r, with the
gray-blue eyes and his voice was saying: "Jest when things looks about
as black as they can look, if ye hold steady, keep cool and kind,
something sure happens to make it all easy. There's always a way and the
stout heart will find it."

What way was there for him? He would die of hunger and cold before
Quonab could find him, and again came the spectre of fear. If only he
could devise some way of letting his comrade know. He shouted once or
twice, in the faint hope that the still air might carry the sound, but
the silent wood was silent when he ceased.

Then one of his talks with Quonab came to mind. He remembered how the
Indian, as a little papoose, had been lost for three days. Though, then
but ten years old, he had built a smoke fire that brought him help.
Yes, that was the Indian way; two smokes means "I am lost"; "double for
trouble."

Fired by this new hope, Rolf crawled a little apart from his camp
and built a bright fire, then smothered it with rotten wood and green
leaves. The column of smoke it sent up was densely white and towered
above the trees.

Then painfully he hobbled and crawled to a place one hundred yards away,
and made another smoke. Now all he could do was wait.

A fat pigeon, strayed from its dock, sat on a bough above his camp, in
a way to tempt Providence. Rolf drew a blunt arrow to the head and
speedily had the pigeon in hand for some future meal.

As he prepared it, he noticed that its crop was crammed with the winged
seed of the slippery elm, so he put them all back again into the body
when it was cleaned, knowing well that they are a delicious food and in
this case would furnish a welcome variant to the bird itself.

An hour crawled by. Rolf had to go out to the far fire, for it was
nearly dead. Instinctively he sought a stout stick to help him; then
remembered how Hoag had managed with one leg and two crutches. "Ho!" he
exclaimed. "That is the answer--this is the 'way."'

Now his attention was fixed on all the possible crutches. The trees
seemed full of them, but all at impossible heights. It was long before
he found one that he could cut with his knife. Certainly he was an hour
working at it; then he heard a sound that made his blood jump.

From far away in the north it came, faint but reaching;

"Ye-hoo-o."

Rolf dropped his knife and listened with the instinctively open mouth
that takes all pressure from the eardrums and makes them keen. It came
again: "Ye-hoo-o