camp with Halstead another hour. Grabbing
the gun, he had started off.

"That's my gun! Leave it here! Drop it!" Halstead had shouted angrily
and had run after him.

Down near the bank of the stream, Halstead had overtaken him and had
tried to wrest the gun from him. Alfred had turned, struck him, and then
given him so hard a push that he had fallen over sidewise with his foot
down between two logs. Alfred had run on without even looking back.

The story did not astonish us. For the time being, however, we were
chiefly concerned to find out how badly Halstead was injured, with a
view to getting him home. His ankle was swollen, sore and painful; he
could not touch the foot to the floor, and he howled when we tried to
move it.

Evidently he had suffered a good deal, and pity prevented us from
freeing our minds to him as fully as we should otherwise have done. The
main thing now was to get him home, where a doctor could attend him.

"We shall have to haul him on the hand sled," Addison said to me; and
fortunately the sled that Alfred and he had taken was there at the camp.

But first we cooked a meal of some of the beef, corn meal and coffee
they had taken from the old Squire's.

It was still raining; and on going out an hour later we found that the
stream had risen so high that we could not cross it. The afternoon, too,
was waning; and, urgent as Halstead's case appeared, we had to give up
the idea of starting that night. During the rest of the afternoon we
busied ourselves rigging a rude seat on the sled.

There were good dry bunks at the camp, but little sleep was in store for
us. Halstead was in a fevered, querulous mood and kept calling to us for
something or other all night long. Whenever he fell asleep he tumbled
about and hurt his ankle. That would partly wake him and set him crying,
or shouting what he would do to Alfred.

Throughout the night the roar of the stream outside grew louder, and at
daybreak it was running feather white. As for the snow, most of it had
disappeared; stumps, logs and stones showed through it everywhere; the
swamps were flooded, and every hole, hollow and depression was full of
water.

That was Wednesday. We made a soup of the beef bone, cooked johnny-cake
from the corn meal and kept Halstead as quiet as possible. We had left
home early Sunday morning and knew that our folks would be greatly
worried about all three of us.

As the day passed, the stream rose steadily until the