I was. I had feared he would see in my appearance certain unmistakable
evidences that I had made a tenderfoot blunder and then run for
my life. But Edd took my loss of hat, and torn coat, and general
bedraggled state as a matter of course. Indeed I somehow felt a little
pride at his acceptance of me there in the flesh.

We rode around the end of this slope, gradually working down into
Horton Thicket, where a wild confusion of dense timber engaged my
sight. Presently George trotted up behind us with the other dogs. "We
lost him down on the hot dry ridges. Hounds couldn't track him," was
all George said. Thereupon Edd blew four blasts upon his hunting-horn,
which were signals to those on the stands above that the hunt was over
for the day.

Even in the jungle tropics I had never seen such dense shade as this
down in Horton Thicket. The timber grew close and large, and the
foliage was matted, letting little sunlight through. Dark, green and
brown, fragrant, cool thicket indeed it was. We came to a huge spruce
tree, the largest I ever saw--Edd said eight feet through at the base,
but he was conservative. It was a gnarled, bearded, gray, old monarch
of the forest, with bleached, dead top. For many years it had been the
home of swarms of wild honey bees. Edd said more than one bee-hunter
had undertaken to cut down this spruce. This explained a number of
deeply cut notches in the huge trunk. "I'll bet Nielsen could chop it
down," declared Edd. I admitted the compliment to our brawny Norwegian
axe-wielder, but added that I certainly would not let him do it,
whether we were to get any honey or not.

By and bye we reached the bottom of the thicket where we crossed a
swift clear cold brook. Here the smells seemed cool, sweet, wild with
spruce and pine. This stream of granite water burst from a spring
under a cliff. What a roar it made! I drank until I could drink no
more. Huge boulders and windfalls, moved by water at flood season,
obstructed the narrow stream-bed. We crossed to start climbing the
north slope, and soon worked up out of the thicket upon a steep, rocky
slope, with isolated pines. We struck a deer-trail hard to follow.
Above me loomed the pine-tipped rim, with its crags, cliffs,
pinnacles, and walls, all gray, seamed and stained, and in some clefts
blazes of deep red and yellow foliage.

When we surmounted the slope, and eventually reached camp, I found
Isbel entertaining strangers, men of rough garb, evidently