feeble light. "Oh, yes!" he said and laughed.
"It's the old camp. I tumbled into the brook. But what makes it so
dark?"

"It's night. You have been asleep two or three hours. We shall have to
stay here till morning."

"With nothing to eat?" Tom exclaimed. "I'm hungry!"

In his haste to set off from home with Ellen he had neglected to take
any luncheon. We divided with him what we had left; and he ate hungrily.

While he was eating, we heard a sound of squalling, indistinct above the
roar of the wind in the woods.

"Bobcat!" Tom exclaimed. Then he added, "But it sounds more like an old
gander."

"May be a flock of wild geese passing over," Addison said. "They
sometimes fly by night."

"Not on such a cold night in such a wind," Tom replied.

Soon we heard the same sounds again.

"That's an old gander, sure," Tom admitted.

"Seems to come from the same place," Addison remarked. "Out on Papoose
Pond, I guess."

"Yes, siree!" Tom exclaimed. "A flock of geese has come down on that
pond. If I had my gun, I could get a goose. But my gun is in Wild
Brook," he added regretfully. "I let go of it when I fell in."

The squalling continued at intervals. The night was so boisterous,
however, that we did not leave the camp and after a time fell asleep in
the old bunk.

The cold waked me soon after daybreak. Tom and Addison were still
asleep, with their coats pulled snugly about their shoulders and their
feet drawn up. I rekindled the fire and clattered round the stove. Still
they snoozed on; and soon afterwards, hearing the same squalling sounds
again, I stole forth in the bleak dawn to see what I could discover.

When I had pushed through the swamp of thick cedar that lay between the
camp and the pond, I beheld a goose flapping its wings and squalling
scarcely more than a stone's throw away. A second glance, in the
increasing light, showed me the forms of other geese, great numbers of
them on the newly formed ice. On this pond, as on the other, water had
gathered over the winter ice and then frozen again.

With the exception of this one gander, the flock was sitting there very
still and quiet. The gander waddled among the others, plucking at them
with his pink beak, as if to stir the