“Well, we won’t go hungry to-night, anyway,” was his comment, as he picked them up and put them in the pockets of his hunting coat. “But I’m going to keep on,” he added.
He had gone perhaps half a mile farther, when he suddenly stopped and sniffed the air suspiciously.
“Sulphur spring,” he remarked, half aloud. “Guess I’ll go take a look at it. Whew! It’s strong enough. I don’t need any other guide than my nose.”
Making sure of the direction in which the strong odor of sulphur was wafted to him, Fenn temporarily abandoned his quest for the place of the turtles. The odor grew more pronounced, for some sulphur springs are so strongly impregnated with that chemical in solution that the smell carries for miles, especially on a windy day. The region where the chums had gone camping, as they learned later, was well supplied with these freaks of nature.
A few minutes later Fenn had come upon the object of his search. The spring gushed out from the side of a hill, and so strong was the sulphur that the stones, over which the spring, and the stream resulting from it, flowed were a yellowish white.
“Whew!” exclaimed Fenn again. “This ought to be good for whatever ails you, but I don’t like it.”
He remained looking at the spring for a few minutes, and, as he was about to move away he was startled by a deep, booming sound in the woods, off to his left. Fenn started.
“Blasting?” he exclaimed aloud, in a questioning tone. “No, it can’t be that, either,” he added. “They wouldn’t be blasting around here!”
The next moment he heard a pattering around him, and several large globules of mud came down, seemingly from the sky. Some struck on his hands, and others dotted the white snow about him.