of him! Of course his
mother could not have hitched Keno to the old buggy and driven
here, but she might have telephoned to Tom Walsh and asked him
to find out what had become of the missing hunter. He made another
bold attempt to walk, with the aid of a stout pine branch; but
he could not bear to put any weight on that cursed ankle.

"Well, I guess I'm bound to spend the night here," he told himself
grimly, after several futile starts. "I hope mother'll not worry;
she may not have noticed Keno, after all, if he went straight to
the barn. I remember I left the door open. And now what's the
first thing to be done? Oh, I know: make a fire---and two smoke
fires for a distress signal."

So he set about doing this, hobbling with difficulty over the
uneven ground. The signal fires he placed about fifty feet apart,
so that the wind should not confuse them; his camp fire he built
between three big rocks that formed a natural oven, over which
he laid a hastily constructed grill made of green alder withes.
On this grill he intended to broil whatever game he could bring
down with his rifle, for supper; and, as luck would have it, he
did not have to wait long before he "bagged" a large gray squirrel,
which he dexterously skinned and prepared for cooking.

While it was still daylight he gathered plenty of good firewood,
for he realized that having no blanket or poncho he would need
to keep up a brisk fire and to sleep as near it as possible.
Fortunately, another rock adjoining the fireplace afforded shelter
against the cool night wind.

The next thing to consider was his bed. The ground was damp in
places, but if he used leaves for a bed they might take fire and
burn him while he slept. So he built another fire in a sort of
hollow at the base of the fourth rock, and after about an hour---during
which the squirrel was broiling deliciously---he raked away all
the hot ashes, and curled up on the dried warm ground. This proved
to be a fairly comfortable bed and, after eating his nicely browned
supper, and bathing his ankle again, he replenished the fire,
taking care that it should not spread, and lay down beside the
sheltering rock.

Twilight deepened into darkness, the stars appeared one by one in
the vast black dome above him, the forest was deathly still save
for the noise of the waterfall which drowned all other sounds.
Once, an owl, attracted by the fire, perched on a low overhanging
branch and stared into the fla