notice, thinking that the
sunshine will last forever for you."

"Shut up, Al," said Dick, "you'll make me feel sorry for those
ducks. Besides, you're not much of a poet, anyway."

When the trap was finished they put around the mouth and all
along the tunnel quantities of the grass and herbs that the ducks
seemed to like, and then Dick announced that the enterprise was
finished.

"We have nothing further to do about it," he said, "but to take
out our ducks."

It was toward twilight when they finished the trap, and both had
been in the cold water up to their knees. Dick had long since
become hardened to such things, but he looked at Albert rather
anxiously. The younger boy, however, did not begin to cough. He
merely hurried back to the fire, took off his wet leggings, and
toasted his feet and legs. Then he ate voraciously and slept
like a log the night through. But both he and Dick went down to
the lake the next morning with much eagerness to see what the
trap contained, if anything.

It was a fresh winter morning, not cold enough to freeze the
surface of the lake, but extremely crisp. The air contained the
extraordinary exhilarating quality which Dick had noticed when
they first came into the mountains, but which he had never
breathed anywhere else. It seemed to him to make everything
sparkle, even his blood, and suddenly he leaped up, cracked his
heels together, and shouted.

"Why, Dick," exclaimed Albert, "what on earth is the matter with
you?"

"Nothing is the matter with me. Instead, all's right. I'm so
glad I'm alive, Al, old man, that I wanted to shout out the fact
to all creation."

"Feel that way myself," said Albert, "and since you've given such
a good example, think I'll do as you did."

He leaped up, cracked his heels together, and let out a yell that
the mountains sent back in twenty echoes. Then both boys laughed
with sheer pleasure in life, the golden morning, and their happy
valley. So engrossed were they in the many things that they were
doing that they did not yet find time to miss human faces.

As they approached the trap, they heard a great squawking and
cackling and found that the cell, as Albert called the square
inclosure, contained ten ducks and two geese swimming about in a
great state of trepidation. They had come down the winding
tunnel and through the apertures in the hoops, but they did not
have sense enough to go back the same way. Instead they merely
swam arou