CHAPTER XXIII—WHEN MORNING CAME
Neither of the boys would be likely to forget that night of the storm, when they passed so many wretched hours in their rude shelter. It was pretty cold, being without a blanket and unable to move around so as to keep their blood in circulation, though, after all, they realized that it hardly deserved the name of a blizzard.
“Oh, thank goodness, it’s really getting daylight, Bluff!” Jerry called out, at last, arousing the other from a nap.
“And the snow seems to have stopped pretty much, likewise that awful wind,” remarked his companion, as he, too, took an observation.
“Let’s get outside and stretch a bit,” proposed Jerry. “I feel as though I were seventy years old, and every bone and muscle in my body creaks or pains like everything.”
“A good idea, Jerry, and I’m with you,” Bluff conceded. “After we’ve jumped around a while, we’ll get limbered up. Here you go, now!”
They proceeded to carry on as if they had just escaped from an asylum, waltzing this way and that, clasped in each other’s arms, or attempting some sort of darky hoedown—anything to get their muscles in shape.
“There, that makes me feel young again!” declared Jerry, panting as he threw himself down beside the fire.
“The next burning question of the day is: What will you have for breakfast?” demanded Bluff; and with that he commenced to rattle off a great variety of dishes, beginning with ham and eggs, coffee, wheat cakes with maple syrup, and so on down the list.
Jerry presently threw up his hands, and as the other continued to tantalize him by keeping up a running fire of breakfast hints, he even went so far as to thrust his fingertips in his ears.
“That’s adding insult to injury, Bluff,” he told his chum, when he found a chance to speak. “Because I don’t believe we could scare up a scrap of grub this morning, no matter how hard we searched our pockets. We cleaned it all out at suppertime, you remember.”
“Well, there’s one last resort, if we have to come to it!” remarked Bluff, with an assumed dejected air, as he rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger.
Something about his manner caused Jerry to look at him in horror.
“Now, I can guess what you’re hinting at, and I tell you right straight from the shoulder I never could be hired to eat wolf, not if I was actually starving.”
“Oh, well, I can’t say I’m really hankering after the dish myself,” Bluff admitted; “but you never can tell what you may have to come to. Some people don’t like to eat crow, but it’s been found they’re not so very bad, after all. It might turn out the same way with wolf.”
“Are you going to help me get that jacket off the rascal?” demanded Jerry.
“Sure I will!” he was told. “You’d make a sorry mess of the job, I reckon; and if the thing’s worth saving at all it ought to be taken the right way. I don’t say I could do it as well as Frank, who’s had a heap more experience; but you’ll get the pelt, Jerry, never fear.”
“Then the sooner we finish the job the better,” said the other boy; “because it strikes me we had better be leaving here and heading for home as soon as we can make it. I only hope we don’t get lost, and that we strike camp in time for the middle-of-the-day feed.”
Both were speedily engaged in the task of taking off the skin of the slain wolf. Bluff did the main part of the work, but the other was handy at times in various ways.
“I don’t remember hearing another howl the whole night through; did you, Bluff?” Jerry presently asked, when the skin had been rolled up in as compact a bundle as possible.
“Can’t say that I did,” was the reply.
“And now, do we make a start for home?” demanded Jerry anxiously. “I hope you’ve got your bearings all correct.”
“Leave that for me,” the other boy replied; “but before we quit this region for good I’d like to take a turn over yonder.” And he pointed in a quarter which his chum knew took in the region where they had had the meeting with Bill Nackerson and his two friends, after bringing down the big moose.
“Yes, we ought to see what became of our moose, hadn’t we?” Jerry admitted.
“That’s right, for I’d like to get hold of those splendid horns. But there’s another thing I want to find out.”
“Yes, I can give a pretty good guess what it is,” the other told him. “I’ve been worried some, myself, about it. Lots of times in the night, when I was lying listening to the wind moan and howl, I found myself wondering how those three men were making out, if, as we had an idea, they couldn’t scare up a match among ’em.”
“Come along, let’s hike out that way,” said Bluff, frowning, as though he did not feel any too happy at the thought. “After all, it isn’t going to be so very much out of our way.”
They took one last look at the rude shelter that had served them so well in warding off considerable of the storm’s violence. Often in memory they would again see that bough barricade; and even take note of the hole which the bold wolf had torn in it.
Bluff walked along with a confident tread. Jerry was pleased to note this, for it assured him his chum really knew where he was heading and the chances of their becoming lost in the Big Woods were not serious.
“I tell you I’m glad I’ve got as fine a woodsman along as you are,” he remarked, after a little while; “because, if I had been alone, while I might be able to locate north by means of the compass, I declare I could not tell whether home lay to the north, east, west, or south. So what good would a compass be to such a greenhorn, I’d like to know?”
Bluff liked to hear such talk; any boy would when he set up to be an authority on woodcraft.
“We’re going to hit the place right soon now,” he assured his companion soberly and with a manner that showed that Bluff did not think he was doing anything so very wonderful in leading the way back to the scene of the previous afternoon’s double adventure.
Three minutes later he spoke again.
“There, you can see the leaning pine right now. That was only twenty feet or so away from where we dropped our moose.”
“I don’t see anything that looks like a camp,” hinted Jerry.
“No; seems as though they must have cleared out,” he was told; “but they couldn’t take the moose along with ’em, of course.”
“What became of it, then?”
“We’ll find that out soon enough. Just follow me, will you? Looks as though there had been a banquet around here, seems to me. Hi! see the bones, would you? And the snow’s all trampled down, with patches of red showing through it here and there.”
“Bluff, the wolves struck this place after we chased ’em away; or else this may have been another lot of them. They cleaned up our moose, hide and all. But, tell me, isn’t that the skull and the horns over there?”
“Just what it is!” Bluff exclaimed, as he started on a run for the spot, to bend anxiously over the object that was half concealed in a drift, and then joyfully burst out: “Jerry, they haven’t been hurt a single bit. Why, we ought to thank those wolves for gnawing all the flesh off! It’ll be easy enough now to hack the horns out with our hatchet. And as we’ve got so little to tote back home with us, mebbe we’d better try and get our prize there.”
“I wouldn’t like to risk leaving such wonderful horns here,” Jerry replied seriously. “Any sportsman happening on them would be tempted to make out that he had killed the big moose himself. What do you really think could have become of those men, Bluff?” he presently asked, uneasily; which question proved how the thought was worrying him.
“Oh, like as not they made up their minds to start back home right away,” the other boy asserted, as though he wished to think so himself.
“But I thought I heard something like a faint shout just then, Bluff; let’s listen a bit; for with that hatchet banging away it’s hard to catch anything.”
Hardly had Bluff ceased hacking at the moose skull when they caught a wailing cry, plainly a human voice, calling:
“Help, oh, help!”